Drobo Apps gives you cool add-ons for Drobo

I have a 4 TB solution with Drobo, (4 1 TB Drives) split in two- (one drive for a LAN drive) one for a Time Machine Backup.

It works great, I chose not to buy the drawer as I didn't see the point- You can share the Drobo drive and ITUNES allow you to share the media on your subnet- which I am testing now- so far so good-

Well, USB 2.0 is a nominal 480 Mbits, but in fact you usually get 200 or less.

On the other hand , I guess that most IP stacks, except on very fast machines, wouldn't get more than about 400Mbps over a typical gigabit link.

So yes, there's a bottleneck, but I'd be surprised if it's very substantial? I should think the processor in the Droboshare is more likely to be a limiting factor than the USB.

(This is all gut feeling - I haven't done any performance tests with the Drobo yet).

Thanks for the info - I've had my drobo for a few weeks and the thought of apps is intriguing. As for way it's better than a home brew RAID box is that the hard drives can be of disparate size that can be hot swapped - you just pop one out and slide in the new one. The droboshare is a rip off though.

I have to say that I love my drobo, and love the whole hot swapping thing. I'm not sure about the NAS thing though...

Will check throughput rates, anyone tried this for HD video?

Daniel

http://blog.evidently.com

Drobo has a larger initial cost ... but the benefit is that you can just add another drive or a larger drive at any time and the machine will automatically reconfigure itself.

This means that as larger and larger hard drives come to market you can simply replace an older, smaller drive in the unit and continue to expand your available disk space without any problems.

Also, if a drive fails, you can always easily replace it with the same size or larger drive as required.

Since drive costs are always getting cheaper, you could start with a couple of smaller drives to meet your initial capacity requirements and then simply add new/larger ones as your budget sees fit.

Now this might not be the best solution for everyone, but it is something that a lot of people (myself included) can really benefit from.

I've been looking into a home NAS but haven't committed to one yet. I have a mini and usb drive now but I wanted something with RAID. Synology looks like the best. Netgear has some nice offerings too. Drobo seems expensive and lacking features.

http://synology.com/enu/index.php

http://netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASPro.aspx

Am I the only one who read this as Dobro apps gives you cool add-on for Dobro?

I'm not sure what I would do with a Dobro app.

Resonator Guitar btw... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonator_guitar

I really want a DroboShare. The problem is the cost! I've already unloaded $500 for the Drobo, not to mention the drives, and I don't see these Drobo Apps as anywhere near convincing enough to spend $200 for bottlenecked network attached storage.

The problem with Drobo with NAS is that the connection between the two is USB only. So, you will not get Gigabit throughput on network transfers. Also, while the Drobo accepts up to four 1.5 TB drives, it reserves a portion of each disk for duplication, thus 6 TB capacity is not possible.

The Droboshare has a Gigabit Ethernet connection but is connected to the Drobo itself through USB 2.0, doesn't that create a bottleneck at some point ? It should've been connected through Firewire 800 since the Drobo now has that connection.