Avian’s Blog

Apple users at Zemanta used to backup their machines to an Apple Time Capsule. I say used to because it went belly-up a while ago, probably for the same reason as many others of its kind. On Friday we did some clean-up in the office and I took the white brick home, to see if I can still find some use for it.

Disassembly went quite smooth. Actually, the approach was somewhat similar to what I did with Piki the Pleo. And similarly irreversible.

Inside is a normal hard drive and an embedded computer which I hear is running NetBSD. As far as my web searches have shown nobody has yet managed to run any kind of custom software for it, so I guess that option is out.

It also becomes obvious why these things are dying of overheating. What kind of a thermal design is that? The fan does nothing - it just mixes hot air around the case as there are hardly any holes in it. There's also precious little air to actually mix around because the case of so packed. Interestingly, there seems to be a temperature sensor glued to the hard drive.

So far I haven't done much more than just poked around for a couple of minutes, so right now I have no idea why it's simulating a brick and whether it's fixable or not. Nothing is obviously blown out.