By now, you've probably heard about Drobo. It's the ultimate RAID-like array, with USB and Firewire 800 connections, that allows you to store up to 6 terabytes using 4 hard drives (you get about 4.1 TB of usable space, since some of the room is used for RAID redundancy -- see the Drobolator capacity calculator for the details). Not too long ago they released DroboShare, a way to turn Drobo into a NAS (network attached storage device) with Gigabit Ethernet. If you have both a Drobo and DroboShare, you can now run DroboApps.

Because Drobo is built on a small version of the Linux open source OS, you are able to run these lightweight applications that can do some awesome things. There are currently around 20 applications that can create an iTunes media server (Firefly), or limit the total size of a Time Machine backup (Time Tamer), among other functions.

If you're a Drobo owner, you might want to check out these cool new applications. And if you're a developer, why not take a look at the Drobo development SDK?

When Steve Jobs announced a ten-fold leap in .Mac storage space, most of us were generally happy to hear it; I know I was. For those of us, including myself, who have been synching their iDisk to use it more or less as an online backup drive however, this good news had an unfortunate side effect in the form of lost local storage space. Because of the way iDisk synching works (a setting you must enable in the .Mac System Preferences pane), the amount of free space on your local hard drive will diminish according to the size of your iDisk. This is because your Mac keeps a disk image that serves as a constant backup of everything in your iDisk - that's part of the advantage of enabling the synching feature because you can retain a copy of everything in your iDisk even when offline, and sync any changes you make once you get connected again.

Before the upgrade, .Mac offered 1GB of total storage between .Mac email and iDisk storage, so synching one's iDisk like this didn't gobble up too much space. Now that this total storage has been raised to 10GB, the tables have turned a bit for us synchers, and especially for me since about a month ago I paid for the next tier of storage (I know - I've been bit by the Apple update bug again); imagine my surprise when my iDisk instantly went from about 1.5GB in size to 19GB.

But how can we solve this problem? There are a few solutions, so you can play with these and see which fits best with the way you work.

The first solution is perhaps the more obvious: log into your .Mac account online, go to your account management page and readjust the balance of storage between .Mac mail and iDisk storage. You can knock your iDisk storage as low as you want and perhaps gradually increase it if your iDisk activity grows in the future. There's room to play there, but you get the idea.

The next solution, the one I originally opted for but have since double-backed on, is to turn synching off. You can still quickly mount your iDisk anytime you need it - assuming you're online - via the Go > iDisk > My iDisk command in the Finder (or cmd-shift-I). If you're mounting it for the first time after a fresh restart or login you'll experience a slight lag, but after that your iDisk should act almost as snappy as it did when you kept it synching. The only problem here, and the reason I'm rethinking this, is the catch with being offline: I'm not offline very often, but when I am, I still need my iDisk, so I just downsized the amount of iDisk storage I have allotted and I'm re-synching as I write this. For those who work differently however, turning off synching is still a viable option: if you're always connected or you simply don't need iDisk files both large and small always available at your fingertips, shutting off synching altogether could solve your storage issues.

The final solution I have is to simply start using your iDisk to store more stuff. After all, with a ton of extra space now you can really let loose and keep a lot more stuff in there, making it online, backed up, sharable by moving to your iDisk's Public folder and accessible via a browser on any web-connected computer in the world. That's a darn handy tool when you think about the possibilities. I'm moving more folders of documents and other files to my iDisk since it is now a pretty spacious and effortless way to store files, share them between Macs that keep my iDisk synched and back them up online all in on fell swoop.

No matter what solution you come up with, I'm not sure how much Apple can do about this considering how the iDisk seems to fundamentally work right now. It sure would be nice if the iDisk could simply expand automatically as you add files to it instead of taking a massive bite out of your hard drive, and who knows, maybe that's something we could see in the upcoming Mac OS X Leopard or beyond. For now, if your iDisk is cramping up your hard drive, it looks like you'll have to get a little creative.

thanks Mr. Gaskell

Oh Apple, you sly devil, what with all the secretly upgrading hardware and not even telling us. Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Eric Wortman, we now also found that the Mac Pro gained a RAID card option for those who need mounds of storage and a secure, redundant system with which to manage it. The card supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. The card also features a 256MB cache and a 72 hour battery with which to protect that cache, and it occupies the top PCI Express card slot, connecting to all four internet drive bays.

What's all this RAID connectivity going to cost you? A cool $999 on top of the price of your Mac Pro.

I like a relatively neat Desktop. I keep out just those items I need to access right away for my day-to-day work. It's so easy to clutter Finder, especially when you use multiple hard drives and partitions, an iPod, a memory card reader and the odd CD or DVD. An often-overlooked Finder preference can come to the rescue.

To hide volumes on your Desktop, choose Finder -> Preferences (or just type Command-, when Finder is active). In the General tab, choose which items you want to show on your Desktop. Place a check next items you want to see or clear the checkboxes to hide items. You can always bring hidden items back by updating your preferences later.

And don't forget: whether you hide disks or CDs on your desktop, they're always there on the side drawer of your Finder windows where you'll find all hard drives, servers, removable media and so forth.

Wikidesign tracked down this hard disk drive enclosure which offers you some of very Apple-ish aesthetics. It's a standard 3.5" IDE/(P)ATA enclosure with USB 2.0 and 1394 support. The holes on the back are needed because it's a fan-free enclosure--which you need to take into account because this thing needs good ventilation. The aluminum materials used in the unit should help with heat dissipation but it's probably not very stacking friendly. At £39.99, it's a bit pricey--especially since it doesn't come with an actual disk. You're just buying the enclosure. Still, it's pretty good looking, isn't it? [via WikiDesign]

Lots of news coming out of Macworld, of course, but this one caught my eye: Seagate has announced Mac compatibility with the software for its OneTouch III Mini line of portable USB hard drives. The software offers security (password protection) and standard Backup features -- i.e. schedule backups or utilize the OneTouch button -- but also a great-looking folder-based Sync option: select your Music folder, for instance, on one Mac, back it up on the drive and sync it with the Music folder on another. It's even possible to modify the files on the drive directly, and sync the changes back to your machine.

The drives come in 80GB ($129), 120GB ($169), and 160GB ($229) capacities and are available now. Check out their website for more details, and check TUAW in the near future for a full review.

We aren't sure if this new option appeared today with the newly-updated MacBook Pro, but it's the first time we've heard of it: reader Mark S tipped us off to the availability of a 750GB hard drive option in the iMac 24-inch and the Mac Pro. The massive drive isn't available in any other iMac (they still cap out 500GB), but with 4 available bays in the Mac Pro, they can now be configured with 3 terabytes of storage straight out the gate. That's a lot of iTS movies.

These drives don't come cheap, however: typical of Apple, each 750GB drive (across both machines) is a somewhat expensive $399 upgrade, so that's an extra $1596 just for the bragging rights of having the big bertha of Mac Pros on the block.