Drobo the little robot that can and does
Drobo by drobo
By Wandering Photo
15 July 2007
Harken back to the good old days of yesteryear when all you needed to store your pictures was a few negative sleeves in a three ring binder and a couple of shoe boxes for the actual prints? I remember those days. Do you?
In some ways, film was so much easier than digital. In other ways, digital is so much easier than film. Since switching to digital it seems that every time I turnaround a new digital something or other is needed so I can store and edit all the digital images I am taking. My first image editing program was Nikon Picture Project which worked just fine for something's but not so good for others. After a few thousand pictures I purchased Nikon Capture 4 which was more powerful than Picture Project but harder to use. Then, Nikon announced Capture NX which is more powerful than Capture 4 but much easier to use and works much better with Picture Project.
Dodging and burning in a dark room was never this hard or time-consuming.
Each new program opened new vistas into the world of digital photography, but each new program consumed more and more storage space on my PowerBook G4. And every time I downloaded more pictures at least another gigabyte was consumed. Until, one day I realized I was running out of storage space on the 60 Gigabyte hard drive in my computer. This limited amount of space would never be enough to store all the pictures I had taken and will take in years to come. Plus, I had never implemented a good and reliable backup strategy for all of my pictures.
Luckily, fingers crossed and knock on wood I have never had a hard drive crash.
A new digital storage system was needed. I looked into RAID's, but they are very expensive and require more work than I am willing to do. I looked into online storage and backup services, but they also are expensive, and some have bandwidth transfer limitations. I looked into massive disk drives, but this provided no protection against a crashed disk which would be no better than storing the pictures on my PowerBook hard drive.
Then I stumbled across a new product called Drobo. Drobo is a data storage robot that will hold four independent disk drives and automatically copies your data across all four drives. But, it will also work with two or three drives. The Drobo website recommends starting with at least two disk drives. When those two disk drives begin to fill, you can add a third larger disk drive and Drobo will automatically move your data around and provide you with redundant copies in the event of a hard drive crash. This product sounded too good to be true, but it was the best thing I had found in months of searching for a data storage solution.
I ordered one drobo and two disk drives. They arrived on time in perfect condition very neatly packed. The instructions are very straight forward, and setup takes only a few minutes.
After you have the drobo hooked up to your computer insert the first drive and format it. After the first disk is formatted, you can insert the second disk and drobo will automatically format it. Then moving your data to the drobo is as easy as drag and drop. My first drag and drop was about 40 Gigabytes of pictures which took a while to transfer, but it did so without a hitch.
Then, if you listen carefully you can hear the drobo moving your data around and creating the redundant copy. All of this is done automatically without any instructions from you. Now that is cool.
Since I have installed my drobo, I have placed about 40 Gigabytes of pictures and at least another 40 Gigabytes of music and podcasts onto the drobo without major incident. This is a wonderful device.
Then one day I walked into my office and one of the disks had crashed. I was about to panic when I remembered that drobo is supposed to have redundant copies of your data. I logged onto my computer, and everything was right where it was supposed to be. I ejected the bad disk sent it back to drobo and received a new disk in about a week. I inserted the new disk and drobo immediately began to copy the data just as it had done before.
Is the drobo better than other storage solutions? Yes in my opinion it is.
Is the drobo perfect? NO.
What changes would I like to see in future generations.
In the future Drobo should be firewire, ethernet, or WiFi compatible. The current USB hook is good but kind of slow. More than one port would be very nice as well. The current drobo can be connected to a WiFi network but this did not work well for me. The data transfer rate was very slow, and it interfered with my connection to the internet. Future generations of drobo should have more than four disk drive bays for really massive storage. And finally, future generations of drobo should have a bigger fan and better air flow through the box. Perhaps a perforated outer shell like the current Apple towers?
If you need more data storage for your pictures, music, podcasts, or whatever you should check out drobo at www.drobo.com.
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