Used a Seagate IronWolf NAS, still had to trim the pads — so maybe don’t worry about which drive to buy (or if you’re doing it in person, just bring the pads and see if you can find a drive that fits them well.

Trimming the pads isn’t THAT much of a pain in the grand scheme of this project anyhow. I was much more worried about possibly snapping a cable.

Absolutely — as soon as you have the cables hooked up to the drive and board again, you can just plug the power cable into the jack even before re-seating it, check the drive out and then finish with the plate, power jack and base.

Installed a 6GB Seagate NAS drive to replace the 3GB Seagate Barracuda that was in there. This is like my fourth 3GB Barracuda to die on me, thanks, Seagate. I didn’t even know that’s what was in this Time Capsule, or I would have expected this hard drive death sooner.

Was hoping that by getting the Seagate NAS, I wouldn’t have to trim the rubber, but I had to trim it quite a bit anyway. The cables are super-finicky — delicate, with not a lot of extra slack, and I had to do it twice because I didn't trim enough the first time. Still, all went well, nothing broke in a serious way during the replacement, and the drive is recognized.

If Apple would update these with newer hardware, mesh networking and higher capacity drives, I’d probably just have bought another one, but I couldn’t handle spending $500 for out-of-date hardware, so I ended up doing this instead.

I am waiting for first backup to complete. Thanks for the solid replacement guide.