Editorial:

Less than twenty four hours after the new Apple Time Capsule became generally available, flickr pictures by “Nakedmac” show the dissection of this unit.

The pictures reveal that the 1TB “server grade” hard drive inside this unit is a

HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 HDS721010KLA330
(0A34915) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

This drive currently sells at NewEgg for $304.99 with a $30 rebate making it $274.99

This means the $499.00 Time Capsule is, at the hardware level, an Airport Extreme (U.S. $179.00) + HITHACI Desktar 7K100 (U.S. $274.99), making this unit’s hardware cost retail U.S. $453.99. Ok, seems to me that additional U.S. $46.01 is a reasonable price to pay for Apple’s engineering, marketing and manufacturing costs. So from that point of view, Time Capsule seems like a very good deal.

However, Steve Jobs said during the Macworld Expo, that the Time Capsule has a”Server-Grade Storage.” To me what makes a hard drive “server-grade” is these hard drives are more rigorously tested. That means that they typically guarantee over 1 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), assuming 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week usage. It also means that manufactures are proud to quote MTBF on their Data Sheets so that IT managers have numbers to quote to their IT departments. You can find more information on this very good PC World article. here.

If you look at the Data Sheet for the Time Capsules’ Hatachi drives you see some very impressive statistics clearly showing this is a very fast, as well as a heat and power efficient drive. However, there are no MTBF stats quoted in the Data Sheet. Compare that to the Barracuda® ES.2 Hard Drives data sheet which clearly states under the “reliability section” a MTBF number of 1.2 Million hours. That same statistic does not appear anywhere in the HITHACI Desktar 7K100 Data Sheet.

So, I’ll say it now “for the flamers,” I am not any kind of hard drive expert, I am a consumer who listens and investigates. I don’t see that the Hitachi drive that Apple is delivering with Time Capsule qualifies as a server-grade hard drive, if we apply the Enterprise standard of having manufactures proudly publish MTBF statistics on their Data Sheets. I hope I’m corrected , but at first glance it seems that Apple has delivered a very well priced product, but a server-class Hard Drive? Not that I can see.

Segate Data Sheet excerpt

HITHACI Desktar 7K100 Data Sheet Excerpt

Update: Here is a great article from eweek.com challenging the whole MTBF concept. Thanks to @johnstarta for passing it along. Also here is another link to specs on this drive from the Windows Marketplace folks.

Update: 8:12PM PT:

The story keeps on building. TidBITS states that

 ”Apple has clarified that their assertion of “server-grade” is related to mean time between failure. Chulani clarified that the “server-grade” drives in a Time Capsule are the same 7200 rpm drives used for Apple’s Xserve servers, and that they have a higher mean time between failure (MTBF) rating than consumer drives. The MTBF for server-grade drives is often 1 million hours (114 years), which is a measure of probability; in this case, that out of a set of drives with similar properties, an extremely high percentage will still be fully functional after several years.”