Last year I bought a cheap two bay NAS enclosure and a couple of 1TB hard drives to go with it. Sadly, in this case, cheap truly was nasty. It was temperamental from the start, you got very little feedback from it, the web-based interface was appalling and after a few months it started to become a chore to use. Thankfully I saw its impending death coming and kept a copy of all the precious data it contained on various USB drives. Last week, running low on space on all of my other drives, and unable to get the NAS to serve up any data at all, I replaced it with what I wanted to buy in the first place, a Drobo. [Link to manufacturers page: http://www.drobo.com/]
Data Roboto:
The entry level Drobo is a 4-bay USB2.0 and Firewire800 enclosure for SATA hard drives. It uses a proprietary technology known as “BeyondRAID” to provide redundancy for your data; should one disk fail, your data will (in theory) be intact, and you can simply replace the failed drive with a new one. Should you run low on space you can simply insert a new drive, even while the unit is on; if there are no free bays, you can replace one of the existing drives with a larger one. Simples.
The manufacturer offers various other solutions including network attached options with 8-bays, and a 5-bay version offering protection from two simultaneous drive failures.
The unit has a reasonably large light next to each drive bay which indicates the current state of each drive. Green is good. Red is bad. Somewhere in between means that you need to think about replacing the drive soon. There is also a row of 10 small LEDs along the bottom of the device, these indicate how much of the installed capacity you are using, one LED = 10%.
Thoughts?
I’ve had the unit for less than a week, but so far I’m impressed by it’s solid build quality, excellent design, and blistering speed. It’s biggest flaw is that it’s not network-attached, but I knew this going in. There is an optional module called the DroboShare, which you plug the Drobo into and it essentially turns it into a NAS, but I didn’t think that the cost was justified. I have experimented with plugging the unit into my Apple Time Capsule’s USB port, which not only allowed me to access the device over the wireless network, but also over the Internet via MobileMe. Handy, but there does see to be a significant performance hit, even when connected directly to the Time Capsule via Gb Ethernet.
I’m a very happy customer so far, I’ll keep you posted with any new thoughts and developments.
Why don’t you buy from a Drobo from Amazon.co.uk?
