Time Capsule & Network Accessible Drive

I want to setup a netork accessible hard drive to store all my music and photos. I would like this to always be on so I can run Sonos (a distributed music system) without having to have a computer on in the background.

Can I use Time Capsule for this? The Apple Store recommended I NOT use Time Capsule for this and merely use it for backups of my MacBook and PCs.

Alternatively, can I plug in an external hard drive via USB to the Time Capsule (or Extreme, which I am using to extend my network) and just save my music there for access? Will doing it via USB make it always available or do I truly need to buy a Network Accessible Drive and wire it via ethernet?

in the end there should be no difference between having a pure network drive or having it plugged into your wifi via usb ... maybe difference in speed? But as far as accessing it goes, it will be very similar; either you access it directly by IP or by the IP of your wifi (in your case Airport Extreme)

did you get an explanation as to why you can't use the Time Capsule as storage and only for backups? I mean, it is just a hard drive, it doesn't matter what kind of data you save ... except that it's always better to use a clean partition for backups

Thanks so much!

I didn't get a good explanation. They just said it was "not recommended". I think for the reasons you mentioned as far as wanting a dedicated location for backups and they didn't seem to keen on trying to partition the Time Capsule.

Are you planning to use the time capsule as backup storage? If you do, at least create a separate partition

A dedicated location, in terms of a separate drive itself, has the advantage that by using it only for backups and not with "regular" data that you move around daily, you decrease the chance of getting segment errors and disk failure in general

But yeah, it's not very convenient buying multiple drives for backups, data, other backups, other data when you know you have that half a tera still free - thus partitioning ... and it's quite common for people to split their external drives into partitions depending on use

Anyway, I personally don't use the Apple Time Capsule (I've used several WD drives as basic externals or what you mentioned - plugged into a usb port on my wifi access point.), so I can only provide a sort of general tip ... be sure to do some research as to accessing multiple Time Capsule partitions through the network ... however I don't suspect that to be a problem

I use my time capsule to hold my music - and I do hook up a drive to the usb and put my data there. I've run it both ways. The time capsule works fine for general NAS. I don't have separate partitions for my sparsebundle backup and my music. I haven't run into any problems with the drive and it has been 2 years.

I have my old time capsule disk connected to my new time capsule and all partitions show up when I try to mount the device so partitioning shouldn't be a problem at all.