Thanks to my good friend Juan, I got myself a Time Capsule (which I’ll be calling TC from here on out). Finally, I’m now able to make good on that last thought I had in an old post.

The Good

The unit’s pretty slick and well thought out; as much as you’d expect from an Apple product.

• Setup is very straightforward. If you have a Mac, you have everything you need. On a PC you’d have to install the AirPort utility, but no biggie.

• The TC is already an Internet Gateway; so you can use it as your router. I personally replaced my old Linksys WRT54G with it.

• 802.11n (248Mbps) wireless, GbE¹ (1000Mbps) wired

Compared to my previous Linksys setup, that’s theoretically up to 4-5x faster (your mileage may vary) on both wireless and wired.

• 1TB… one TerraByte… one thousand GigaBytes.

• Configuration options

This is the first time I’ve switched to an “Apple managed network” so to speak, so the things I may point out here might have been old news for those who’ve always been using old Apple base-stations. But one thing that I really liked with the network settings (that was lacking in my Linksys setup) was the possibility for MAC-based² DHCP assignments.

Basically, I like using DHCP as it “just works” – but I’ve always wanted to manually set the IP addresses of my machines.³ OS X‘s networking preferences allows an option called DHCP with manual address, which I obviously use, but the problem is that XP doesn’t have such a counterpart. It’s either you go DHCP or manual. And when you go manual, I found that I’d always have to set my DNS settings – else I couldn’t get on the web.

So like I said, the TC’s got an option to “reserve” DHCP addresses based on MAC addresses – this basically means that while you’re still “automatically” configuring everything else via DHCP, if the TC identifies a certain computer you have set, it will go ahead and apply the specific IP you’ve specified.

The good thing about this is that all this is set on the TC, and not on the connecting computers. So you can basically have one setting for all your computers; PCs, Linux and Macs alike. Just set everything to DHCP and you should be set.

• The TC is a good NAS⁴ solution as it rids the user of cables needed to access their files from external hard drives. I personally find this to be a boon, as my iTunes library is on an external drive. Gone are the days where where moving with my laptop is constricted due to physically connecting my hard disk to the laptop… just to listen to music. Now I have access to my full library regardless where I am situated in my home.

That doesn’t mean the TC is perfect though; it has its share of shortcomings.

The Bad

• Cannot partition

It’s beyond me why there’s no partitioning utility for the TC. There is a hack which will allow you to create partitions, but it will void your warranty. The funny thing is that the TC is able to handle a multi-partitioned drive (e.g. after doing the “hack” mentioned previously), so there shouldn’t be any technical limitation thats preventing Apple from having that feature built-in.

Here’s why partitioning, even when using a single drive, can be useful: In the case you start getting bad sectors, or if certain areas of the plates are physically damaged. There are some instances when you hit a newly developed bad sector that simply doesn’t allow you to go further in access the drive (I’ve experienced this).

With partitioning, because you’ve divided your hard drive space to chunks, there a possibility that you will just lose the partition containing that irrecoverable error, but would still be able to skip/access the other partitions. That’s the sort of thing that’s nifty to have when you intend to back-up. Imagine not being able to access the good data simply because the bad data was read first – and subsequently prevented you to move further.

• No Low-level Disk Access

This is actually connected to the first issue (or rather the first issue is connected to this, as partitioning is a low-level process).

Basically you can only access the drive from a network… not directly. The only way to access it directly is if you open the TC up and take the hard disk out and mount it on a computer – which voids your warranty.

The implications of this are very significant. For one thing, what if the hard disk acts up? (corrupted data, bad sectors, etc.) You can’t use disk utitities/diagnostic tools on it because those methods require direct access to the physical drive (either through IDE, SATA, IEEE 1394/Firewire, SCSI, or USB). Like I said, the TC is a NAS – so you can only access it as a shared network volume – which limits usage to file-folder manipulation… not hardware maintenance.

I’m praying that Apple provides a firmware upgrade someday that allows you low-level access to the TC’s drive via it’s USB port. If Apple would only do that, then that would solve a bunch of problems (including partitioning)

• Fastest data transfer to the drive is limited to Ethernet

For this part, lets assume all rated specs on paper are true (but we all know they really aren’t).

GbE is technically is faster than USB2.0 which is rated approximately at 480Mbps – so you’d normally bottleneck on the USB interface anyways. What bothers me though is that the only way to get that fast of a transfer rate is if you physically connect the drive to your computer, then connect the computer to the TC.

What’s the big deal you ask? Say you’re working on your laptop, which in turn is on an 802.11n connection (about 248Mbps); that’s about half the hard drive’s native interface speed (USB 2.0). Connecting like the paragraph above (via GbE) would solve that, but here’s where it gets annoying:

The TC has a USB port, but the TC has no native GUI so to speak⁵ so you’d obviously have to access it through a machine. Going back to the scenario: you’re on your laptop wirelessly, and the hard disk is connected to the TC via USB. Say you now wanted to transfer files from that USB drive to the TC. Ideally you’d want it to be smart enough to use the fastest connection available. Since the hard drive is connected directly to the TC via USB, obviously it would be the fastest interface available.

Turns out, it will not use the native USB connection… instead, the data will stream from the hard drive to your computer wirelessly through the TC, then stream to the TC wirelessly. This constitutes a true what the fuck moment right? Here you have a hard disk already connected natively to the USB port of the TC and it had to do those hops to the slower wireless network. It’s worth mentioning though that if you use the “archive” option (which is essentially backing up the TC contents to a connected hard disk), then it goes ahead and directly accesses the USB interface. But that only covers data going out from the TC.