Subject: Drobo

Hi all,

There have been that I know of two people on MJ that had corrupt disks and lost tons of work. I thought I would take a second and make a recommendation.

I have no affiliation with this company other than having tried many various external drive solutions and finally after much frustration gave this one a try and oh man... what a sweet thing it is!

www.drobo.com

Describes it all. I was cheap and went for the USB2 version (which is the prior generation). It was quite a bit cheaper than the firewire version.

This is like most RAID based arrays a raid array but what makes this one so much better is how easy it is to update and expand. The USB2 version cost $349 I think and I had some SATA drives laying around. I simply plugged them in and it just worked.

I ended up getting the network share thing for $199 as the unit does have a fan and it sometimes cranks up when the disks get hot. So I ended up putting it in a under stair closet where it can remain cool and the noise will not bother anything.

Over 25 years in the computer industry I have slowy collected a bunch of data consisting of movies, songs, sounds, pictures, you name it. And in the event of a fire or disaster I wanted something I could quickly throw into the car. The Drobo is that device.

Obviously if your home burns while you are away this won't help. So I use an online backup for the critical files for that scenario.

But having been through numerous kinds of USB and NAS devices over the last 5 years all of which had troubles, issues, reliability problems etc, I finally found the drobo and so far for a month this thing has been rock solid.

Hot tamale! That looks cool. I want one.

Victor.

PS at first I thought you misspelled "dobro".

Yeah- these are cool. A couple of my clients bought them and they've been excellent for the money.

Ok, so supposing you're not using them as Time Machine backup, how do you approach this?

What do you put on the internal drive of your Mac, and what on the drobo?

Victor.

Vic,

I think it would be your choice really, however some thought must be given to USB versus firewire. The firewire is more expensive but is said to be able to serve raw video streams so music files would be fine. I don't know about USB for that. I'm not using mine for that purpose yet... Just a mass backup device.

Sure, but I'm asking what you do. Is this your only drive? Or do you put your user folder on it? Then how about preferences and such stuff that goes into /System and /Library? Lots of symlinks?

Victor.

Thanks for the info. Mark. We had a tech come in a few months ago to help us set up our back up software (Retrospect) and he recommended Wiebetech. Now I can also compare Drobo as an option when we update our storage drives.

We currently have two external drives that we alternate back-ups to. (one goes off-site)

If anyone wants to know more about what RAID is and the many options, here's an article I found on Wiebetech's website:

http://www.wiebetech.com/raidfaq.php