EXternal HD Vs Time Machine

[marv777]

What is the actual difference between a EHD and the Time Machine? Thanks

[Y-Guy]

Same thing mostly, an EHD can be setup as a Time Machine driver or a regular drive. Time Machine will automatically back up to the TM drive.
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[Bandit Bill]

Is the question...

Difference between an EHD (external hard drive) and a Time Capsule?

If so, there can be many differences.

[marv777]

[Bandit Bill]

Time Capsules were engineered primarily for back-up purposes. They were designed to be used with Time Machine... which writes a few small files to to Time Capsules (Western Digital Green) hard drive once every hour. This is what the Time Capsule was designed for. This is not very demanding use. That being said they can be used as a shared network drive, but being it is also your back-up drive you can decide for yourself how hard you want to work a passive (no fans), plastic enclosure, that is backing up your data.

There are many drives on the market that are designed for running video, using as an external boot drive etc. ie. intensive tasks.
notice the heat sinks and upright design
eg LaCie Quatra
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10554

Here is an example of another drive from the same company, that is not designed for resource intensive tasks. It's more of a back-up drive.
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10587

vs. Time Capsule
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD032LL/A/time-capsule-2tb?fnode=5f#overview


So with that being said, what you use your drive for and what they were engineered for can be entirely different things.


p.s. I never got into RAIDs, drive interfaces etc. and I'm not going to