Hi,
The HD on my 5th gen TC is making a funny noise so I want to replace it with a better and master HD. I need to know if the WD RED 4T with NASware 3.0 technology is compatible with the TC.
Thanks
Time Capsule-OTHER, iOS 11.0.2, Time Capsule 5th gen 3T
The RED is compatible.. almost any drive will work.
There is no need for NAS rated disks in the Time Capsule.. RED NAS disks are pretty much the same as their now obsolete GREEN series but with better sync across multiple disks.. which is not an issue as you can only fit one drive.
Also GREEN drives are now defunct so unfortunately any GREEN you buy now would be old stock. Sorry Tesserax..😢 it happens. Basically WD decided that BLUE economy drives now covered all the needs for GREEN as well.
It is good to buy "green" drives though.. i.e. slower and quieter and more power efficient.. it reduces the heat load..
And the drives are difficult to fit.
The bottom rubber mounts are designed exactly to fit the Seagate drive so you will need to be a bit DIY.. and either modify the rubber boots or simply cut out some pads from suitable fire resistant high density foam.
ifixit has the method of removal.. but be very careful with the hard disk plug.. there is sufficient slack in the cable to remove it from the disk socket.. do not attempt to remove the board end as it is locked.. you will damage the ribbon cable or tear out the board socket.. and be very careful to hold the ribbon cable out of the way as you slide the disk in and out. It will be near impossible to obtain a replacement.
The RED is compatible.. almost any drive will work.
There is no need for NAS rated disks in the Time Capsule.. RED NAS disks are pretty much the same as their now obsolete GREEN series but with better sync across multiple disks.. which is not an issue as you can only fit one drive.
Also GREEN drives are now defunct so unfortunately any GREEN you buy now would be old stock. Sorry Tesserax..😢 it happens. Basically WD decided that BLUE economy drives now covered all the needs for GREEN as well.
It is good to buy "green" drives though.. i.e. slower and quieter and more power efficient.. it reduces the heat load..
And the drives are difficult to fit.
The bottom rubber mounts are designed exactly to fit the Seagate drive so you will need to be a bit DIY.. and either modify the rubber boots or simply cut out some pads from suitable fire resistant high density foam.
ifixit has the method of removal.. but be very careful with the hard disk plug.. there is sufficient slack in the cable to remove it from the disk socket.. do not attempt to remove the board end as it is locked.. you will damage the ribbon cable or tear out the board socket.. and be very careful to hold the ribbon cable out of the way as you slide the disk in and out. It will be near impossible to obtain a replacement.
It may be better but it will be an "overkill" as a replacement.
The SATA controller interface inside the Time Capsule is only capable of providing SATA II (3 GB/s) performance. This will be the limiting factor no matter which drive you replace the original with.
I would suggest that you consider using a WD Caviar Green drive instead. You could replace with either another 3 TB or possibly a 4 TB drive.
Now that I had a chance to review the updated drives that WD offers (sorry about that), I would second LaPastenague's suggestion that you consider their Blue line.
Again the bottleneck will be the SATA interface, so going with the Black drive would offer no performance advantage in this scenario.
WD Green is a very slow disk
Same as the RED as they are physically the same disk.
In the TC slow disk is not really a problem.. it is still much faster than processor will allow data transfer.
I´m lookin for a faster and more reliable HD, maybe 3 or 4T.
The blue series is improved and speed is standard 7200rpm drive.
Or look at Toshiba, HGST drives.. They have a number of different series, and do tend to be a bit more expensive. Last lot of drives I bought have all been Toshiba (They bought out Hitachi drives).
Thanks LaPastenague
You´re right, there is no need for a WD RED disk
The WD Green is a very slow disk and is my second WD green HD drive with problems. Which HD do you recommend to replace the one on the TC? I´m lookin for a faster and more reliable HD, maybe 3 or 4T. WD has also the BLACK drives.
Thanks
Also GREEN drives are now defunct so unfortunately any GREEN you buy now would be old stock. Sorry Tesserax..😢 it happens. Basically WD decided that BLUE economy drives now covered all the needs for GREEN as well.
Yikes! I didn't think to review the latest offerings from WD as I just got one of their Green drives (via Amazon) about 3 months ago. Funny, they have just about every color of the rainbow now, except green. Thanks for catching that.
Thanks Tesserax,
I understand that the SATA interface on the TC won't allow me to get full advantage of a 7200 rpm WD Black drive. I think that the BLUE drive will be the answer to replace the HD on the TC
Thanks LaPastenague,
Unfortunately the only BLUE drive with 7200 rpm is the 1T, the other capacity BLUE drives are 5400 rpm. Trying to undertstand how the TC works, it looks like it don't allow 7200 rpm drives.
The Toshiba HGST drives looks good, I'm trying to decide between the WD Blue or the Toshiba X300, booth are SATA 6 gbit, the WD is 5400 rpm and the Toshiba 7200
Here is the synology test.. slow on the write for some reason..
Speed to a drive is almost identical on whatever speed drive.. the issue is the TC processor is really not capable of full gigabit.
Although drive testing is a bit difficult nowadays.. you need to turn off signing on SMB2 to get best speed.
Which I have done.. but I wanted to give you a quick view of how things are.. so with a bit of optimising I could probably do a bit better on either or both.. but as you can see.. there aint a lot of difference.
To a TC with the original 7200 seagate drive.
To a TC with a replacement WD purple drive. These are slower than green with performance tailored to video.
And in fact the slower drive due to its larger size has better data throughput than the faster seagate.
To do proper testing the disks should be swapped so you can eliminate the effect each TC setup could have.
I don't have time now but I will add a test to the Synology NAS and it will do near 100MB/s in both read and write..
I have done it in the past but cannot see the reference.. here is a close up of the plugs in TC.
Replace Hard Drive on Time Capsule 5th Gen
