TuxRunner

I did it. I caved in. Bought a Drobo. Cali convinced me. I ordered it at the same time as my Asus Eee PC, and also snagged 4 500GB hard drives from Newegg for it.

The Drobo arrived first (got it last week Thursday). I rebuilt a HP DL380 at home with Windows Server 2003 on it just for the Drobo. Got it built ahead of time and I plugged the Drobo in, and loaded up the dashboard software. Without any drives to put in it, the Drobo expectedly informed me that I should add drives immediately to start using it. Grr…. I couldn’t! Newegg was taking their sweet time sending me my drives. (continue reading…)

It looks cool. It sounds like it’s cool. It even has the support of super-uber-cool Cali Lewis. But I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. It’s the Drobo, essentially a external USB storage array. What makes the Drobo different from other external USB drives is the fact that it can use anywhere between 1-4 SATA drives of any different type (speed, size, 150/300, brand, etc) and protect your data by using combinations of mirroring, striping, and other RAID-esque type techniques. It has intelligence built in. You can add drives on-the-fly when space is getting low. Or you can pull drives out to replace them with larger drives. Drobo will automatically rebuild the array and spread data across all drives it’s aware of creating redundancy so you can lose drives without losing data.

I guess what’s holding me up buying one is a few picky things. Originally I was disappointed that it’s USB-only. But with all the pizza-box servers I have at home, really I could slap an OS on one of em and then just share out the drive on the network and create my own NAS solution. (continue reading…)