By Prince McLean

Published: 09:00 AM EST

With the power supply removed (below top), the logic board reveals that all the interesting chips are on other side (below bottom).

Removing the logic board requires lifting out the hard drive, removing the bracket that holds the drive in place, and removing three riser posts in each corner (below).



The hard drive is a standard 7200 RPM 3GB/s SATA Hitachi Deskstar (below). This discovery raised some brows because Apple describes the drive as "server rated," which suggested a heavy duty drive rated to 99.999% uptime. While the drive is more typical of units used in desktop computers (and also used in the company's Xserve line), it is certainly a better choice for a file server than the Apple TV's laptop sized 2.5" drive.



Because the unit uses a standard HFS+ file system, it is possible to remove the drive and repartition it or perform drive file system recovery. It will also easy to replace the drive with a larger version when bigger SATA drives become available. The hard drive has a temperature sensor monitored by the system (below), so this would need to be attached to the new drive. Apart from that, replacing the drive is a simple matter of plugging in power and SATA, just as in a desktop computer.



The unit's tiny logic board (below top) holds an 802.11n wireless card, using a Marvell 88W8363 MAC/Baseband chip (below bottom), attached to three MIMO antennas located at three points on the shell.





Located under a tin shroud is a lithium battery, the LAN switch, CPU, and RAM chips (below).



Time Capsule uses:

a Marvell 88F5BF01 C500 500Mhz SoC (System on a Chip) processor (below),



a Spansion S29GL128N11TF101 16 MB (128 Mbit) Flash RAM chip (below),



two Qimonda (a RAM supplier spun off from Infineon) HYB18TC512160BF-3S 512 Mbit DDR2 667 DRAM chips providing 128 MB of RAM (below),



and a Broadcom BCM5395EKFBG Gigabit Ethernet switch controller (below).



AppleInsider's next segment answers questions on how Time Capsule works.