While it doesn't have a FW400 port, you can easily convert from FW800 to FW400 with a cable.

Tom Loverro (the boss man apparently) said they researched eSATA and found it little used, has compatibility issues and would be expensive to implement, and even Apple haven't used it yet in Mac Pros. Source is Macworld UK news.

Hasn't eSATA been found to actually be almost comparable to Firewire 800 in benchmarks? The spec is faster, but not the actual throughput. I'll have to see if I can find it...


Until then, this is pretty interesting:

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6437950

I agree. eSATA is key, especially for those of us with workstations that already use Firewire for audio.

Get with it Data Robotics (and stop calling it a storage robot - netgear sells a similar X-raid device and doesn't pretend it's a "robot.")

Didn't say that earlier today - I trawled the site, support notes and all, and there was no FireWire 400 comment. Nice to know that it can be used with FW400 only Macs.

My research suggests a 400 => 800 cable is needed. I'm in as soon as it's available.

Yeah - Basically you'll be able to continue to add higher capacity drives until you reach 4 x 4TB drives.

If you want a NAS, this perhaps isn't the best choice for you. I've yet to find a consumer-priced NAS that can give decent sustained transfer rates though, so I just hook up drives to a Mac mini server. It works great, and the Drobo is pretty much perfect. Plus Firewire 400 is usually pretty close to the same speed as GigE and 800 is usually faster.

Nevermind my comment. It appears as though this new Drobo's Thin Provisioning system allows for 64bit file system support, allowing for you to have a single 16TB volume if one wanted. That was the biggest reason that I haven't purchased one yet (as the unit is going to be used for media storage). Now, I will.

The Data Robotics page on the new Drobo says "supports up to 16TB on a single volume as disk sizes increase."

So it looks like they're using a 64-bit filesystem.

Well, not really. Drobo is basically using a system that is being utilized by a few SAN vendors (Compellent comes to mind here) known as storage virtualization. Essentially, the system is striping multiple raid sets across all of the drives virtually, allowing for you the ability to grow and better protect your data by simply adding more drives. In addition, data can be moved between the raid sets (scrubbing) on the fly as you add or remove drives from the system automatically without any type of user intervention. Plus, with the use of thin provisioning, the system can display to the OS a volume of whatever size you want, even if you do not have the storage to back it up. This is how you are able to add more storage by simply adding larger disks. On a 64bit OS, you can basically tell your system that you have attached a 16TB unit even though you only have 1TB of space in it. Thin provisioning prevents white space from consuming raw space so you can add files and folders to the unit without the unit complaining of running out of space. When you reach the limit of your physical storage, you simply add more (or a new) space to the physical unit and keep on going. To the OS, the size of the volume never changed. It is still 16TB as far as it is concerned.

The Drobo does not have a file system. It works with raw data blocks. The file system comes from the OS you have attached the unit to (i.e. a PC or Mac). My comment was more of a technical limitation that used to exist with the old Drobo's. On the old system, you could not present a volume larger than 2TB to the OS (64bit or not). This was a limitation in the units software (some said that it was a USB issue). It appears as though this new unit no longer has this issue.