Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)

by Apple

Product Details

• Item Weight: 5 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0012JJOQO
• Item model number: MB276LL/A
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

From the Manufacturer

A Leap Forward for Backup
Introducing Time Capsule. Automatic wireless backup for your Mac. Available in 500GB and 1TB models.

One Click. Continuous Backup.
Backing up is something we all know we should do, but often don’t. And while disaster is a great motivator, now it doesn’t have to be. Because with Time Capsule, the nagging need to back up has been replaced by automatic, constant protection. And even better, it all happens wirelessly, saving everything important, including your sanity.

Built for Time Machine. Time Capsule includes a wireless 500GB or 1TB hard drive designed to work with Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard. Just set Time Capsule as the designated backup drive for Time Machine, and that’s it. Depending on how much data you have, your initial backup with Time Capsule could take overnight or longer. After it completes, only changed files are backed up--automatically, wirelessly, and in the background. So you never have to worry about backing up again.

Backup for everyone. Have multiple Macs in your house? Time Capsule can back up and store files for each Leopard-based Mac on your wireless network. No longer do you have to attach an external drive to each Mac every time you want to back up. Time Capsule spares you the work.

Room for it all. Time Capsule is your one place for backing up everything. Its massive 500GB or 1TB server-grade hard drive gives you all the capacity and safety you need. So whether you have 250 songs or 250,000 songs to back up, room is the last thing you’ll run out of. And considering all that storage and protection come packaged in a high-speed Wi-Fi base station starting at $299, data isn’t the only thing you’re saving.

The Ultimate Wireless Base Station More than just a wireless hard drive, Time Capsule is also a full-featured AirPort Extreme Base Station with 802.11n technology. Experience a high-speed wireless network and a breakthrough way to back up all the Mac computers on your network. All in one device.

Fits your Wi-Fi lifestyle. Time Capsule uses the 802.11n draft 2.0 specification, so you can rest assured that it works with certified 802.11n draft 2.0 products. And it’s compatible with Macs and PCs that use 802.11a, b, or g technologies, as well as wireless devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple TV.

Print command central. The included USB port is great for sharing a printer throughout your wireless network. Time Capsule and the Bonjour networking technology let everyone in the house or office — Mac and PC users alike — take advantage of one centrally located printer. And if you want to share both a printer and an additional hard drive, you can. Just connect a USB hub to Time Capsule. Whatever the combination, Time Capsule divides and conquers.

Works with Mac and PC.
Time Capsule with Time Machine in Leopard is the ideal backup solution. But that doesn’t mean Tiger, Windows XP, and Windows Vista users can’t enjoy the benefits of Time Capsule, too. Because it mounts as a wireless hard drive, Tiger and Windows users simply access Time Capsule directly from the wireless network for exchanging and storing files quickly and easily.

Product Description

Introducing Time Capsule. Automatic wireless backup for your Mac. Time Capsule is a revolutionary backup device that works wirelessly with Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard. It automatically backs up everything, so you no longer have to worry about losing your digital life. Time Capsule is also a full-featured 802.11n Wi-Fi base station. Every computer in your house can work off a wireless network at blazing speeds. And they can back up wirelessly to the same Time Capsule.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Way to Backup a Mac Laptop, March 4, 2008

By	Jeffrey Heaton "Jeff Heaton" (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)

This review is from: Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage) (Electronics)

I've been using Time Machine since I upgraded to Leopard. While Time Machine is great for backing up my iMac, its a pain to have to hook up my Mac Book Pro and new Mac Book Air to an external hard drive. The Time Capsule is great for that. So long as my laptop is open and running, a backup can happen.

Make sure you remember to do your first backup using ethernet. Otherwise it is going to be slow. Apple does not want to bog down your network with backups, so when you are backing up wirelessly, it will intentionally throttle the connection sped.

This device also functions as a wireless router. I was able to remove my previous Air Port Extreme from the network. The large size is nice because you are able to share one large drive and backup several smaller computers. My iMac and laptop all backup just fine.

The device does run a little hot. The Best Way to Backup a Mac Laptop

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely outstanding experience!, March 3, 2008

By	Erik S. Johnson "What planet am I on?" (Yamhill County, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage) (Electronics)

I'll make this short... I just got my 500GB Time Capsule and, so far, it's been an absolutely outstanding experience. I was already on a wireless network and was a little confused about how well this thing would go in. So, followed the simple instructions that came with the AirPort Setup Utility and, voila, I was talking to the Time Capsule (TC). I decided to stand the TC up as a separate, Apple only wireless network, and to connect (specifically, bridge vs. Double DHCP) the TC up to my existing router. The installation took about five minutes and was absolutely flawless (I now have an Apple-only 802.11n network, and my original 802.11g network for guests). Oh, and did I say the 802.11n wireless is bloody FAST?!

As soon as I specified the TC as my Time Machine backup server, two minutes later the initial backup was cranking away. No false starts, no crazy configuration management or Regedit blah blah blah -- I plugged it in, gave it a couple of key data points, and it was up and working!

Only gripe I have is that I couldn't migrate my existing Time Machine backups to the new TC -- a minor inconvenience, but one I can live with...

THIS is the reason that I buy and use Apple products. I am exceptionally happy with this purchase. Three thumbs up!

Update 2008-03-20: I had some limited drop-outs of the wireless, but it wasn't a "killer" issue. Last night, Apple issued a Time Capsule update, and I'm happy to report the service has been absolutely flawless, and bloody fast -- the wireless function feels like it is orders of magnitude faster than before... Again, this has been an excellent experience, and I'll be purchasing my second Time Capsule for my daughter in the next couple of weeks.

63 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally - Time Capsule has arrived (albeit a little late), March 1, 2008

By	John J. Schmitt III "IT Afficionado" (PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage) (Electronics)

Since its introduction in January, Mac users (new and old) have been waiting patiently for Time Capsules (TC) to start appearing in retail stores. For me - I got lucky and wandered into the Apple Store on Friday to find that they had actually materialized earlier in the day.

Getting the product installed into my home network was a little more difficult than I expected, but not terribly so. For me - the hang up was that I was not going to use the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) to share out my Internet connection. My goal was simply to turn this device into another client on my Cat6 home network. After installing the AirPort utility provided with the packaging onto my MacBook Pro, configuring Time Capsule to recognize itself as a NAS only device was fairly straightforward. For at least the beginning, I disabled the wireless radio and plugged it in via one of its 4 available Cat6 connections. Opening config stuff was fairly standard: 1) give the device a name, decide on DHCP or manual IP config, etc. The only slightly annoying thing is that the Airport Utility does like to reset/reboot the Time Capsule after you make almost any type of change to the configuration. Mine must have rebooted 8 times before I had made the last of my changes.

As far as the integration with Time Machine, it was very intuitive and straight forward. The only curious thing is that it will not let me change my TM preferences unless my laptop was plugged in. Strangely, I could perform an instant backup with the laptop running on battery power. As many people have wondered, you can attach another USB-based hard-drive to the TC and use that drive(s) as the source of the TM backups if you like. Doing so would essentially make the entire size of TC available as traditional NAS Storage. Plugged in via my Ethernet connection, the initial TM backup of my 160GG (40 GB used) hard-drive took about 2.5 hours. I assume the speed would be significantly reduced if I was using the wireless. It looks as though Apple creates a sparse disk image bundle on the Time Capsule and then mounts that during a TM operation. This essentially leaves one file on the root of the hard drive after the initial backup is performed. You can mount this image at any time, and you will observe a folder structure similar to when Time Machine is operating against a locally attached USB hard drive.

Next the Wireless: After getting TM working to my satisfaction, I wanted to see if I set up another wireless network in my house. As with other AEBS units, this was very simple to do. I simply chose to put my TC into "Bridge Mode" and away I was. With 2 minutes I had a second wireless network up and running. For curiosity sake I setup the network to operate on the 5G Hz 802.11n configuration. I was curious to see how much faster the speed was than if I configured it to be backward compatible with 802.11a/b/g. Not surprisingly, performance on the "N" network was much better. I achieved average file transfers of almost twice the speed as I would have seen if I had been connected to my 802.11g network. Once I unplugged the Ethernet cable and went totally wireless, my Time Machine backups were very seamless and after a few hours of work, I stopped noticing the backups actually taking place.

Aesthetics: Like the AppleTV, the Time Capsule device does get fairly hot to the touch. From a size comparison, it is a little bit bigger (height-wise) than the AppleTV. It does not however have the smooth edges that the AppleTV sports. For some reason, its exterior design is more reminiscent of the last generation of AEBS.

Overall, Time Capsule is a great consumer device; but I have to believe that many power Mac users would cite SuperDuper's (http://www.shirt-pocket.com) ability to perform backups to image files stored on a network share as a comparable feature set in a backup solution. Interestingly, I am using both backup strategies: Time Machine & Time Capsule to protect the incremental versions of my everyday files and SuperDuper to generate a weekly backup image of my entire hard drive. My last comment would be this: a 500GB TC unit should be more than sufficient to take care of any single MacBook or MacBook Pro archiving strategy. If however you are looking to service multiple Macs or work with large amounts of video across the network, then the 1TB version will definitely be the way to go. Enjoy!