Should I get the Time Capsule?

Howdy all,

I'm planning on making the plunge to Mac notebook, but I need more storage space. I think having a "wireless harddrive" would be a rather handy solution, but I'm not sure about buying the Time Capsule for 3x the price of a "regular" external hard drive. I looked into the Belkin Network USB Hub, and even though I like the fact that it supports any USB device, I don't like that commenters report OS X support as flaky and that it locks devices so only one computer can use it at a time.

Does anyone know of any other solutions for a "wireless harddrive" that's cheaper than a Time Capsule?

 

I have a 1TB Time Capsule and love it, works great with Time Machine and quite convenient.
Please post proof before posting just "words"? What model hard drive, storage size and price are you comparing the TC to that merits the TC to be 3x the price of the other?
You have to assess what your needs are and what the TC actually does. It's not just a wireless hard drive, it also serves as a wireless router and allows for multiple Macs running Leopard to back up files to it. It also works with PC's and older Macs running Tiger as a NAS.
The price at $499 for a 1TB is quite reasonable.

 

^^ I agree with him. The N router functionality adds value to it. What usb hub are you comparing it to?

 

Well I almost got a 1tb Western Digital My Book Studio Ed (mac version w/ firewire 800) for $150 the other week at Frys. That's 1/3 the price of the time capsule. I would think it would be a better idea to get an external HDD and a router w/ a usb port (such as the apple aiport extreme) separately so your HDD isn't stuck permanently to your router.

 

The network USB hub I was talking about is this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QSN3O6/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I still don't really like the fact that it locks devices, but I do love that it supports any/all USB devices (yes, I realize one comes with the other )

I already have a router that I love, the WRT54GL running dd-wrt, so I don't really want the router capabilities of the Time Capsule, but I guess adding the Wireless-N to my network would be nice. Didn't really look at the AEBS stuff because I heard Apple doesn't really support any USB devices for it? Would hooking a hard drive up to an AEBS work the same as the Time Capsule? The base station that only comes with one ethernet port for $100 would work the same as the full one, correct? Also, with the audio output on that device, could I forward all audio from my mac to it, or is it iTunes only?

Thanks again for your help everyone.

 

My current setup at home is that I have a extreme base station+an external hard drive. I use WD 500G mybook edition, which does not have a power switch on it. The secret is that when you connect with the USB port, it will automatically powered on, but when you disconnect with the USB port, it will power off.
I connect my external hard drive to the USB port of my extreme base station all the time and I use it. It is very convenient.
Just my 2 cents

 

Since you already have a router you really like maybe try something like this. You put in your own drive, it acts like an Apple TV but with a staggering amount of format playback options and it has it own onboard torrent client, direct youtube access and almost too much more to mention, a rake of outputs, it does backups and has 2 usbs for $179. Drop in a 1TB drive (IDE only unfortunately) and you have an almost unparalleled media server to use with your existing wifi router.

http://www.popcornhour.com

In Ireland the Timecapsule costs €499 ($792 US) which at that price for a router with a non-server grade HDD (thanks Steve) i'd rather saw my own leg off than buy one compared to the Popcorn. I'm looking at either the popcorn or a Qnap TS-209 Pro II NAS with onboard torrent client again but they are in the $400 region without drives which is a bit heavy.

Certain devices function perfectly as convergence concepts, a router and HDD in one sounds absolutely perfect but I fear the day one side of it goes down hard and I lose everything or I need to upgrade 1 without effecting the other. I'll play the separates game for the moment.

 

Correct, Apple does not support hooking up external hard drives to the Airport Extreme Base Station, at least not for use with the Time Machine backup utility and I am not certain about NAS either. This is one of the main reasons to get a Time Capsule.

 

Thanks for the tip about popcornhour, but it's not something that will work well fr me.

Drat at Apple for not allowing hard drives to connect to the AEBS.

 

Megiddo, I don't think they dont allow external HDD's to be hooked up to the AEBS, its just that they don't support them so tech support will tell you where to go if your looking for support for it. But thats all as far as I know.

 

any1 want to buy a dlink xtreme N router for 100 bucks? heh. i want that time capsule...

also does it support streaming vids. like i double click it from it's location on the time capsule, does it start to play (i do this from my other computer now. it has a bigger hd, so i just stream the movies.) *also i kno what streaming is, in this case it's not from the net, but from two computers on the same network. (or a computer and the time capsule.)*

 

Anyone else know more on this subject? Looking for opinions too.

Yes it supports streaming, you can just drag a movie from it into VLC, insta-streaming.

 

I'm not sure what people mean by hard drives not being support on the AEBS.

http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/features/harddrivesharing.html

Apple advertises it as a prominent feature right on their website. I think the only hard drive related feature they don't officially support is using an Airdisk on the AEBS with Time Machine although the firmware updates have added that feature.

Personally, I'm looking to buy a new router too after my Netgear blew it's WAN port during a thunderstorm. Interestingly, the modem and router's power were surge protected and all my computers are fine, but there must have been a surge through the ethernet cables. I was originally thinking about getting a Time Capsule, but I'm leaning toward the AEBS now since it's cheaper and has the same functionality. I have spare HDDs I can hook up anyways, so Time Capsule doesn't really have the same draw. Time Capsule's HDD might be a bit faster since it's internal, but Apple Insider's comprehensive review showed that WiFi N is generally too slow to expose the difference between an internal TC HDD and an external AEBS HDD. And I'm kind of worried about blowing an expensive Time Capsule although AEBS is quite expensive too. I guess I need to find an ethernet surge protector.

 

I have a USB enclosure with 1TB of storage connected to my TC, and I can stream video to my Macbook. I *cannot* stream to Window's Vista - I persistently get crashes when doing so. I've reinstalled Vista, and have pretty well just put the problem down to the networking protocols that were updated for Vista, but know that if you have Vista users on your network that TC doesn't necessarily make an ideal streaming solution.

 

Can the $100 Airport Express Base Station do hard drives as well? If it can, this would probably be the ideal solution for me.

 

As far as I know, you need the Airport Extreme - the Express only allows you to share printers and stream iTunes as its 'unique' features

 

My 2 cents on the matter ...
I have an AEBS and have a seagate freeagent pro 500GB hooked to it, and access the contents of it on all my computers at home wirelessly. It works like a charm. The only bottle neck is actually the wireless signal strength from place to place in the house rather than the link bottle neck between the AEBS and the external HDD hooked upto it. There's a really neat trick by which you can gauge actual bit rate speeds of your router while working on ur mac - this parameter determines the wireless streaming throughput of your router at any particular point.
Once your wireless is setup... and is showing on the menubar, click it while pressing the command (apple) key, and you'll see a host of parameters below your selected network. One of them will be a term called RSSI and other other called Bit Rate me thinks. In B/G mode (n-compatible) i get a highest Bit Rate of 130 .. when I'm close to the AEBS. The value goes down to about 50 when I'm 2-3 rooms away. This is still good enough for video streaming; however, values lower than this will cause problems with high data throughput tasks (like video streaming) - primarily because of falling data tx rates.
Also I've noticed something very peculiar - in the N only mode the initialy Bit Rate is astoundingly high (about 300 or more)... however... if i take my mac 2-3 rooms away and try to access stuff... the Bit Rate falls to a paltry 10-20 in the N only mode .. while the B/G n compatible mode still shows over 40. (This might be a router specific property.... though I would have assumed that the N only mode would be more robust and stronger for wider areas of coverage.) You might want to ask about these technicalities before you get yourself a TC or AEBS coupled with an external HDD.

 

anyone want to buy an Airport Extreme to specifically wirelessly stream data? I have a Fast Ethernet (non Gigabit) ethernet model, and I would love to upgrade to the gigabit ethernet model, as I do use a few different wired networking setups.

like zambie said, depending on the size of your place, wireless streaming works like a charm, and wireless backup for that matter, I have no issues at all using my Lacie Porsche 500gb HDD connected to my AEBS as a Time Machine backup drive, through wireless or ethernet, and my PC can easily access the same drive for file access and sharing.

if fact the network setup in my place is pretty amazing in what can be acheived all from one main machine, the MBP.