
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: