At the beginning of last week we have spoken about the many cases from all over the world where the power supply of the Time Capsule died after approximately 18 months. Since then, several readers have come to tell us about the recent death of their devices. It seems a repeat of the story we have experienced with the Airport Express. On our forums, at least 3 readers saw their time capsule cease functioning. On the Apple forums, good number of people also lost their means of backing up.
All these products have two things in common. They are models 500 GB, and they were bought in March 2008. The agreement of these two points, especially the second makes us more than ever fear an epidemic. The first is also interesting to try to partly explain this problem. We also bought Time Capsule in March 2008. This is the one that has had the disk replaced with a 1TB hard drive and since then, one of 2 TB. Part of the improvement doing these modifications, was due to the replacement of the internal Seagate disk that vibrated, and also produced a lot of heat, much more than the replacement disks. We suppose that one of the component of the power supply is the one that limits the life of this product, and that the higher temperature generated by the disk is enough to make it fail after 18 months of operation. After studying the the Apple forums, the parts that fail would seem to be two capacitors, but this is almost a detail.
It is without doubt that at least a small portion of the production of Time Capsules is defective, and we invite Apple not to behave in a way that they did with the Airport Express and that they agree to repair under full guarantee these products!
While waiting, if you have Time Capsule 500 GB bought in March 2008, you should know that this product has a high chance to die. If you have on his disk data that are not saved elsewhere, make a backup now! But this is perhaps that the beginning of a vaster problem, the time capsules of March 2008 are among the first delivered by Apple. There is a risk during the coming weeks of seeing others to also cease functioning :(
Of course, if our time capsule suddenly dies on us, we would immediately inform you. This would mean that our theory about the disc 500 GB does not hold water.
