Drobo & DroboShare
Written on Aug 17, 2008 // Technology.
Zero management, maximum peace of mind. That’s the tagline for the Drobo by Data Robotics.
Let me first say there are two ways of looking at this product, from a home user point of view and from a business user point of view. This product is aimed at the home market, but it has some features that made it so interesting for me that I decided to buy it for work. As such some limitations such as the lack of Active Directory support can’t be blamed on the Drobo.
The Drobo then. What is it? It’s a storage device. Like a USB harddisk, except this also has Firewire800 and can hold up to 4 harddisks. But here’s the beauty, normally if you want to have any kind of protection for whenever a drive fails you have to mess with RAID settings yourself, and then whenever a drive fails you have to notice it and take action.
Not with this baby, you unpack it, hook it up and literally just slide your drives in and you’re done. No screwing, no manual fidgetting of any kind and no messing with RAID. Insert 1 drive, slap another in and it automagically starts mirroring, add another one in and it start build its own ‘BeyondRaid’ volume. Now here’s the kicker, because it uses its own voodoo under the surface it can do a few things you can’t find in most devices of this kind, not even the really expensive kind.
Say you slap in several 200GB drives you still had laying around, but then as time progresses you’re running out of space. Oh no, what now? Simple, pull out a 200 and slap in a bigger one. Done. No data lost, no migrating of sets on volumes or bla bla, done. The tech takes care of it.
Same goes for a drive failure, the Drobo keeps an eye on things and automagically starts shifting data around when it sees a drive failure instead of waiting for you to do something like in the case of the oh so popular RAID5. It has its own software called the DroboDashboard which gives you a nice overview of your Drobo in your taskbar and allows you to change some settings but that’s it.
So am I happy with the Drobo? Yes, very. It’s clearly aimed at the Mac market with the keep it simple philosophy and even the way the product looks and is packaged looks Mac like.
The only thing missing is a NIC, and that’s where things for me go a little sour. You can buy the DroboShare which allows you to run the Drobo standalone on your network instead of having it hooked up to your pc or mac, but it’s a lot of money for something which should have been built in. And, the real kicker for me, no security settings. So either everyone can access everything or no one can access anything. There is an option to set a username/password protection on the whole volume but that didn’t work for me no matter what I tried, I couldn’t access the share afterwards.
Conclusion: Yay for the Drobo, boo for the DroboShare.
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janrocks
Aug 17 2008, 17:41Hmmmm.. no NIC and no security… Looks like my old twin Xeon with it’s scsi arrays will have to keep spinning for a few more years. Shame, for a few more €€ they could have made a real winner. There is a growing demand for home servers which currently we seem to be filling with old desktop machines and defunct webservers.
I don’t get quite what they were thinking, ease of installation.. pretty well one click setup, and then forget the important stuff. Some strange decisions made by the design team.
Kaos
Aug 17 2008, 21:21Whats the price tag on this lovely thing? I could totally use one of these things for work and home. Place for my posters to be stored safely and a place to hold all my asian dramas and movies and a spot of anime. Course proved i invest in some hefty hard drives but this this is perfect it seems. Question is; what types of hard drives can you use? What if you want to use a sata drive instead? Or only Raid drives? Thats about the only thing thats got me pondering.
XIII
Aug 17 2008, 21:30That’s the beauty of it, it uses SATA drives. Just throw ‘em in and you’re good. Price seems to hover around the 300 mark at the moment I think, depending on whether it’s the first or second generation model. The one I bought for work I ordered with 4×500GB drives at 50 euros a pop. So that gives you a safe storage with 1.5TB of space (500 is reserved a la RAID5) for around $500. Good value for money me thinks.
Kaos
Aug 17 2008, 22:54Awesome! Not bad either, 500gb hdd for 50 a pop. And the 500$ price tag isn’t bad either imo.
Definitely something i will look into and invest. Instead of buying an external hdd, i can get one of these with multiple drives and pull a drive out and add a new one in when one is full. Its perfect for what i need.
NoCluE
Aug 18 2008, 15:27I knew I should have asked more for the Drobo + disks hehehe….. Good 2 know for next time :-)…… Maybe you can make an order list for those who want one :p
I make u good price!
cya 27th
XIII
Aug 18 2008, 15:43Kaos lives in the US, I don’t think you ship there. ;)
CommSie
Aug 18 2008, 16:45Everything X-man mentions I want to buy 1 or 3 of it, at times >.>
But don’t know if I am going to fully use and or have the budget. Saving for the little future or should I just say when it is the time that it is the reality that your fund has been I.O.U noted >.>
XIII
Aug 18 2008, 16:55Saving is better I think, I’m not buying new hardware unless something that is actively used croaks and cannot be replaced by something else I have laying around. And even then it depends. But it’s a shiny lovely device, regardless of our current financial situation.
croga
Aug 23 2008, 9:28Thanks for live reviewing this thing X, I’ve been wanting to get one to replace Adam the home server but with the lack of networking support I’m afraid this isn’t going to be the one for me :(
Can’t you, like, buy another 5 or 6 of this kinda thing, but other types/brands so that you can find the ideal one for me? would save me a lot of work ;)