Time Capsule question

Hi.

Currently I have an imac hooked up to my router via an ethernet cable and it's connected to the phone line via cable. But I am thinking about replacing this setup with a time capsule. Cause for me having one thing that could potentially be router and back up hard drive is great. I'll only need one instead of two things on my desk. But I have a few questions.

1. Will the time capsule work as a wireless router? In the way of no ethernet cable from it to my mac. But I still want the cord from the TC to my phone line.

2. Can if I want to reconfigure the TC so I can use it as a normal router via the ethernet cable. Cause I'll have to so I can connect to my wii via the imacs airport. And afterwards I'll make it wireless again.

3. Without the ethernet cable (ie wireless) will it have the same internet speeds as a wired router?

4. Is it worth it's price? As it's really expensive in my opinion. Would keeping the setup I have now and just getting a cheap firewire box and a external drive be more sense dollars wise?

The Apple website doesn't mention TC being/containing a modem for the Internet. It just seems to be a wireless hub, NAS and print server.

Oh ok. Thanks. I might still get one if I can justify it's cost. Which will be hard to do.

The TC is an Airport Extreme with NAS capability that's all. You get all the functions of the AE in TC which is a wireless router + external storage.

Oh thank you. That's what I was wanting to know. I was after a wireless router + a time machine drive in the same thing. This makes TC much more appealing. Now for the cost . . .

One thing worth pondering is the fact that since the time capsule is essentially an integration of an external hard drive + wire router, would a malfunction of either capability affects the other? Ie, if router is malfunctioning, would it affect accessing the hard drive etc and vise versa.

A regular Airport Extreme N is 180... figure a 500GB drive is about 150ish+ (thats if they are really the enterprise class drives with 750,000 hours continuous run time life, 7 year warranty, 7k-10k RPM drives)... then 299 isnt a bad price at all.

Orpheus1120 said:

One thing worth pondering is the fact that since the time capsule is essentially an integration of an external hard drive + wire router, would a malfunction of either capability affects the other? Ie, if router is malfunctioning, would it affect accessing the hard drive etc and vise versa.

Click to expand...

If the router dies... then you cant talk to the drive... so yeah... that would be bad. However if the drive dies... then you can always hook up the external drive and probably use that.

However... there is always the possibility that just the wireless dies, or the wired dies... and you wouldnt be completely out of luck.

one other problem might happen to older macbooks and macbook pro's
that only have a,b and g but no n is a slow down using time machine.