Drobo
I was listening to TWIT’s 100th episode this weekend and they had mentioned Drobo. Drobo is a new USB hard drive which uses a much more intelligent way of protecting your data. They claim that it is a robot that manages the best use of your hard drive. It will shrink and expand your disk space as soon as you add or remove a drive from your array. It is also not picky of the size and brand of hard drives that gets inserted into the disk array. Just as long as it is 3.5” drive with SATA interface.
This got me excited since my Raid-1 Linux server at home is close to 60% of capacity. This is only a 200GB file server. I figure I should be in the market for this or similarily a NAS device like Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV+. I stumbled upon an entry in the blogosphere from isnoop.net which briefly goes over the differences of each devices. One of the things I wish the Drobo would have is NAS capability so I can just plug this into my network and give access to multiple systems much like my Linux file server. The negative for ReadyNAS is that it won’t use all the available disk space if you had put in bigger disks. It would just use the least common denominator and default to the smallest disk size. Both negativity are critical in my opinion and I have decided that I will wait later to consider a new storage solution. I also read on drobospace.com that you can use an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station to attach the Drobo and have it serve like a file server. That wouldn’t work since I just got a new wireless access point.
What I have to consider is that if I replace my Linux server, I wouldn’t have the ability to offset any other features my Linux box gave me like bittorrent downloading. Yup, I even looked to see if the Drobo was Linux compatible. It is possible but not built in natively. Hopefully the NAS version of Drobo is coming out sometime soon. Crossing my fingers
