The IT Nerd

Apple last week quietly released new 2 and 3 TB Time Capsule WiFi router/storage solutions. One of the things that Apple proudly advertises when they talk about the backup capabilities is this:

Time Capsule is your one place for backing up everything. Its massive 2TB or 3TB 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.

So, Mac fanboi site Hardmac.com ripped one apart and found this:

On its website, Apple advertises on the fact that the Time Capsule runs on a “Server Grade” hard drive. On this label you can see that it is a simple Caviar Green disk, identical to the ones you can find about anywhere. Nothing special here.

Now Western Digital makes this drive and it’s intended for situations where you want low power consumption and less heat, which is important as previous versions of the Time Capsule ran rather hot. But it’s not server grade. What makes a drive server grade is the MTBF or mean time between failures. Typically something north of a million hours. Western Digital isn’t saying what their MTBF figure is for the Caviar Green because they don’t measure reliability that way, but it’s a safe bet it’s not in the same universe of server grade.

So Apple, are you just BS’ing your customers with this server grade claim or do you have the facts to back it up? Oh. Right. Apple doesn’t comment on stuff like this so we’ll likely never know. Too bad. Because this situation really stinks and Apple really needs to clear the air here.

This entry was posted on June 28, 2011 at 6:58 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.