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Drobo Learns to Share
By Dave Peterson | January 28, 2008
Considering the sheer volume of work I perform and save on computers, it’s nothing short of miraculous that I’ve only had a drive die on me once. That one was back in 1993, and honestly it wasn’t the drive’s fault. It had been made fragile by my unreasoning faith in DoubleSpace, Microsoft’s first effort in the disk compression field. My compressed disk was then further insulted by being accidentally powered off during a Scandisk operation. That did it, and the disk became unreadable. In retrospect, I really couldn’t blame the poor thing for crumpling like a gum wrapper. But since then, I’ve never lost a drive. So there must be a mighty big law of averages evening- up headed my way. I’ve been convinced to make alternate arrangements before it arrives. Enter Drobo, from Data Robotics. It’s been widely reviewed and commented on elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail other than to say that it’s a storage and backup robot. Feed it a couple of drives and it will use one as the primary and one as a backup, There are four slots, so you can give it that many drives total. After that, you need to start replacing smaller drives with larger ones. Drobo came out last summer and has been well received by people who’ve chosen to use it. What is new is the DroboShare, introduced at Macworld, a network attachment for Drobo. A quick setup (and a Y-connector that allows both items to use the same power source – nice!), and the Drobo now resides on my network. Both the initial setup of the Drobo and tonight’s addition of the Share accessory were very simple and speaks volumes for the thought Data Robotics put into ease of use. I’ve now got a protected terabyte of storage, accessible by any system on my network, destined to be used for photos, video projects, and my iTunes library (currently at 250 GB). And the next drive crash, whenever it hits, will be more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe.
Topics: Computer Accessories |