Hardware Meme: Drobo
10:25 am June 5th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
I was reading my RSS feeds this morning and noticed a lot of posted about the Drobo storage device. This is the new “storage robot” that looks like a 4-drive external RAID device, but isn’t one and it is apparently incredibly easy to use. Everyone that has had a chance to play with this thing seems to become a fan, so while I was not impressed at first, I am starting to become intrigued.
Is it possible that someone has finally made mass storage (on the personal level, < 2TB) simple and effective while also have proper redundancy? Lots of companies have tried this, but no one has yet to put out something that ready for the general consumer.
- Thomas Hawke is a fan. He put all his mp3 files (something like 100,000 tracks) on his Drobo and plans to buy a few more (Drobos) in the future.
- Michael Gartenberg- “In short, it’s the best solution for managing external storage needs I have used.”
- Engadget review- a must read
The Engadget review is the first time (to my knowledge) where anyone has really started to point out the flaws. Up to reading it I had a serious feeling of too-good-to-be-true and no one was talking about the issues I was concerned about. For example- when you pull out a drive and you just push one back in, the system is not going to instantly be ready (as we saw in Drobo’s video). The post says it all:
We thought our 1/3rd-full 1TB array would be totally happy about us yanking the smallest drive and upgrading it to something a bit larger — and it was, 7 hours later after rebuilding. Unfortunately, only adding new drives to empty bays is a fast process — upgrading existing ones can take a while, and be nerve-wracking if your array doesn’t have enough space to keep things redundant during the rebuild.
I am very okay with the $500 price tag though it is extremely disappointing that this is not a NAS device (it does not have network connectivity). This would have been a pretty simple addition for the Drobo team, but by not adding it they limit the Drobo to use on one computer. And where is the eSATA connection? This would increase the transfer speeds substantially (that is important when dealing with so much data).
Past that things are looking pretty good and while I am not ready to disregard other great devices, like those from Infrant (now owned by Netgear), the Drobo could be my next mass storage device.
[...] I just was reading my feeds and found Sal Cangeloso, who links to a bunch of Drobo stuff (now you can see why it’s important to read my feeds, Sal’s post and Engadget’s [...]