I purchased a Drobo from Newegg.com and three days later the UPS man dropped it off at my door. My previous post to the blog outlines the reasons why I chose the Drobo as a storage solution.
Setup was very easy, the top of the box full of cables shows the three steps to getting started and it really is that easy.
- I took the Drobo out of the box
- Removed the packaging material
- Inserted 4 Samsung 1TB hard drives
- Put the Drobo on my desk
- Plugged in the Firewire 800 cable
- Inserted the Drobo disc and installed the Drobo Dashboard
- Plugged in the power cable to the Drobo
- Here began my only snag, the Drobo appeared to go into a loop of restarting which it did not recover from. So unplugged the Firewire cable and then the power cable and restarted the computer. Once the computer cam back up I plugged in the Firewire cable and then the power cable and the Drobo jumped to life.
- The computer warned about the drive being unreadable and the Drobo began the process of walking me through partitioning and formatting the drive.
- I used a 16TB partition and HFS+ formatting. It was done in about 5 minutes and popped up on my desktop just like any external hard drive would.
- I immediately began copying my music library to the Drobo from an external USB drive
This really is an amazing device; I was able to start using it within 15 minutes of opening the box. It is almost invincible on my desk; its sleek black case and solid construction give me confidence. Not having to install rails on the individual drives is also a plus.
I have been using the Drobo for just over a week now and have copied just over a terabyte of data to the device now and am using it as my main photo and iTunes libraries.
Performance has not been an issue; the drive is plenty fast for audio, video, and working on 15 megapixel images in Photoshop and Lightroom.
Noise could be an issue for some users but not for me, my previous computer had 6 fans and sounded like a jet when fully overclocked, so the fan and drive noise from the Drobo is tame in comparison. I can hear the fan noise and I can hear each of the drives unpark, spin-up and park but it doesn’t bother me and can barely be heard over any game or music I am playing.
The lights on the front of the devise are not blindingly bright like the D-Link router and are actually dimmer than the lights on the Linksys router but are visible from a wide range of viewing angles.
So far I give the Drobo a 5 out of 5 across the board.