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C|Net Gives Time Capsule Mixed Review
by , 2:30 PM EST, March 5th, 2008
C|Net UK put an Apple Time Capsule through its paces in a review published on Wednesday. It has a clean design, is a well priced for a Draft 802.11n router plus terabyte drive, and is extensible. C|Net didn't like the lack of advanced storage features and poor network performance for PCs.
The Time Capsule received a 6.9 rating, "Good."
"We're happy to report that we were able to connect an Intel-powered Mac Pro, an iMac G5, a Windows Vista-based HP Pavilion tx2000z laptop and the Windows XP-based Lenovo X300 laptop to the Time Capsule wirelessly with little trouble," Rich Brown wrote. "Each system was also able to read and write to the Time Capsule's hard drive."Mr. Brown took note of the fact that the TC has no power switch and only a single indicator light. On the other hand, there is a reset button to restore factory settings, and the power cable is just that -- there's no external brick. Also, the top surface gets very hot and needs to be well ventilated.
The review compared the Time Capsule to competing products like the Hewlett Packard MediaSmart Server -- which doesn't serve as a router. The issue there is that if the hard disk fails in the Time Capsule, the user will lose the wireless network. "...Apple assured us that the Time Capsule's 'server grade' Hitachi Deskstar hard drive would last a lot longer than the typical desktop or laptop drive," Mr. Brown noted. Also, Mac users will get the most benefit since only Leopard has Time Machine and an interface to the Time Capsule.
While Time Capsule was lauded for its storage capabilities, the review was not so happy with the wireless performance. "... as a wide-bandwidth 802.11n wireless router, the Time Capsule is decidedly mediocre," Mr Brown said. "On the 2.4GHz performance, the Time Capsule fell behind by a full 20 Mbps on our max throughput test compared with a NetGear RangeMax router."
The conclusion was that while Mac users looking for a wireless router upgrade and wireless storage option will find the Time Capsule to be the most advanced product on the market, Windows/PC users demanding ultimate network performance should look elsewhere.
Observer Comments
According to you then, there is no point for a review of a router. If you are only going to do a closed ecosystem for networking the decision of which router to use is already determined by what networking hardware you have in your computer. Compared to other 802.11n routers, this fell short in both speed and range. It doesn't matter if the draft is not been made a standard yet, they are all writing off the same specification. Standard and draft are just statuses of the specification. The problem is not that you cannot implement to the specification, it is that the specification might change before it becomes a standard and then if those changes are material then devices written to the draft specification may no longer work. The draft status of the specification doesn't make it harder to write to a specification, only riskier.
Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:03 pm Subject: draft vs. standard
When PCI 1.0 became a standard, there were areas where two manufacturers could implement a card and a slot that were both compliant with the standard yet could not talk to each other due to timing issues. The timing issues arose due to differing interpretations of the specification.
It wasn't until PCI 1.1 was finalized was the standard tightened up and you could be assured that two compliant devices could actually work together.
The same might also be true with regards to 802.11n. The status of draft vs. standard is important if the wording of the specification is ambiguous.
Be interesting to confirm if indeed you lose the router functionality if the internal HD fails.
It's still a 'not quite' product for me - for instance, while I can appreciate why Apple pulled Time Machine support for USB external disks mounted on the Airport Express, I'd still like to be able to plug in an external HD to a time capsule and automatically backup my backup.
Also, there are other NAS solutions that can act as iTunes servers. With an AppleTV that would be the best solution.
QuoteGuest wrote:
Be interesting to confirm if indeed you lose the router functionality if the internal HD fails.
It was confirmed by Apple itself. If you read the full review you'll find that they wrote, "One thing we feared about the Time Capsule when we first heard of it is that because it's essentially a closed box, if the hard drive or the router fails, you end up losing both. It's been shown that you can peel off the Time Capsule's rubbery bottom and remove the hard drive yourself, but Apple confirmed for us that even if you were to do that, you couldn't treat the Time Capsule as a standalone router, as the hard drive hosts vital data on it for the networking functionality as well."
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