The thought last week was, F**king Lacie, the bloody thing has gone and died, one Lacie big disk 1 TB had snuffed it, taking with it a huge chunk of thankfully replaceable data, sooo, time to bite the bullet and get a Drobo, i cant afford it, and should not get it, but this is the second drive i have lost in the last month and i need RAID (or what ever it uses), one surf latter and its off to Scan I go, (they were the cheapest, had it in stock and also had a special offer on good reliable 1TB drives)
2 days pacing (and frantic downloading), and it arrives, there are hundreds of normal reviews and deboxing views out there, so here is the points that the other reviews seems to miss
The dashboard app that you REALLY need (ignore what they say, its got all the groovy functionality in it), does not work on Linux, not under wine and not even under vmware (yes it loads and everything but it does not find the drobo, and i tried it in both bridged and natted modes, also it does not allow you to specify and IP address to connect to), so i go crawling to my beloved and beg the use of her XP machine (STOP SNIGGERING!!!), i had also got the Droboshare, as its currently the only way to support EXT3 with out a whole lot of farting around (it can support 2 Drobo units to 1 Drobo Share) and anywhere theres is something groovy about NAS’s rather than SANS.
Anyway, after that, is really was a doddle to setup (it also tootled of to the net and did all the firmware and such), and suddenly i had 3.8 gig of safe data space (broken up into 2TB chunks), you can rename the drives and everything, some extra notes:
1) its not too slow, i get 19Meg Sec, on normal USB drives and the same on this, and about 7-10Meg Sec on network transfer, so you can stream moves just fine.
2) its does not like surprises, ie it takes a while to warm up once it has fallen asleep, and if you suddenly do something it does not like (say attempt to transfer 1.5TB), it wants a little sulk and a quiet 5 mins to flash its lights, and don’t just turn it off (you don’t lose any data, but it acts like someone has nicked its teddy bear)
3) it knows best, even the instruction book says to leave it alone so it can sort it self out and do thing, and each time i have tried to intervene when it was taking longer than i wanted, i have just made it worse, and it simpler to just go and have a shower.
4) its bleeding quiet, nuff said
(clicking sound attacts the scums attention, and he scuttles off for 10 mins), Phew, back, my other lacie drive must have heard the swearing as it started making a very nasty clicking sound, and stoped responing, i tell you that company hates my guts, after a franting few mins i got it working by taking it to bits and spreading the parts out on paper in the cold outside (dear lord dont let it rain tongiht) and its talking to me again, backup BACKUP!!!,
back to the drobo, all in all an excellent bit of kits and well worth it if you have a couple of Terabytes of data you really don’t want to loose, and dont want to waste you money on lacie drives.
