Apple Time Capsule 2TB ME177LL/A

Bought this to provide 802.11ac Wifi to my Macbook Air. It works great in that regard, with a few caveats to note below. Having read that the basic Airport Extreme had the slot for a hard drive with no way to hook it up, I thought it would be great to decrease clutter on my desk and move my Time Machine Backup drive inside my Airport router. I used the 2TB disk for a few months, then upgraded it to a 4TB disk since I'm backing up two computers. The upgrade was easy thanks to the teardowns at iFixit.I live in a fairly small 3 bedroom house of 1100 sq. ft. Wifi signal is great, although my study where the Airport was located is in a converted carport on one side of the house, and behind a brick wall. This means the 802.11ac speeds did not reach the rooms on the opposite side of the house for my Macbook (just the slower N speed), and the signal dropped regularly in those rooms for smaller devices like my Android phones, HP Touchpad, and even my iPad Mini. To be fair, this isn't the fault of the router, as 5Ghz signals from any router would not translate well through 1' thick brick walls, and the 2.4 Ghz frequency is also impacted. I moved my Airport to the other side of the brick, which improved my signal greatly for the other side of the house.As I was preparing this project, Drive Genius on my iMac started giving me warnings about my Time Machine backup. There is no disk utility built into Airport Utility, but it turns out the only way to have it check the disk is to reboot it. I did this, but Drive Genius was still giving me error messages. I finally turned Drive Genius off and tried to run a Time Machine backup. Eventually it did give me an error message saying there are problems with my backups and a new one needs to be created. This makes sense because the backups are actually stored on disk images. The backup for my Macbook seemed OK, while the iMac's backup may have been corrupted when I did a force shut down after my computer locked up. But no big deal, I tell it to create a new backup. Forgot, of course, that I have my computer set to auto shutdown, which interrupted the backup first. It took over 20 hours for a 1.6 TB backup! I opened up Activity Monitor during the backup, and sure enough, my network transfer rates were hovering around 20-30 Megabytes/second. Gigabit Ethernet, which is how my iMac is hardwired to this router, boasts speeds of 1000gb/s, or around 125 MB/s. The 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus hard drive I installed was reviewed at 167 MB/s write and 171 MB/s read speeds, so the bottleneck is clearly the Time Capsule. Some people complained that this only has USB 2.0 ports on it, which is part of what led me to choose the Time Capsule. But that's irrelevant because it will not allow transfer speeds any higher than what you normally see with USB 2.0. Normally this is not a huge deal, because Time Machine does incremental backups. But for the first backup, or the first time an additional hard drive is backed up, this makes it excruciatingly slow! If you have the patience to let it run in the background and leave your computer on for several hours while it runs, then it should be fine. The first time backup with the new hard drives, this was the case, but today I'm needing to move my computer to finish my project, and I'm scared to because I have no backup until Time Machine finishes. When I bought this time was not a huge issue, but now I'm also in a bit of a time crunch to get this project completed and back to work. I cannot recommend using this as a backup device if you have a significant amount of data to backup and your time is valuable. If those are not a big deal to you, then it is workable.More recently I have hooked up a second hard drive to the USB port to store my iTunes library on. I access this from Windows 8.1 and OS X Mavericks on multiple computers. My observation is that it runs great over the wired connection on Mavericks, but excruciatingly slow on the same computer booted into Windows 8.1. When I open iTunes on one platform after using it on the other, it has to update the library. On Mavericks it takes about a minute to finish this process. On Windows 8.1 the process takes 7-10 minutes. In short, whether using an internal drive or an external USB drive, the Time Capsule is a poor performing NAS. I'm docking 1.5 stars for the poor NAS performance, which is unacceptable considering that the hard drive is the main feature difference between this and the basic Airport Extreme.Overall, the router and internet functionality is solid. I have it connected to a Motorola Surfboard SB6121 cable modem on Comcast, and it works well. IPv6 even checks out OK at the various testing sites, at least if I set my DNS providers using the new OpenDNS IPv6 addresses and turn off the "Block incoming IPv6 connections" in the Network Options. I'm not sure that this actually makes any difference in web browsing, as if anything I've noticed slower web browsing since making that change.Most routers have a web based utility, but Apple would rather you use their apps to control their routers. That wouldn't be a huge deal, but there are not a lot of options in this area. Airport Utility has a few quirks with this router. I'm running it on Mavericks with the latest version (6.3.2), but sometimes it seems to have trouble communicating with the router. Often it shows that the internet is disconnected when loading a web page works fine. Occasionally I get an error about "Double NAT," but this seems to coincide with the modem losing its connection to Comcast. That's not particularly helpful for troubleshooting, though. Also, every time I restart the modem using Airport Utility (such as to apply a change), it will not show up in Airport Utility again until I quit and reopen the program. After it reboots and the internet is connected, it just grays out and says that an Airport base station was previously associated but is no longer part of the network. I'm docking another .5 stars for this poor software behavior and the lack of a web interface.This still deserves three stars because most of the time it "just works," which is what is expected out of Apple. If you're buying it for performance, you can expect excellent Wifi speed and normal range for a high end router, but the hard disk performance is embarrassing. I was hoping for a speedy all-in-one router + backup drive, but apparently this is too much to ask for.Update 8/2016: Lost one of my hard drives, the backup was nowhere to be found in Time Machine. Turns out the drive didn't get backed up!! After getting the bad drive reconnected I tried to back it up. First the Time Capsule didn't even show up in my network, either in Airport Utility or in my Network. I restarted it and it showed up, but the backup got stuck at about 218 GB. It appears to be proceeding at about 0.01 GB every 10-15 minutes, not sure if this is a sustainable rate or not. Interestingly enough, the TC again fails to show up in Airport Utility or Network. So, while the internet works fine through this whole thing, clearly the TC is unreliable for backup after 3 years. Tested the visibility on two different computers, too.

I wanted to write for those looking to join or extend their wireless network. I have read a lot of comments where people had difficulty connecting the TC to their existing non-Apple router. I decided to share how it worked for me. The instructions appear to leave out or make clear one important detail. So much so that when I spoke with Apple, the tech didn't recognize this missing fact or instruction either.When you start up the TC on a Mac, you can either open Airport Utility to simply tap on your Wi-Fi/Network icon in the upper right corner. You will see (it may take a few moments for the device to be recognized) the TC name listed below your wireless network(s). Tap it an it will automatically open the airport utility. From there, you will see "Other Wi-Fi Devices" in the upper left corner. Click on it and it will start recognizing wireless networks and look for your TC/base station. Then you will have three options. Create a new network, join a network, or replace a network. For those who want to use their existing router as the primary router, or who simply want to have this extend their network, chose the middle option, "join a network".This is the part that threw me (and the tech). It brings you back to create a network. Say okay. I used a different name than my existing network to make sure that I did not have a problem identifying which was which if this didn't work. I created a network, named the TC, and then got the option under the Airport Utility, subheading Wireless, under Network Mode to create or Extend from a short pull-down menu. I selected Extend, input the wireless information on that screen and voila the TC joined or extended my network. Unfortunately, this was not clear to me when I tried to set this up originally. In fact, it wasn't clear to the tech either. By the way, if you go to Network under the Airport Utility, you will see that the Router Mode is "Off(Bridge Mode). That is done automatically under this process.I have read a variety of comments on a variety of sites with very involved processes to get to this point (going into the router or modem setup, changing things to bridge mode, etc.) For those who want to simply add this to their network rather than switch their network over to the TC, this is a solution. Apple suggests, that you simply switch over to the TC as your router or primary router. That is an option, and perhaps I will do that at some point in the future. For now, the TC, and my ability to add an external hard drive to it for additional storage to it, will be secondary to my existing and personally owned router. This is no criticism of those who simply follow apple's suggested approach.For those who want to add it to their network, good luck and I hope that it helps.I can't really comment on the TC too much after only two days. The first back up was as most people have warned - very slow. I may comment or amend this review after I have had more time using it.By the way, this score for me would be somewhere near a 3.5. 3 seems too low and 4 too much given that lack of clarity for those not planning on creating a new network.

Product is superb and Net Speed do increased after using it. Previously I used Netgear Router and on my home network I used to get around 100kbps download speed at its peak when I installed it in place of the Netgear Router the speed increased to approx 148-160 kbps. Though the bottleneck is my internet connection which is slow but it does effect the speed.Also the 3TB Hard disk is added advantage for backup.You do need a Mac or Ipad or Iphone to set it up then you can easily use it with any Windows Desktop/Laptop. To use the Hard Disk with your windows system, you will need to download a simple utility from Apple Website Airport Base Station Agent and then the harddisk will show as a network drive on your My Computer. Simple.I have given 4 star because the model I ordered was 182LL/A but I received different model. Seller informed me that in India the Newest model is not available but I paid extra considering the new model so I reduced 1 star.

I don’t know why Apple  doesn’t make this anymore.

This is one of "The best" routers i have ever come across. Setup happens in a breeze..... Super easy to manage data wirelessly. Amazingly fast data transfers. I am using it on six devices simultaneoulsy including my apple tv. Definately a great buy. Go ahead folks, i assure this wont ever dissapo

LASTIMA QUE APPLE LO DEJO DE FABRICAR, POR EL LADO DEL PROVEEDOR MUY BUE SERVICIO, LLEGO ANTES DE LO PROMETIDO.

It's one amazing device to have. It's automated connectivity is is really great. Range is very good. I am happy to have this device.Quick delivery currier . thunder very good seller. Quick Buy & Enjoy.