Should I purchase a Airport Extreme or Time Capsule?

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Should I purchase a Airport Extreme or Time Capsule?

I am in the market to purchase a new wireless router.

I have all Apple products at home. (2 iPads, 2 iPods, 2 iPhones, Macbook Pro, and an AppleTV)

I am unsure what product I should buy? the Time Capsule or the Airport Extreme?

I have a 320 GB external hard drive that I would like to use to store any movie/TV series I purchase from AppleTV. First, will that be large enough?

I somewhat like the idea of the TimeCapsule's ability for automatic wireless back ups, but I don't want it to slow down my MacBook Pro (Nov.2010) while it does this.

... but my thinking is I will not be able to tie in my external hard drive into the network (with the Time Capsule) for Apple TV??? I'm thinking this can only be done via the Airport Extreme???

I'm thinking...The money I would save from purchasing a Airport Extreme would allow me to buy another large external hard drive to use as my movie/TV series storage space.

I would appreciate any thoughts on this matter!

Thank you in advance for your time.

MacBook Pro 13", Mac OS X (10.6.4), iPhone 4

Posted on Dec 3, 2012 1:10 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 3, 2012 1:32 PM in response to Lammer

The idea with ATV and purchasing movies is not to store it locally at all.. but to download it on demand.. your purchase is recorded and you will have access to the movie at any time.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5183

To store movies it will be loaded in your local itunes library..

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4063283?start=0&tstart=0

You cannot store downloaded material outside of the itunes library.. AFAIK.. so therein is your problem. If you move the itunes library off your laptop then you can use external drive plugged into Macbook.. that is the best solution from speed and reliability point of view because TM can then back it up. TM cannot backup network drives.

I am unsure what product I should buy? the Time Capsule or the Airport Extreme?

They are the same.. except TC has internal hard disk and is designed for TM backups.

Extreme has only USB port. . exactly the same as the TC.. but doing backups via TM to the USB is not reliable.

See http://pondini.org/TM/Airport.html

Your USB disk will be extremely slow.. and not recommended on either AEBS or TC.

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