Disk space, like puberty, is a problem that’s unlikely to disappear until we see some major technological revolutions (holocubes and voice-modulators, respectively), and for my money, again, as with puberty, life’s too short to worry about these things when there are other, bigger and better things to focus on. Like food.
You’d think by now, that they’d have HDD enclosures down, right? Wrong. Over the last 3 – 4 years, I’ve bought four or five external HDD enclosures, and with every single one I’ve been disappointed by something or other. The 300GB LaCie D2 vibrates too much, the 500GB LaCie Porche has the oddest sleeping pattern, the 250GB Achmed’s Grill og Fastpladelager Fabrik broke in a couple of months from a bad connection and the 1TB Western Digital MyWorldBook gets confused when you try to do too much at once and simply crashes on itself. No matter where I turned, or what I heard of positive things from other people, each disk I bought was hellbent on plaguing me in some new manner. Awesome.
And since I moved to my MacBook Pro as my primary workstation, I’ve moved all of my data onto our LAN (1TB WD MyWorldBook NAS, 300GB LaCie D2 hooked into a 500GB Apple Time Capsule). This works really well for most things (when the 1TB NAS doesn’t require a hard reset because I accidentally tried deleting AND moving at the same time!), and allows us to access music, photos and movies from all our various devices.
But, wait… I have all my precious photos, music, document archive and what not on the LAN… That means… There’s no BACKUP! ARGH! PAANIIIC!
I’ve just been waiting for one of those disks to fail in some way, wiping out years of work and irreplaceable memories. Not sure Rikke would respond too well to that… Hell, I’m not sure I’d respond too well to that.
So I’ve been eyeing the Drobo for a while now, refraining from buying one simply because they’re so damned expensive here in Denmark. You may have seen my whines about that on Twitter once or twice…
But then this week I finally decided it was time, whatever the cost. On the official site it’s a splendid $500. Humac — the Danish ‘Apple Stores’ — sells it at 4900dkr ($890!) and 3G sells them at 3500dkr ($636). I finally found Cyberport, a German reseller, which listed it at €450 ($610), but dropped their price to €399 ($540) on tuesday. So I ordered one immediately, which came out to €412 = 3070dkr = $558; pretty cheap, everything considered.
Two days later, it’s sitting here, snugly next to my MacBook, working away on getting all my data onto it.
I’ll get back to you with impressions when I’ve used it for a while.
How many disks did you throw at it and how much space did you end up with when corrected for parity? I’ve begun assembling what will become an OpenSolaris-based NAS. Just ordered the cpu and mobo, but I’m still not sure which disks I should put in it. Unlike the Drobo (which will eat anything, afaik) I would probably need three or four matching disks for ZFS to play nice. Must ask the Meidell for advice.
The drobo does look like a sexy bit of storage kit but its just far too costly for me. Do you have the Ethernet add on which is like another £100+?
I will be very interested to see how you get on with it, have you not thought about maybe using some “Cloud Storage” its all the rage these days!
It may be costly once, but over time, the other solutions have easily added up to a Drobo.
And cloud storage may be all the rage, but 50GB of RAW photos isn’t particularly cloud friendly, nor is 200GB of music.
I’m throwing 2×1TB + 300GB at it, which gives 1.2TB (check out the Drobolator)
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Kevin
I’m very interested by this drobo
I hope you will tell us your experience.
thanks.
I was recently in the market for some sort of backup scheme as using random HD’s and waiting for them to crash on me and lose data was just getting too old. I was initially all set to go with the Drobo’s watching your tweets, but then my primary need for was for something that could be network accessible to multiple PC’s and so I ended up going with the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. The Drobo’s network add-on module got pretty bad comments from users, so I opted out of that.
The ReadyNAS manages all my data, and with a ability to add new functionality onto the device is a welcome feature I wasn’t looking for. Also, with all of it’s streaming capabilities I’ve now extended the use of my XBOX 360. :)
I know the Drobo has some similar thing with DroboApps and would love to hear what you think of those and the Drobo in general..
~ Ashwin
I’ve hooked up the Drobo to my Time Capsule via USB, which makes it available to the LAN. This works fine, though the Drobo dashboard will only work if it’s connected directly or via the DroboShare.
I haven’t tried any DroboApps yet, but I will as soon as I get everything stabilized.
Grats on the Drobo! I have had mine for about a month and so far I’m liking it … a lot!