C|Net Gives Time Capsule Mixed Review

March 4th, 2008 at 2:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

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 didnit like the lack of advanced storage features and poor network performance for PCs.

The Time Capsule received a 6.9 rating, "Good."

"Weire 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 Capsuleis 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 -- thereis 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 doesnit 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 Capsuleis iserver gradei 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.