I'm an Apple Whore
So, I decided to pick me up one of these new Time Capsule devices. I had several reasons (all Mac people have to justify their purchases, after all) to get this new device...
- I needed a new router. My current router was a hacked together Linksys wrt54g that was quickly dying. When I first moved to the apartment, the damned thing kept losing it's configuration and I'd have to reset the whole router to get it to work right. So, I tried uploading hacked firmware to the router which worked great for awhile, but then the radio would heat up and die every now and then causing me ever so much frustration...
- I wanted to back my machine up over wireless. Time Machine will not work any other way (without hacks). I frequently have my laptop in other parts of the apartment where my backup drives are not. This is why I lost 10 days of data last time my hard drive died... this will hopefully eliminate most of those issues.
- 802.11n may be useful for me... someday...
So far the device works great. It's not as customizable as I'm used to in a router, but it's not bad. I think the big thing, though, is any adjustment I make on the router takes only 20 seconds or so to bring the router back online. Quite impressed.
The internal hard disk is accessible by OS X without issue. I just browse to it and can access the drive no problem. The Time Machine preferences recognized it instantly. You just have to be careful... right now I'm backing up 105.5 gigs of data to it. Don't do this over 802.11b or even g. It's just too slow. Go ethernet for the initial dump.
I also believe I figured out why it took a special piece of hardware to make Time Machine work... they're creating disk images right on the networked drive, thus creating separation between multiple machines that back up to it.
Nothing wrong so far. The device itself is rather hot though... there's a fan inside it keeping it cool. It may not be worth the full price of admission, but so far it seems to be doing great. Although I'll laugh if they knock $200 bucks off in a few months. ;)