Clear benefits to Time Capsule?

vdonahuevdonahue
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited December 2014

I'm wanting a personal cloud solution, and I can't find a definitive answers as to whether or not there is a clear advantage to going with an Apple Time Capsule, instead of something like the WD My Cloud, which is half the price, Time Machine compatible, and at first glance, nearly identical in function.

 

Is there something I'm missing?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,326moderator
    Time Capsule is a router too. WD My Cloud is a NAS drive, which you plug into a router via ethernet. If you have an 802.11n router, the speed transferring to the WD box will be a little slow, this site tested around 6Mbps (22 minutes to backup 1GB):

    http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/storage/western-digital-my-cloud-2tb

    With an 802.11ac laptop connecting directly to the 802.11ac Time Capsule, you'd get about 85Mbps (1.5 minutes to backup 1GB):

    http://www.macworld.com/article/2044247/review-speedy-networking-makes-apples-new-airport-time-capsule-a-good-buy.html

    The WD box would probably get over 6Mbps if you have an 802.11ac router but likely still not as fast as the Time Capsule. The older 802.11n Time Capsule can be bought around the same price as the WD Box:

    http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Time-Capsule-2TB-MD032LL/dp/B0057AVXP4

    Even the older one gets decent transfer performance so the performance of the WD box must have been affected by the data going via the external router.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    rctlrrctlr Posts: 5member
    All depends on what you want to do,
    for video I've used air video HD for viewing videos remotely,

    If it's file management I've opened AFP up to my Mac.

    Share a folder using system preferences/Sharing/File Sharing

    On your router port forward port 548 to your Mac. This of course is different for each and every router, so you will need to check this yourself.

    Remotely, use another Mac and in finder Go/connect to server/ afp://IPAddress
    This is your IP address your provider gives you.

    Use IFiles on iOS devices to connect the same way. Ifilesapp.com

    With this solution there was no need for a time capsule. If you do want to use a time capsule, you can always share this disk on it and then point the port forward to its AFP port, that works just the same.
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