Data Robotics announces new Drobo FS

I have one of these, so far, so good and very fast.

The Windows Home Server will be appearing on eBay pretty soon.

I agree too, far too many people relate the Drobo technology to typical RAID technology and are way off the mark.

Whilst Steve re-iterates the simplicity of Drobos easy set-up and upgrade functionality, this by no way implies this is inferior to the traditional complicated RAID solutions many of which still have matching disk limitations and a horrendous rebuild & recovery system!
Quite the opposite, I know many techies who have started to add Drobo's to their IT infrastructure as a means of forward planning to aid simpler growth in the future and to help save time when the inevitable disk failure happens.

I had the unfortunate experience of a multi disk failure in a RAID system some years ago now. A idiot in the service department managed to cause a catastrophic power surge that went straight through the supposedly surge protected UPS. The surge damaged a couple of the disks in the RAID solution which of-course obliterated it. I had to start from fresh restoring from tape but our downtime was exasperated by trying to source suitable replacement disks to match the existing set. Fortunately, things have moved on and this is no longer such a concern, but if I learned one thing from my previous experiences, the simpler you can make your life when it comes to technology, planning for future expansion & disasters, the way less important a few hundred dollars means when your comparing one system to another!

I completely agree with Steven here, this is a legitimate post that interests a large number of the TUAW audience. No doubt, this is the target market for Drobo's products (creatives who need to back up their files, but don't need an engineering degree to do so).

Awwww, mentalsticks! It's SO good to hear from you again.

The reason I write good things about the products from Data Robotics is that I have had a lot of experience using them, and every unit I've worked with has worked flawlessly. I can't say the same for equipment from other vendors.

With the BeyondRAID technology Data Robotics developed, they DID revolutionize the computer industry. If you knew anything about setting up storage arrays, you'd know that their technology does an damned good job of letting people who don't have an IT background create and maintain an array.

If you can tell me where else you can buy a 10 TB NAS for $1499 that my 82 year-old Mom could set up, tell me. Otherwise, shut your trap.

Steve

NAS need to come down in price real soon. It's nothing new, and lately it's all the same old recycled crap.

$699 empty is NOT "impressively low".

Its interesting timing for me, because I was thinking about purchasing a HP Mediasmart system running Windows Home Server, and using it to make incremental system images and network shares to backup all of my media twice, once on the HP itself, and the other to my 2nd Gen Drobo for redundancy. However, for nearly the same price, it seems like I could use the Drobo FS by itself to backup all my machines, and keep the 2nd Gen Drobo as a local backup to my main computer. I assume with the Drobo apps, I'll be able to do things like scheduled automatic backup directly from the enclosure, so I don't even have to think about it on the clients.

Still, the Drobo is a far more complicated machine than a dedicated Windows box. Its awesome at redundancy, but I think its better suited for backups. They do have problems occasionally, so you never want to rely on one as your primary storage, though that's true of any storage medium.

Nice! Of course, this explains the huge sale Drobo ran through the end of last month... glad I didn't bite then.

Ironic coming from the Apple fanboy but build you down device with unRAID and put all the saved money into hard disks. For the $699 price of the Drobo unit alone you could build you own unRAID box and including a couple 2TB drives.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

I have the original mk1 Drobo which was slow compared to traditional RAID solutions (but obviously that was a price to be paid from much better flexibility).

Since then, they bought out the Drobo Pro aimed for business use which was about 5 times faster than the original device. I believe that should put the Drobo back in comparison with traditional RAID's or maybe even better, not sure.
Then they bought out Drobo-S which is 4 times the speed of the 4 bay mk1 unit and then the Drobo Elite which I believe is better than the Pro.

I biggest speed problem was using a mk1 with the DroboShare, I admit, that was too slow for me, I ended up bin'ing that and directly connecting the mk1 to my server to tide me over.

I planned on upgrading to the Drobo-S this year but it now looks like I will be able to go for the Drobo-FS instead, although I will have to do some investigation as I may still prefer to attach the Drobo to my OSX Server in which case, the FS might not be any advantage if the Drobo-S is still available at a cheaper price!

I have a 2nd gen. Drobo, and while I like the idea of it, it's very flakey. It often freezes, and most times needs a hard reboot to get it going again. This is especially true when copying large or intensive files (ie. Time Machine or Super Duper images). I've had two replacements, replaced all the drives ... no joy.

I've pretty much given up on it. At the moment it's just a very expensive enclosure which I don't trust with ANY data. If I could return it, I would.

Just a warning to y'all.