I have a new friend: Drobo.

By Peter, August 25, 2009 23:39

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Drobo Super HeroDrobo is my new friend. He (or she?) lives on my desktop. Just next to my Apple iMac. And although I had a lot of peripherals in my network, this is something I have seen and never heard before, until a friend told me about the Drobo last week. Drobo is not only a very safe backup system, but it is also giving my old hard drives a new life.


iomega1I can imagine, that there are more people that had the same experience as I had. At first you backup on USB drives and later on put some NAS drives in your network and attaching USB drives to these NAS drives also. But USB drives have the nasty habit of dying. 10231562-lacie-1tb-external-usb-20-hard-drive-301840kYou never know when this is going to happen but you do know that it will definitely going to happen, that’s for sure. And after building a huge pile of all kind of USB drives, the dying was about to begin. OK one drive death you can live with. A second death is annoying and you start by moving all your valuable data around. And after the third death, you know one thing for sure: I will never buy LaCie and Iomega drives anymore.

Then you have the choice: Do I bury the drives right away or are there some parts I can use? Well I chose for the last one and I found out, that in the land of disk drives there is something like resurrection. The drives itself were intact. Only the cases – they were built in – stopped working. After taken all the “dead” drives apart I was left with 5 healthy hard disks of 500GB. So what to do with it?

seagate-barracuda-iv-persIt was of course a possibility to buy 5 new cases and have again a lot of wires and some “overloaded” USB ports. I also considered the latest gadget from Acer, a home server with Windows Home Server software equipped and having the ability to host 4 hard disks. Also the top of the bill: the various systems of Synology. But both systems do have one great disadvantage: all the slots of those systems have to be filled with the same kind of drives. And that was no solution for me.

But then a friend told me about Drobo. The box that holds up to 4 hard disks, no matter what size, no matter which manufacturer, no matter how many RPM (7.200 or 5.400). But what really makes you happy is the easy way to operate the box. Just put the drives in the box, put the AC plug in, and (in my case) put the firewire 800 into my Mac. Just as simple as that. And all together it will become one drive in your computer sysyem. Putting those drives in the box is so easy, it’s really fun.

drobo-logo1 drobo-logo1 drobo-logo1

Drobo3But the Drobo will not only give you a place to store all your data, but will also make an internal (inside the system) backup of all the stored files. They call it Beyond Raid. It will cost some space of course, but you never have to worry. A system of traffic lights tells you what to do if there is an action required. So in future, when the total amount of space will no longer be sufficient (too many photos and videos) and I will need more space, I just will take one 500GB hard disk out and replace it by a 2TB drive. Just like that and not even putting the system off and of course not loosing any data. Can it be more fun and user friendly? I do not know. Just watch this video and be persuaded how useful this new ‘gadget’ can be. And is it a he or a she? I don’t know. Do you? Let me know!


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