when the capsule started acting up i thought it best to pull them off and put them on an external hard drive, the wait time for files was insane

Then I decided to back up my NAS to an external hard drive I keep

Copied drivers to Hard drive of Surface Pro 2, ran setup which installed Windows 8 drivers, followed instructions, connected device then connected Ethernet cable, flawless/perfect in less than 5 minutes.

This leave you with an addition 3 unused 3.0 ports for connecting a hard drive or DVD or your Windows Phone or any other USB 3.0 device you might want to use

Stuff like this should ship with a tiny, cheap flash drive with drivers vs a mini-disc