Airport Extreme (5th Gen) and Time Capsule (4th Gen) Review - Faster WiFi
by Brian Klug on August 5, 2011 10:22 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Airport Extreme
- Time Capsule
- WiFi
Construction overall is like the Airport Extreme, however, heat up the back to soften the adhesive, pry off, remove some screws, and then the top metal lid lifts off gently. There’s a fan attached to the lid which is plugged into the mainboard, however. That requires some care to unplug gently to avoid damage.
Unlike the Airport Extreme, the Time Capsule has an internal power supply, and, of course, a 3.5” HDD for Time Machine backups. With the lid off, you can already see that the mainboard has a short SATA cable, and the power supply has a SATA power connector in addition to another for the mainboard. The power supply easily lifts out, revealing the board underneath.
I suspect that some users are interested in doing things like buying a 2TB Time Capsule ($299) and bringing along their own 3TB drive instead of paying $499 for the 3TB version. I can’t speak for the 3TB Time Capsule version, but inside the 2TB Time Capsule is a relatively consumer level WD Green WD20EARS SATA II 2TB, 64MB of cache HDD.
It’s lipped with rubber and rests inside a metal caddy on three pieces of foam. On the PCB side the four mounting holes are home to some screws which mate up with a rubber support on the Time Capsule’s base. If you’re looking carefully, you’ll note one more foam piece with a cable leading off—there’s a thermistor attached to the drive using some foam and a plastic bracket.
The temperature sensor is used in conjunction with the SoC to control the Time Capsule’s fan. I played around with the drive and a heat gun (not the two together) alongside a contact-less IR thermometer, and found that the fan seems to turn on and spin at a moderate level at just above 120 F (49 C) and stays active during normal use when the sensor is around 115 F (45 C). At below 110 F (43 C), the fan turns off. At around 140 F (60 C) the fan will spin at maximum and the front LED light will flash amber, and note overheating is happening in the Airport utility. 60 C is the maximum recommended operating temperature for the WD20EARS, so this makes sense.
Google’s empirical study of disk failures has shown that between 40 and 45 C is ideal for prolonging drive life, so as long as things run in the fashion that I saw them run, it seems like drives shouldn’t fail due to excessive heat. That said, the airflow pattern in the Time Capsule seems odd—air is drawn in from the side, over and through the power supply, into the fan, then blown over half the drive, and hopefully exhausts through some small vents at the other side. Even with the fan spinning at maximum, it’s hard to really tell that any air is moving, and the only time you can even hear the fan is with it at maximum. The Time Capsule has a strong reputation for running warm, and I can definitely see why.
Upgrading the drive is simple enough. Transfer the four screws, rubber, foam, and the temperature sensor, and connect the SATA data and power cables. There’s also no need to preformat, as the airport utility has an auto formatting option as we’ll show later.
Disassembling the Time Capsule further shows some more interesting, if slightly expected details. On the reverse (top) side of the main PCB is the same Marvell SoC, switch, and flash module.
What’s different is that the Time Capsule gets double the RAM of the Airport Extreme—256MB of DDR2 instead of 128MB. Once again, we see the same dual BCM4331 based PCIe x1 WLAN card and four antenna connectors.
So there you have it, the main difference in both of Apple’s main WiFi AP products is the WLAN stack, which is a modern, more powerful BCM4331 based 3x3:3 solution. So, how has performance changed then?
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tipoo - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Oi, I should read slower, heh"There’s a stigma that Apple gear is more expensive, and for the 3TB Time Capsule that may be the case, but the Airport Extreme is actually right near where it should be. Take for comparison the Linksys E4200, which is a 2x3:2 device on 2.4GHz, and 3x3:3 on 5GHz, and also Broadcom based. That device runs for $179.99 and features similar functionality including a USB 2.0 port for sharing devices. At $179.00, the Airport Extreme offers full 3x3:3 on both 2.4 and 5GHz, albeit the E4200 does have considerably more Tx power, which we'll investigate in a forthcoming article."
lowlymarine - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Calling Caviar Green's "server grade" strikes me as galling even for Apple, who are pretty willing to play fast-and-loose with truth in advertising as it is.repoman27 - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
This odd bit of nomenclature has been around and much debated since Apple first introduced the Time Capsule. WD Caviar Green drives generally offer the lowest price per GB combined with some of the best performance per watt for a 3.5" spinning disk on the market... Just ask Google how many they currently have deployed. So yes, they are ideal for servers.What isn't "server grade" in the Time Capsule is the utter lack of redundancy within the device itself. The intended usage model for the TC is as a backup device though, so there is redundancy in the overall system, i.e. you never actually store critical data on it, just a backup of critical data, therefore if it fails it's not much of a problem.
solipsism - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Can the Linksys E4200's USB port be used for a printer the way the Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme/Express can?Brian Klug - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
I know it can share attached USB Mass Storage devices, but I'm actually not certain about printers. Jarred probably will talk about it in his review soon.-Brian
ThomasA - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Does the AE software offer a means to record data usage? With the 'new' DSL caps set by At&t I'd like to be able to compare my info on usage vs. theirs.Brian Klug - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
You could watch the SNMP counters and use one of many software packages (including some big ones like MRTG/Cacti) but that's sort of daunting admittedly. There's nothing in airport utility that will show data use. That's just another thing I leave to Tomato on a WRT54G-TM personally.-Brian
deadshort - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Here's a general suggestion for hardware reviews: could you plug the gizmo under examination into a power meter instead of just the wall and eyeball up some numbers? These days green geeks fret over these matters, especially for 365x24 devices like routers. The badge or spec. numbers are often worthless. Just a thought, thanks.Oh, nice review, BTW. I agree that the recent Apple 802.11 gear is getting boringly reliable and decent, in a good sense. You can't tweak the firewall in quite the gruesome detail I'd like, but the box never needs attention or unplanned restarts. The he.com tunnel works fine, the BSD/Roku/Apple/Sony/Epson clients are happy, there is no drama to upset the non-geeks. Not bad, even for the price.
Brian Klug - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
I actually completely forgot to mention my Kill-A-Watt numbers. I don't recall the Time Capsule numbers off the top of my head, I saw a peak power use of 11 watts on the Airport Extreme Gen 4 (while data was being transacted on 2.4 and 5 GHz) and 12 watts on the Gen 5.-Brian
ThomasA - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Yes, I read of MRT/Cacti. Also looked into replacing AE with a Netgear WNDR4000 that offers the data usage meter. I'd prefer the Apple, but must look ahead. Too bad.