What Is The Drobo?
The drobo is a little box you add hard drives to in order to create a huge pool of protected storage for your data. If you have a lot of data you might need an external drive. If you have a ton of data you might need three or four or five external drives! And if that data is important to you, you’ll want to back it up. You can see where I’m going here.
The drobo can hold four SATA hard drives of any size. And if you run out of room you just swap out the smallest sized drive with a larger one. It’s quick, easy, and painless. Now what about backups? The great news is that Drobo makes multiple copies of your data across the hard drives you’ve added. If a drive fails you’ll still have your data. It’s beautiful.
Setting Up
Installing the drobo to my intel mac-mini was a breeze. I installed two drives, plugged it in and began formatting. Next, I started moving all the data from my two MyBook external drives over. Once that was done I extracted the drives from the MyBooks and fed them to the hungry hungry Drobo for formatting.
Three Months Later
I’ve been using the Drobo as part of my home entertainment system. I have a mac-mini I access with FrontRow and the little white mac remote. The drobo stores backups of my DVD collection so I preserve the integrity of the DVD disks.
The Drobo is Loud. The fans rev up and reach their peak when writing lot’s of data. I quickly learned for example that if I’m looking for a quiet evening, I write my data to the internal drive and then copy it over to the Drobo in one fell swoop. Watching a movie off the Drobo will ultimately spin up the fans and become especially annoying (although tolerable) during quieter films. Drobo fan’s won’t complain about a short 30 minute show.
The Drobo is Slow. Don’t expect amazing throughput with this machine. With the virtualization layers and multiple writes to the different drives, it takes some time. The real annoyance here is that a two-hour movie will usually hang a couple times if writes are happening in the background.
The Drobo is Hot. I moved over all my GarageBand audio loops to make space on my internal drive. Now this really gives the Drobo a run for it’s money if you try to work in GarageBand and all its’ real-time glory. I usually stop after thirty minutes or so because the Drobo is just too loud and the drives are so effin’ hot.
What I’ve Learned
Don’t leave any software open that’s going to end up writing to the Drobo. For example if you have iTunes connected to the drobo, close iTunes when you’re done.
Don’t watch a movie AND write to the drobo at the same time.
Don’t download large files directly to the drobo. Download to the internal drive and then move the files over to the drobo.
Conclusion
While I’ve never felt safer with my data, the drobo is not the best solution for a home media system. The biggest drawback is not the slow read/write times which I can live with, but the noise from the fans. I want to be able to watch a two hour movie without the fans spinning up. The fan sound doesn’t overtake the movie audio, but it is noticeable/annoying when they kick in.
