The repair, particularly if you just replace capacitors will not last very long unless you improve the cooling. See the infra-red camera pictures showing clearly the effect of the fan on and off. Infra-Red pictures of Time Capsule Apple built the TC with a fan, but it is not used in normal operation. Only if the TC detects overheating, it will turn on the fan and take the TC offline, probably shut down the hard drive. So in other words, the fan is useless. The TC depends purely on natural convection... and the reason it is dead now is lack of large enough ventilation holes and insufficient care in the design for natural convection which is much harder btw than using a fan. This is a fairly major mod... I think the alternatives are using an external power supply to offload some of the heat generated or fan mod. Simply repairing the power supply and keeping it internal will not improve the situation one iota. (as a rough calculation I would say hdd and power supply each contribute about 30% to the heat load, and the main board -- router - wireless - controllers about 40%.. but it is the power supply that is the most fragile. Hard drive and board components are pretty rugged.) So to do this you need to remove the fan (the rubber anti-vibration mounts can be easily pushed through the holes with any round blunt rod about 2mm dia.) and drill or punch a hole through the baseplate under the fan. Hole punch will work better, but hole saws are available more cheaply and will work fine through the aluminium even if the saw is really for timber or plasterboard.  Mark out the hole matching the fan... mount the base plate in a vice with wood pieces in front and right to the top behind.  I drilled it out with a 1.5" (40mm) hole saw. The timber behind holds the drill spindle so it doesn't damage the base. I then used a small grinding tool in the drill to smooth the edges. Even a sharp knife (I use a stanley knife) to cut off the burr on the inside and outside works fine.. the Aluminium is fairly soft grade.  Mount the fan back in. Again the rubber mounts can be difficult to push back through.. use a bit of liquid soap or hair shampoo as a lubricant, gently push one side through and slowly move around pushing the rubber flange through. You can see the hole matches up pretty well to the open area of the fan. The gap between the fan and the base should also be filled but a bit of inefficiency that would cause didn't worry me, and makes it easier to remove the fan for replacement. You will also notice the fan is now drawing air in the way it was designed to... ie the front not the back as Apple have installed it.  Cover the top of the fan with something. I just used duct tape. Good enough.  This pic shows the pinout of the fan socket. Click once for med-res and again for hi-res. Cut off the fan plug and wire a resistor to the +5v inline with a red wire, to power. And a black wire to ground. These are the outer two of the 4 cables. Pinout as shown on the board. Resistor value, well it seems to depend on the particular fan... first one I did I used 56ohms but that was too much for the second one... fan wouldn't start so I used 39ohms. You only need 1/2watt so grab a few when you buy them, (or 3 x 100ohm and just wire 2 in parallel for 50ohm... if too much add a third one which gives 33ohm ...easy) as you want the fan to reliably start and at the same time keep the noise level down. Revision With some help from Rudy(CA), as a modification to the above instructions Don't Snip off the Fan Plug... Snip the two centre wires. (Actually just the one next to GND if you want to be exact is on-off control). And then wire the resistor into the 5v line. This will be neater than my version. All the fan mod TC's I have done subsequently I have used this method. Rudy also finished off the job by sticking the rubber boot back on with a hole in it... I never do... to me it is pointless and part of the issue. Some people say it is conductive rubber... pfftt!! Conductive rubber is thin silicon rubber... and at its best is a perfect insulator cf Aluminium. The rubber also partly blocks the side vents... not so relevant now with the fan working but shows how the rubber boot was a bad idea in this product. It matches the Airport Extreme and Apple TV (which also overheats) but so what.. it is not right for this particular product. Stick some feet on the TC and keep it around 10mm (1/2") off the surface it will sit on.  This is pic showing how I soldered the power wires back to the power supply. I did tape them down once I finished the job. And covered the outside hole with a bit of thin foam as a dust filter. I tested the internal temperature with a thermocouple on the meter... the temperature rise was 30degC above ambient which was 13deg at the time. Without the fan running the temperature increase was over 50deg above ambient. Also the hard disk was now very cool to touch all over. Without the fan the hard disk was too hot to leave your hand on... so the improvement there, where the fan has good access to blow air was terrific. The issue with the internal power supply is lack of space for air to circulate. But just keeping the rest cool reduces the heat build up. Hope this all proves helpful to some people... If you are in Australia I offer a repair service.. see the front page. Just email me the address to send your TC and there is a list of charges there. And Apple... listen to your Engineers... not just designers and marketing...or even SJ!! When looking closely at the design it appears the fan was intended to run with PWM variable speed control according to temperature. Otherwise the fan is actually drawing air in the wrong side. The fan should be drawing air in as per this mod, from the bottom. So in fact I did not modify the design as it was supposed to be, Apple did. They created a faulty flawed product design because someone didn't like fan noise. How can Apple not measure the temperature rise in a running unit... how can you call it a time capsule... with an 18month lifespan. Due to altering an excellent original design it became a short-lived time bubble or time warp. This is what it always should have looked like. Picture and mod by Chris Fackrell, one of the UK "authorised" repairers. So neat drilling exact holes through the rubber foot to match both the fan cutout and 10screws for the base.  Chris has also developed the fan mod another stage. http://www.fackrell.me.uk/ I punched out 10x screw holes since this one had no hard drive fitted. Using a slightly smaller punch than originally he is able to put the cut out grommet back in again.. so now the only hole in the bottom is the fan one.. 5mm clear plastic stick-on feet raise it just enough to get a decent air flow." Chris takes about 5 hours to do this very clean job. To see details of the how Chris does it,, See Chris Fackrell Repair method And what does the infra-red camera show is the result. Infra-Red pictures of Time Capsule  |