Apple's Time Capsule: A Sturdy Hard Drive

Kudos to Apple for finally doing what no one else has. In its new Time Capsule wireless hard drive, Apple uses what it calls a server-grade hard drive.

This is a noteworthy addition. Hard drive manufacturers have two classes of drives: Consumer and enterprise (or "server-grade" as Apple referred to it).

The primary distinction is that enterprise class hard drives are more rigorously tested so as to typically guarantee over 1 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), assuming 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week usage. Hard drive makers rarely ever quote a similar spec for consumer drives--you know, the drives that all of us typically have our data stored on in our PCs or external hard drives.

While it's hard to tangibly equate MTBF to hard drive reliability, it's also hard to say it doesn't matter--after all, there's a reason these distinctions exist, and server farms will turn to enterprise-class drives, not the consumer drive on sale any given week at Fry's.

Apple does not quote the MTBF on its spec sheet, but I would expect the MTBF to be up to the 1 million hours generalization. (Drive specs do vary: For example, Seagate's Barracuda ES.2, not in the Time Capsule drive, carries a MTBF rating of 1.2 million hours.) Regardless, it does mean that Apple has taken an extra step to safeguard consumers' data.

I applaud Apple for taking that extra step. While I?m still not convinced that wireless is the way to go for a storage device whose primary use is as a backup device, the inclusion of a business-class hard drive is a win for us consumers, not to mention a first in a product targeted at consumers. I can only hope other hard drive makers follow suit.

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