How âServer Gradeâ is Time Capsules Drive? [Update - 500GB Details]

The Time Capsule began shipping late last week and has finally begun arriving in the hands of the consumer, which means the inevitable has happened.

Steve Jobs announces Time Capsule at Macworld 2008

One user over at Flickr has posted multiple shots of the innards of a 1TB Time Capsule, one aspect of the Time Capsule was of particular interest to the team here at World of Apple; the “server grade” hard drive.

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in January he announced a new, easy to use wireless NAS perfect for use with Time Machine and containing a “server grade” hard disk drive. All of that seemed plausible except the server grade drive bit…

First of all defining what exactly a server grade drive is, is kind of difficult. There appears to be no common definition but a bit of Google research and decent enterprise technology knowledge gives the following qualities to a server grade drive:

• High MTBF (1,000,000+ hours) - Mean Time Between Failures is simply the average time between failures.
• 10,000 - 15,000RPM
• Fast connection - almost irrelevant due to wireless connection

So what drive does the Time Capsule have in it? The answer appears to be a Hitachi Deskstar 3.5” Deskstar 7K1000. Is this drive server grade? Well that’s debatable, lets have a look:

• Interface: SATA 3.0GB/s - Very quick and easily out performs both the wireless and wired connections on the Time Capsule
• Speed: 7200RPM - Just a standard desktop hard drive
• Error Rate: 1 per 1.0 E15 bits transferred
• Load/unload cycles: 50,000
• Tailored uses: Internal and external storage for consumer computers
  Networked storage servers
  Extreme gaming machines
  Video editing arrays

The Hitachi drive is quick enough and claims that it is tailored for server use but unfortunately Hitachi doesn’t list a straight up MTBF figure so further analysis is difficult.

It appears that the jury is out on whether this truly is a server grade hard drive.

[Update] One reader of World of Apple has given us the details of the drive that shipped in his 500GB Time Capsule. The drive is reported to be a Seagate Barracuda ES, model number: ST3500630NS.

This drive is almost certainly server grade but unfortunately not available in 1TB capacities.

The drive lists an MTFB value of 1.2 million hours (PDF), possibly the highest reliability of any hard drive ever made.