Drobo First Impressions

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. ...

January 12, 2009 · 3 min · 469 words · Dave Nelson

Feeling Drooby

I believe I first heard about the Drobo on This Week in Tech (TWiT) with Leo Laporte, but it may have been on This Week in Photography (TWiP) which is a podcast with members who are also on TWiT, but it is the photographers on TWiP that really convinced me that the Drobo is worth its price. I have always belived in making regular backups, for years I used CDs and then DVDs to backup my photos, documents, music, and all work related files. I even went as far as making three sets of discs, 1 for the office, one at home, and one at my parents house. My parents thought it was funny that I was giving them stacks of 20 or more DVDs every couple months. ...

January 4, 2009 · 4 min · 707 words · Dave Nelson