KIRF, or keepin' it real fake, perfectly describes Apple's own new Time Capsule backup device. A teardown of last week's refreshed Time Capsule has revealed a regular, cheap-ass, non-enterprise drive lurking within. Curious, as Cupertino's website lists a "Serial ATA server-grade hard disk" as standard equipment on the device's official spec sheet. It's generally assumed that for a drive model to be qualified as "enterprise," it must sustain a mean time between failure- MTBF for short - in excess of one million hours. So what's the MTBF for the Western Digital's WD20EARS (Caviar Green) in Apple's Time Capsule? Conveniently, the hard drive maker wouldn't say.
Of course, we guess the definition here is up for interpretation, but given past experiences with the wireless backup gizmo, we'd certainly hope this improved revision fares better; the last generation of Time Capsules had a random working time of ~1 year before "just dying".
Below is the hrdware you can expect in the next generation of Time Capsules. This is acutally a fake ebay HDD, but it comes close to what you get when you pay premium for "premium" Apple hardware:
Instead of proper hard drive platters, the USB hard drive in question had a 128MB flash drive inside that works in loop mode. It writes data until it’s out of memory and then it starts from the beginning replacing the previous records. Add two nuts for proper weight and reprogram the drive’s firmware to report to the computer OS there are actually 500GB on it and you have yourself a fake disk drive.
It fools the user that the files in there are OK. You can see your files on the drive (because the controller writes a false file system), but actually there are just a few bytes of each file.
Do take note, next time you think you'll get premium quality for an Apple product, that all their products are Manufactured by Foxconn China, a company trusted by most of the world's electronics vendors to manufacture no more that power bricks and hair dryers.
Instead of proper hard drive platters, the USB hard drive in question had a 128MB flash drive inside that works in loop mode. It writes data until it’s out of memory and then it starts from the beginning replacing the previous records. Add two nuts for proper weight and reprogram the drive’s firmware to report to the computer OS there are actually 500GB on it and you have yourself a fake disk drive.
It fools the user that the files in there are OK. You can see your files on the drive (because the controller writes a false file system), but actually there are just a few bytes of each file.
Do take note, next time you think you'll get premium quality for an Apple product, that all their products are Manufactured by Foxconn China, a company trusted by most of the world's electronics vendors to manufacture no more that power bricks and hair dryers.
Via: Engadget
