[jholmes]

Time capsule is a great idea but I had an original ABS that was set on top of an an external HD and the heat fried the drive (as well as the capacitors in the ABS but that was a "known issue" back in the day.)

Friends with AEBS say they run blazing hot leading me to wonder if there will be a similar issue in the Time Capsule since it has no fan or other cooling.

Thoughts from those with the AEBS?

[Simon]

I have two AirPort Extreme base stations in my house. The things are barely warm. Blazing hot? I don't know what your "friends with AEBS" are talking about.

I would image the HDD but mainly the internal power supply will make TC run warmer than the AEBS, but I wouldn't be worried about actual heat or damage.

[RQuarters]

The the new TIme Capsule doesn't look to have that much cooling, will be interesting to see what the life is on those "server class drives" (I really doubt they are SAS or FC drives, pffft).

The other interesting announcement at MacWorld was DroboShare from Data Robotics. Lets you network up to two of your Drobo very easily (and they added email alerts!! Woot)

[ghporter]

Under-rated capacitors in AirPort devices = a very hard lesson learned very thoroughly. And a LONG time ago. Not only did Apple engineers "fudge" a little to get smaller capacitors into the box of the original AirPort Base Station, the capacitors they got often were faulty from the start. There was a fairly large spate of such capacitors-a case of industrial espionage gone bad meant that a manufacturer of capacitors got an INCOMPLETE recipe for electrolyte from an illicit source. They made metric buttloads of capacitors in all sorts of values using their bad electrolyte, and the computer industry rocked on its foundations because of it. EVERY major manufacturer was affected, and it wasn't only AirPort devices that hurt Apple, though there were relatively few computers directly harmed by this problem.

Do NOT worry about overheating an AirPort or TimeCapsule device that's given adequate air circulation. If there's room around it (especially underneath-even just a little) it'll be fine.

[ginoledesma]

My AEBS is above "warm", but it isn't that hot to touch. I'm curious as to what kind of drives come in Time Capsule. I'm looking to replacing my AEBS+USB HDD setup with one -- less cable clutter AND one less power plug.

I just hope the networking software running on this is much improved over the AEBS in terms of stability. I can manage to "freeze" my AEBS (several related issues in Apple's discussion forums: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and I'd hate for the drive to be corrupted if the base station is restarted improperly.

[dimmer]

Hmm, the need to hard-reset base stations (Apple and other vendors) does make me wonder about the potential therein for HD damage: the solid state / firmware stuff is pretty much kick-around-able with little fear (worst case: buy a new one). I'm sure Apple have considered this and made the necessary decoupling between the networking aspects of the device and the drive / drive controller -- but it'd be nice to have confirmation on that.

[ghporter]

Just about all current hard drives park their heads when not actively using them, have plenty of intelligence to know "the computer just lost power so I'll safely shut down" and so on. I don't think a hard reset is going to be any problem at all. It doesn't seem to be with my NAS box, which is a couple of years old.

[MacosNerd]

My gigabit AEBS doesn't get too hot. I have an gigabit ethernet switch and that puppy gets hot, my AEBS is a cool cucumber in comparison. I agree with your concern though, through in an internal drive and all bets are off on how hot this will get.