Demise of a Time Capsule

For the last 3½ years we've been using an Apple Time Capsule (TC). It has served as our router, our WiFi base station, and a backup hard drive for Time Machine on Joan's iMac. Then it began to fail.

The first failure coincided with two events, so we weren't positive what to judge as the cause. Time Machine announced that the backup drive was full, and it would have to begin removing the oldest versions to make room for further backups. Then the Internet connection failed, and Joan noticed that the TC status lamp was not on. Not green, not yellow, just not on. She unplugged the power cord and plugged it back, and the Time Capsule resumed its duties, for a while.

Then one afternoon the TC spontaneously turned itself off. We unplugged and replugged it several times, to no avail. Then, coming back a few hours later, it was working again.

Clearly it was time to do something. An Internet search revealed that the early Time Capsules had an abnormally high failure rate, most of which were due to the power supply. Eventually Apple extended the warranty for these Time Capsules, under user pressure, but at 3½ years old, ours was out of warranty even so. We were lucky to get 3½ years; many seemed to fail at about 18 months.

The Time Capsule suffers a lot of heat stress, which is what was killing the power supplies. The device has an internal power supply (turning the AC current from the wall into proper DC voltages), an internal hard drive, the wireless circuits, the Ethernet circuits, all generating heat -- and there is no ventilation. It doesn't even have feet to allow air flow under the unit; here's a picture of the bottom:

I went to our local Apple Store to get a replacement Time Capsule. However, the 2 terabyte (TB) model, $299, was not in stock in either central Ohio location. The 3 TB model could be had -- for $499. Given that we'd been happy with a ½ TB (500 gigabyte) model, I wasn't keen to pay an extra $200 for the larger unit. I went home to order online, but, lo and behold, the 2 TB units had a 1 to 2 week shipping estimate on apple.com. Our old Time Capsule was working today, but buying a replacement with an uncertain shipping date and praying that the old unit wouldn't die completely first did not sound like a sound strategy.

I went back to the Apple Store, now much more crowded than during my first visit, and priced my options. I could get an Airport Extreme for $179, which would take care of the wireless and routing functionality, and there was a 1 terabyte external hard drive available for $129.95, which we could use as the backup device for Time Machine. That adds up to $308.95, or $10 more than the 2 TB Time Capsule -- but much less than the 3 TB model. And having "just" 1 terabyte for backup wasn't an issue; we were, after all, replacing a ½ terabyte model! I brought them home.

The Airport Extreme has an external power supply, and no hard drive, so the heat build up should be tolerable, even though it also has zero ventilation:

I also put feet on the bottom of the Airport Extreme. It may not make a lot of difference, but it was an easy remedy to apply.

 Here is a photo of the old Time Capsule below the new, and more compact, Airport Extreme.

The external hard drive (black) is tucked behind the iMac, beside the (white) cable modem. It connects to the iMac through a USB port.

These replacement devices were easy to install and configure. Although the Airport Extreme is warm to the touch, with the separation of hard drive, power supply, and wifi/routing into three different enclosures, overheating should not cause problems. It was an adventurous time, but appears to have turned out well.