Drobo

I have been searching for a NAS device and all the good ones are really expensive. Hard drives are really cheap and are considered a commodity nowadays but the housing / device itself are still very expensive and I would say are aimed towards the prosumer.

The perfect device that I found was Infrant’s Ready NAS NV+ which has been bought out by Netgear but as usual the price is way more than my wallet will allow me.

The new device I found was from Data Robotics called Drobo and DroboShare. Drobo is a USB storage device which can take up to 4 drives. It does not use RAID technology but it’s similar. The DroboShare is a “companion” to Drobo which can have up to 2 Drobos connected to it. It has a 1gigbit network port to allow the device to be shared over ethernet.

Whilst the device is cheaper than a NAS system it is also very modular. The Drobo comes in over £330 (ReadyNas was over £500). The DroboShare adds another £150! That’s almost half a Drobo! The nice thing about it is spending £330 to get USB access and at a later date purchase the DroboShare. All the prices exclude any hard drives.

The problem is like any other RAID type system that a lot of space is reserved for redundancy meaning you will not get the full capacity of the drives to store data. It only marginally falls behind RAID in turns of storage space to reserved space ratio using RAID 5 configuration.

The Drobo software allows you to monitor the state of the Drobo like available space. It supports Windows and Mac with a Linux version rumoured to be on the way. It also supports Apple’s Time Machine but I do not know to what extent. It touts a configuration free setup compared to regular NAS device and supports the most popular file formats.

The front face plate is magnetic so it can come off easily to expose the drive bays. In the pictures the device looks small but it’s far from it. Drobo is very long measuring in at 27.1 cm. There are various videos on the web including ones on the site demostrating the product.

Its a product worth considering and will hopefully have enough money to get at least one NAS type system.

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Hardware. Bookmark the permalink.

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