Welcome to the Drobolicious future! My better half has had one of the original Drobo's for quite some time. Other than a terrible mishap with a 3TB drive, it has served her well. It's not surprising then, that it was tops on my list for consideration to be the new brain in the household. This device is not cheap, but it does feature some great simplicity, improved storage capacity options, direct network access and Apps.
I snapped it upon sale while a $100 rebate was available which took a bit of the sting out of the price. But why Drobo? I really just wanted an appliance. Something that would be always available, quiet and had lots and lots of space. This device (and others) fit the bill, but the Drobo has become a pretty mature platform over the last few years.
Initial impressions are that it is very solid and reliable. This impression starts right out of the box with high quality packing material, good organization in the box and a minimum number of cables required. It hopped on the network quite easily and the provided software tools were easy to install and update. The software also automatically prompted to update the device's firmware. I added a couple of the extra 1TB drives I had lying around, just to get it up and going. As a reminder - adding a drive to the Drobo completely wipes it so make sure you aren't throwing data away.
It automatically built a redundant storage fabric and it was easy enough to create a couple of shares. I should also note at this point that security options are quite limited. You can create users that can access the various shares, but that's about it. No Active Directory integration or anything like that. It certainly doesn't bother me - it does enough for what I need.
Overall, I'm quite happy with the little device. I do need to upgrade my router to gigabit speeds to help with performance but that will be the subject of a future article. Of far more importance is trying to rescue my data from the old MediaSmart server.
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