Drobo

JohnK

Anyone used one of these? Looks nice but if it does what it claims then I'm surprised I hadnt heard of it sooner. I know its only on sale in the US at the moment but I'd still have expected to hear of it.

http://www.drobo.com

aidan_walsh

Heard about these a few months back on the tech blogs when they first came out. The few reviews I read about them pretty much raved.

AlmightyCushion

It only has usb though. E-sata would be nice.

mathias

I think I may be missing something here , but all I see is a multiple hard drive enclosure with data managing facilties ,

In what way is any of that new ? Surely such things have been around for years ?

Reading through that website there are some striking liberties taken with the definition of some scientific terms , in what loose definition of the word could cybernetics be said to be used in that device ?

And the explanation of GB is plain wrong ! The whole site makes this thing out to be something wonderfully new , and all told , tis a hard drive enclosure that takes 25% of your capacity to back up your data ! Nothing you couldnt put together yourself with some cheap parts from komplett and some Linux software.

Honestly , sticking the word robot onto something doesnt make it cool !

Jackz

It's a robot . . . . . . . . . . . damn yanks.

AlmightyCushion

That's what I thought to Mathias but it allows you to put in disks of different capacities(unlike raid) and it if one of the disks fail you can recover the data. There are other things I think but I couldn't be arsed reading the whole thing.

mathias

one of the disks fail you can recover the data.

Thats what raid is for , no matter what system you use , a physically failed hard drive's data cannot be recovered unless the data is backed up somewhere else , they have no magic wand for fixing failed drives here. You specify the drives yourself afterall , they are not " special " drives.

The device uses some of its capacity for backup , this must be on some of the drives , so if those fail your backup is gone , you must back up again to a different part of the drive.

All we have in this device is a rather cute pass the parcel piece of software. nothing new , software backup and compression has been around for years , I got Danse Retrospect with a back up drive a couple of years ago , its capable of anything this thing can do ! A good hard drive enclosure and decent retrospect routine would match this thing any day.

AlmightyCushion

mathias wrote:

Thats what raid is for , no matter what system you use , a physically failed hard drive's data cannot be recovered unless the data is backed up somewhere else ,

The device uses some of its capacity for backup , this must be on some of the drives , so if those fail your backup is gone , you must back up again to a different part of the drive.

Sorry I know that, I probably should have phrased my post better.

mathias

Heres the same type of thing for a fraction of the price , ( Drobo is a nonsensical $500 with no drives !! ...this is about $80 ) and it isnt trying to bamboozle anyone by calling itself a " Cybernetics enabled data management robot !"

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg51_hot-swapinternalsystem.htm

And more ...

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/hotswapsataguide_1.php

If you Google hot swappable drives , there are tons of examples ...

Kali

I don't understand the hype about this and the marketing waffle is just annoying on their website.. can anyone answer the following questions for me?

a) Where's the robot?
b) Where's the redundancy?
c) Why would someone spend $500 on this and not a $80 Netgear?

L31mr0d

exactly, waste of money. Just get a cheap gigabit lan NAS device, throw some HDDs in it and do all the backup yourself, you will have more control over how it operates and faster speeds than USB. eSATA is very dodgy imo, as it isn't hot swappable and never powers down when your pc is on.

JohnK

You could do all the backups yourself but chances are you'll forget to backup some stuff or you just wont do it after the first few weeks. At least this is something that'll just work in the background and lets face it, be idiot-proof. There’s a lot to be said for something that just works and doesn’t need a technically minded person to set it up or maintain it. If this does what it claims then I can see myself getting one or something similar.

mathias

You could do all the backups yourself but chances are you'll forget to backup some stuff or you just wont do it after the first few weeks.

Every piece of backup software I have ever used could be automated ! And that includes the rather basic software included with Vista !

JohnK

You still have to set it up the first time though. Something like this, plug it in and forget about it until a light starts blinking which is what you need to appeal to the mass market.

mathias

You still have to set it up the first time though

Indeed , but I wouldnt pay someone 400 dollars to do it , the price of that unit is ridiculous , a blatant rip off with marketing that borders on complete lies , I wouldnt touch that product with a bargepole ! The makers are clearly out to rip people off.

311

In order for it to work as it does ,surely all the drives in it ,would be active all the time. Would it not be really noisey ?

it must have some buffer on it ,for it to work at all:(

mathias

it must have some buffer on it ,for it to work at all

Yes it has to have , this makes that video on the site quite suspect as well , in the space of 5 minutes he took out all the drives in the unit but the transfer and watching of the video continued , now either that was a really small file , ( it was the movie 300 so it had to be at least movie size , 700mb or so ) or it had to be buffered somewhere.

I notice there is no physical connection showing in the video , and judging by " level of honesty " on the rest of the site , it very much looks like that video is staged !

311

I don't think the video was big at all to be honest ,he says at the start it's looped. I think it's a trailer ,probably about 80Megs or something.
One drive is left in all the time and he still has to have three drives in at the end ,it doesn't make sense .

I wouldn't really like one massive space ,it's not logical to have a terrabyte of info ,without a proper file structure.