06-01-2008, 02:37 PM
I think the Time Capsule actually is a true NAS device. (as well as being a WiFi Router) and though I've not personally owned a dedicated NAS drive, the consensus I've seen around here is that that A. most tend to depend on systems that aren't terribly mac friendly and B. They are notoriously slow.
Here's a question: do you notice the TC is pretty zippy with short writes, short downloads, but slows down on bigger or longer ones?
I seem recall reading a review that had graphs, showing that it's mainly the longer writes where the performance (and wireless speed) weaknesses are revealed. But it performs quite well with lots of short writes. Which is what Time Machine does, essentially, it writes a lot of little things frequently. Less commonly (except that first backup) does Time Machine write big chunks of data. For what it's designed to do, my understanding is that Time Capsule's performance is pretty good.
I have a new Airport Extreme. I connected an external hard drive to it via its USB port, hoping to have a Time Capsule-like experience. Maybe it's the USB, but it was so slow--wired or wireless--I wanted to kill myself. I abandoned the idea after a few days, really disappointed.
For what you're trying to do, it seems like you'd have more benefits downloading to a standard external hard drive, connected to your mac (or one of your macs) via Firewire port. An external FW drive. USB is popular too, but many of us prefer FW for performance, especially with regards to big data read/writes. And as always, wired connections offer significantly faster performance than even the best currently-available wireless connection speeds. Whenever possible, or whenever convenient, enjoy the benefits of wired. (a gigabit ethernet network) With broadband, it's fast all the way through. And you can still enjoy reasonably fast wireless speeds. Except for those really big file transfers.
Also worth noting, if you have two macs or more, and you're running Leopard, it's really easy to access any drive attached to any machine from any other machine anywhere on the network.
Just curious, how did you end up choosing to have downloads directed to your Time Capsule? Is there a benefit to using the Time Capsule as a download target? Compared to other options?
Here's a question: do you notice the TC is pretty zippy with short writes, short downloads, but slows down on bigger or longer ones?
I seem recall reading a review that had graphs, showing that it's mainly the longer writes where the performance (and wireless speed) weaknesses are revealed. But it performs quite well with lots of short writes. Which is what Time Machine does, essentially, it writes a lot of little things frequently. Less commonly (except that first backup) does Time Machine write big chunks of data. For what it's designed to do, my understanding is that Time Capsule's performance is pretty good.
I have a new Airport Extreme. I connected an external hard drive to it via its USB port, hoping to have a Time Capsule-like experience. Maybe it's the USB, but it was so slow--wired or wireless--I wanted to kill myself. I abandoned the idea after a few days, really disappointed.
For what you're trying to do, it seems like you'd have more benefits downloading to a standard external hard drive, connected to your mac (or one of your macs) via Firewire port. An external FW drive. USB is popular too, but many of us prefer FW for performance, especially with regards to big data read/writes. And as always, wired connections offer significantly faster performance than even the best currently-available wireless connection speeds. Whenever possible, or whenever convenient, enjoy the benefits of wired. (a gigabit ethernet network) With broadband, it's fast all the way through. And you can still enjoy reasonably fast wireless speeds. Except for those really big file transfers.
Also worth noting, if you have two macs or more, and you're running Leopard, it's really easy to access any drive attached to any machine from any other machine anywhere on the network.
Just curious, how did you end up choosing to have downloads directed to your Time Capsule? Is there a benefit to using the Time Capsule as a download target? Compared to other options?