So, the 2TB time capsule costs £388 on apple.com!

I just bought a 500GB model on eBay for £98 and a 2TB HDD on ebuyer.com for £100.

I'm pretty chuffed with that price - and I'm confident I can switch the drives. I did my Mini and that was straight forward. I doubt this is any different.

The only thing that this device doesn't have, which the new ones are shipped with is dual band. But I have no desire to run two networks at a time, so that's fine by me.

Um. I'd be careful. The 1st edition 500MB ones have a nasty habit of going pop after about 18 months - see here. Happened to mine. Luckily I still had the receipt and had an Apple shop nearby I could get all sale of goods act on, but if you bought it from eBay...

Jon

This one has already blown up!

It's been refurbished.

Ah, probly alright then. Excellent .

I hope so. As you say though, buying from eBay can be a bit of a risk.

Hopefully it pays off though, it'll be a nice saving if it does.

I was looking at getting a 2Tb Time capsule, or an Airport extreme and a 2Tb drive either connected to my switch or one of my iMacs. Still unsure which way to go.

Airport Extreme with a 2TB drive attached via usb?

I have a 1 TB drive that I could use, though until I have cleared that I will still need to think about it. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Well, the way I see it is that if you get a 2TB TC then you still have room to expand in the future because it's got the USB slot.

If you go down the Airport route, then that USB slot is taken. Unless of course, you can use a hub????

I believe a hub works fine on the airport.
With the 18 month expected life of the 2TB timecapsule, I think I'd go down that route.

I was thinking of a 2Tb Ethernet drive plugged into my switch. All my machines are connected to it so that would take care of the Time capsule back ups, I could then use a Airport Extreme to act as base station to my wireless network. I was going to upgrade the airports to n's at some point so need the wireless basestation first.

I think that was just the first generation??

I think that it is considerably longer than that now.

That's what she said.

Sorry, I really couldn't resist.

OK so I'm going to ask what's a probably a silly question but the only difference between an apple time capsule and a standard hard drive is the wireless capabilities and security?

Seems to have mixed reviews on the apple website.