Drobo

[tobyaw]

Thinking about buying a Drobo. Scan are doing a bundle with the DroboShare that looks reasonable.

I'd mostly be using it as an iTunes media server, and for Time Machine backups (for me, kateaw and qidane). Does anyone have any experience of Drobos, good or bad?

Comments

Drobos

[houstonjames.livejournal.com]

There's a Drobo hooked up to my Mac Mini at the moment — it's been there about a month. So far, it seems fine: feed it some hard drives, plug in power and a Firewire cable, it behaves exactly like a regular external Firewire drive, but RAIDed. The thin provisioning aspect is a little weird; with hindsight, I think I'd have avoided that and partitioned it instead. On the bright side, it will be easier to upgrade in future.

The performance is pretty disappointing, for four SATA disks over Firewire, but quite usable.

I do have a DroboShare, too, but haven't tried it; having bought the two together, I ended up using it over Firewire instead, which gives advantages like Time Machine working sensibly. After much pain and data loss using an Airport Extreme for over-the-air backups, I've decided to stick to direct disk connections for that.

[kateaw]

You and your hobbies...