Questions about Time Capsule

Part of the Mac­world 2008 Keynote post-mortem. Time Cap­sule is Apple’s wire­less hub + backup drive all-in-one prod­uct. It pro­vides fast wire­less net­work­ing: 802.11n. It pro­vides a large, “server-grade” hard drive, acces­si­ble wire­lessly. (By “server-grade” they seem to mean 7200 rpm, SATA.) You can use this hard drive to make Time Machine back­ups from all your Macs (yes, more than one can backup to the same drive, wire­lessly). It also pro­vides a USB port for another device (a hard drive, a printer, or a USB hub) to be shared wirelessly.

Time Cap­sule is a big advance­ment from the pre­vi­ous 802.11n base sta­tion for one rea­son, Time Machine (the backup soft­ware) would not work wire­lessly before. That’s great, for the inter­nal disk in Time Cap­sule. What I can’t find out, how­ever, is whether an exter­nal hard disk attached to Time Capsule’s USB port and shared wire­lessly will be com­pat­i­ble with Time Machine.

That would make all the dif­fer­ence to me.