Time Capsule torn asunder, no "server grade" hard drive inside
Hardmac took apart a 2 TB Time Capsule and found something interesting. The uninteresting bit: there's really nothing new in the new Time Capsule -- same antennas, etc. The interesting bit: Apple claims to have a "server grade" hard drive in the Time Capsule. However, Hardmac discovered the drive inside is actually a Western Digital Caviar Green disk, a fairly common consumer grade hard drive. As Engadget points out, what qualifies a drive to be enterprise grade is the mean time between failure (MTBF), which we don't know for the Caviar Green because Western Digital isn't telling. In fact, based on this review at TechArp, there's no average seek or latency time given. You'd think a drive manufacturer would report these things, no?
Given previous issues with Time Capsules, we're hoping this doesn't become an issue in the future. "Server grade" can be interpreted in many ways, after all (I happen to have a first-gen G4 Mac mini set up as a server, but I wouldn't deploy that as a real server!). It's a shame to see Apple calling what appears to be a pretty vanilla drive something that it likely isn't.
[via Slashgear]
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Is the hard drive in the new Time Capsule really server grade?
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This is way old news. From 2008:
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/01/time-capsule-not-using-server-grade-hard-drive-as-advertised/
If it's server grade, they are just in their pricing. If not, that price is abhorrent.
June 27 2011 at 11:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyNo surprise at all. There is no 2TB server grade HDD in the market and. 500GB SAS HDD cost 2-3 time the price of TC.
June 27 2011 at 12:27 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply
Mabhatter
Realistically, somebody should be asking what the lifetime on the power supply. That seems to be the week link on these critters.
June 27 2011 at 12:59 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyApple dissapoonts.
June 26 2011 at 2:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe "typical" rating on Caviar Green drives is 1.0 to 1.2 million hours, MTBF. That makes them thoroughly "server grade" by virtually all definitions.
Technology marches on, and today it's harder to find drives that are sub-server grade.
If one examines the 2tb time capsul page you will see:
"3tb Server Grade Storage"
"The massive 2TB or 3TB server-grade hard drive gives you all the capacity and safety you need for backing up all your Mac computers."
If both were specifically server grade it wouldn't have 3tb beside server grade storage and it would also say :
"The massive 2TB and 3TB server-grade hard drives gives you all the capacity and safety you need for backing up all your Mac .
Josh, Sorry for the correction but, you didn't have all included in your quotation marks however I do agree with you on the other issues.
It will be interesting to see what's in the 3tb.
If Apple intends to use "server-grade" as an adverb, then yes, the 3TB version may be the only one that is server-grade. However, it is still poor grammar to use confusing, stacked adverbs and adjectives. Otherwise, as an adjective, Apple would be missing a comma in their description and it would apply to both the 2TB and 3TB models.
Either way, Apple needs a grammar consultant.
Anyone that backs up their data on a single drive backup solution is just looking for trouble. it does not matter if the drive is a "consumer grade" or "server grade", drives can and do fail. There are many NAS solutions out there that you can configure as either RAID 1 or RAID 5 that will protect your data and will not compromise your backups if one of the multiple drives fail.
June 26 2011 at 8:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyRAID is more about availability than about security.
security would rather be having more than one backup.
While pretty much all of us know that a close to ideal backup solution is to have two current backups (one offsite), Time Machine with Time Capsule -- in theory -- make a very convenient firs line of defense. I happen to love mine in spite of the issues I've had with it.
Do I trust the Time Capsule? About as far as my limp wrists can throw it. But I do love it.
I was just wondering about this "server grade" drive listed in their specs. Very misleading.
June 26 2011 at 1:30 AM Report abuse Permalink -1 rate up rate down ReplyTime capsule is a single drive solution which makes it intrinsically unreliable. If you want a reliable backup device a 4 drive NAS configured to raid-5 will do a great job, mine actually has 4 caviar green 1TB drives. A single drive, no matter how intrinsically stable is never going to be reliable in the long term.
June 26 2011 at 12:55 AM Report abuse Permalink -1 rate up rate down ReplyRead apple's page carefully, it never says the 2tb is server grade just the 3tb is sever grade. Has anyone taken the 3tb apart to see?
June 25 2011 at 7:54 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down ReplyI'd be surprised if there were such a thing as a 'server grade' 3tb harddisk. Servers usually use smaller drives, not the biggest ones in the market.
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