So a little background: drobo is essentially a mini machine that manages raid on drives that you insert into the box. its neat (or at least i hope so) because its a tiny compact machine that can handle any size drive that you can put in. this is really cool because most of the raid configrations i’ve setup in the past required drives of all the same size.

ok, so why drobo? originally I was a pc user and was happy with my lacie drive formatted in NTFS. I swapped over to a mac, and sadly my external drive wasn’t writable anymore. I installed ntfs-3g which is a mac “driver” that allows it to read ntfs drives. That worked for a while until my drive got accidentally unplugged (by my foot, d’Oh). On top of that the ntfs-3g was extremely slow. My only other option was to get a new lacie drive or download 250 gigs of music, movies, and backedup up docs onto another machine and format the drive for FAT32.

So, I was stumped, I poked around on the net and ran into a post that talked about a nightmare of a time recovering data from a lacie harddrive once it crashed. uhhh, that made me a bit nervous, so I decided to go with the drobo option ultimately. My laptop has about 5 years worth of pictures, all of my code, my business documents and data files, and a whole mess of other stuff. I really can’t risk all of that on the lacie drive (oh and the drobo looked prettier too).

Ok, to the fun stuff…..

First Impressions

So i go the drobo box … cute packaging… the “welcome to the word of … drobo” was a great touch. reminds me of opening up my macbook pro box for the first time. (coicidence that the drobo guys are mac guys… hmmmm).

My first impression is that it’s much bigger than i thought, at least in depth. I thought that it would be about half the size depth wise. I dont know why… just from the pictures on the site, thats what I would have figured.

Setup

I love it when companies provide huge big dumb Step 1 Step 2 and Step 3 things. It allows me not to think about anything and follow directions.

Insert drives.. sure thing. I happen to have 4 400GB drives from a server that crashed a year ago (that i never bothered fixing). So here we go. Opened the drobo casing…oooh magnetic… nice… not a swivel based door WHICH ALWAYS BREAKS.. another great touch.

oooh another great feature, you just slide the drives in… no stupid bays to deal with.. awesome.. all four drives slid in without a problem. ooh i think my lacie is getting jealous.

Step 2 plug in stuff… weird the power cable has a white plastic covering… never seen anything like that… i dont think the mac even had that… kinda neutral about it… if they could save money to me as a consumer by taking that off, I would’ve been happy about it…

plugged in… ITS ALIVE!!!!

uh oh… i hear clicking… thats usually not a good sign… it looks like two of the drives might have gotten damaged when i was moving them.. crap. nice that i got an error on my screen! cool.

ok.. lets see how easy this really is.. ok i swapped out the drives, but nothing has happened… so i guess i’ll unplug this guy again. a quick not about the drive.. its pretty quiet.. which is awesome… so now i have three drives in and not all 4… (still all 400 gb drives). hmmm it says my total capacity is 2 tb, that’s definitely not right… i wonder if it matters..

wow… time machine picked up that i have a new drive (im not currently using time machine)… awesome! another example of just working!

Looks like time machine is starting to backup all my data… cool beans! ehhh time machine looks like it messed up a little. i didn’t want to use the entire drive as my backup drive, so i went into disk utility to partition the space into two spaces, 1 TB each (i still dont think i have 2 tb, but drobo does, so lets see what happens).

Ok, it looks like that kinda messed up time machine… So im going into system preferences and changing the time machine drive. hmm It looks like I can’t force a backup.. thats annyoing. found a post on mactips that says right click on the icon allows me to do it. ok! back in business!

Time to transfer my crap over!

Overall i’m pretty happy with the way that the drobo is working so far. I’ll give another update in the next month or so.