The number one complaint about the
Drobo is pretty obvious:
getting the damn thing on your network without using a host computer. Well, consider that complaint sorted. Today Data Robotics is releasing a NAS upgrade for Drobo called the DroboShare, which will support:
- Gigabit Ethernet (yes!), static or dynamic IPs
- Auto-mounting SMB shares via Drobo Dashboard (supports SMB authentication)
- Dual USB 2.0 ports for two Drobos per DroboShare
- EXT3 file system support (officially!)
- Capacities up to 16TB per Drobo (provided you feed it 4TB drives that won't be out until, say, 2010)
- And possibly our favorite: email alerts, should a drive happen to crash, for example
It's also worth noting that Drobo is still capable of switching between NAS and direct-attached modes if you decide you want to take your Drobo OFF the network (but why would you do a thing like that?). The biggest problem with this add-on? It's $200, which brings the total cost of a DroboShare NAS rig to $700 --
without drives. Still, we have a feeling for many a Drobo user -- ourselves included -- the value of the functionality will far outweigh the borderline unreasonable price tag.
posted Jan 14th 2008 9:00AM
Wouldn't that be 4 TB drives?
If it can support 2 Drobos, and each Drobo can take 4 drives, thats 8 2TB drives.
I was referring to a typo when it was initially posted.
Why anyone would buy this instead of a $599 Microsoft home server is beyond me. That $599 even comes with a 500Gb drive. Sure, Drobo looks sexy, but that price is just unjustifiable.
To me, the fact that they didn't NAS the thing from day one means someone screwed up.
It works sexy too. Watch their video and you'll understand. Not everyone uses Windows BTW but, Drobo likes everyone.
Totally agree. $700 made sense before WHS, but at this point, it's way too much. I can share WHS out to Linux and Mac boxes via SMB, too.
@Denver_80203; I know exactly how it works, and it just doesn't impress me that much with that price.
Had they made it $299, it would have wowed me.
Wonder who was the stupid editor for this article... its 4TB not 4GB. dat would be a difference of 3996GB
It's 'that', not 'dat'. Who is your stupid editor???
And while you're at it, it's not a difference of 3996 GB, either, but 4092 GB.
no, hard drives are measured in 1000's, not by 1024, so it looks bigger
It's called a 'typo'. Yeesh.
This thing looks interesting.
At home I use a BUBBA (http://excito.com/products.html) not quite the same product.
Lol, i'm glad i'm not the only one who's fingers mess up the TB GB thing sometimes. Don't let 'em see ya sweat.
just like TiVo, innovative market leading technology that every techie type person would love to have, but at a hugely restrictive price tag.
The TiVo fix is easy, drop the monthly subscription (or include it with a netflix downloads, or amazon unbox subscription, or something like that)and sell the box for as little as possible.
the Drobo fix is much harder, the only solution is to ramp up like mad and take serious advantage of economies of scale.
Sure, it's pretty sexy. But the Netgear equivalent (can't remember the name) is much more cost effective and has had NAS capabilities since day one. Also has notification capabilities (again, since day one).
It does not have on the fly expansion.
Yes, the ReadyNAS does have on-the-fly expansion. It's as good as Drobo in just about everyway, except now that Netgear bought Infrant, they cost between $825 and $1000 for the diskless systems.
Hate to say it, but "meh"
I think that people are missing the fact that this thing is like a Z-Raid machine for dummies... WHS and Netgear NAS's are great, but on-the-fly expansion with redundancy?
This thing is fly.
I could care less about making it NAS though.
WHS will do reduncancy if you tell it to, IIRC, and it does have on-the-fly expansion.
JustinM: Windows Home Server CAN do these things, but Drobo DOES do them, without your intervention.
Microsoft product manager Todd Headrick: "With WHS, storage is hot-swappable. You can plug in an 80 GB hard drive, for example, and configure it quickly with the WHS Add Drive wizard. When you want to remove it and replace it with a 500 GB drive, there's a simple wizard for that as well."
That's the basic concept, sure, but zero-configuration? ...maybe you just have to use a Drobo to appreciate it.
I won't argue that it's pricey, but the thing is slick, and i'd take it over any WHS setup any day of the week.
I think it's great that they've given existing early adopters a way to NAS this thing up, but I'm still not buying in until they add a Drobo model with Gigabit Ethernet out of the box.
Too. Much. Money.
I can't buy it until it doesn't require USB out of the box because the 2TB max partition issue with USB 2 kills my OCD.
This is very cool. $700 for the whole thing w/ no drives is not cool.
I should add that the the "Share" connect via USB. so USB will be the bottleneck on this thing. Thanks, but no thanks.
I think I'll pass.
/picks Norco DS-520 ftw, (if I could find one.)
Why not just get a Linksys NSLU2 for $80?...you can customize it to your heart's content since it runs embedded linux:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
You can run great apps like iTunes servers and Bittorrent right on the NAS device.
The nslu2 can't really do RAID, and it doesn't have gigE. They are for very different purposes. The Drobo is designed to be used by small businesses without IT departments and people who don't know how to use computers. The nslu2 is designed to be fun for geeks. (I have one, and love it)
Make it eSata and 399$ And i'll pick one up Tomorrow!
OK so if this isnt good for RAID. Then what would all you guys recommend? Doesn't seem like anyone is to excited about this. Plus that $700 price before buying drives is crazy. The whole point is to make the Hardware cheaper. approaching $700 is like buying a decent home server PC.
I just want a good RAID-1 box.
I have no idea why the Drobo got popular to begin with. Lets see... a diskless non networkeable device for $500 that makes "RAID fun". Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS goes for the same price diskless but has *far* more features. Now they introduce a NAS addon and once again people are drooling over it... but it adds another $200 to the NAS. For that money I could already have a TB of storage for the Infrant.
Have you priced out a ReadyNAS NV+ since Netgear acquired Infrant? RND4000 is $1049 SRP without drives, maybe $875-900 street. I won't even try to compare the NV+ to Drobo+DroboShare since it's not apples to oranges. But the days of getting a cheap NV+ are over now that Netgear is in charge, so price comparisons alone aren't going to cut it.
And you're not getting the Drobo's best feature with the ReadyNAS. Expansion on the fly.
"Infrant's patent-pending Expandable Protection (X-RAID™) technology allows you to easily add disks as you need or can afford without fear of losing data and without ever reformatting volumes."
http://infrant.com/products/features.php
WHS is much stronger in some areas than Drobo especially when dealing with backup and file sharing targeted for home users. Drobo has a more of a multi-platform target audience (including >50% Mac users) and is more in the SOHO disk space.
I don't know enough about the specifics of WHS's data protection, but I think Drobo will protect data stored on it better than WHS. WHS seems to do folder mirroring on selected folders, while Drobo does virtual storage pooling at a block level for all data. Drobo protects against silent bit rot. Drobo has true hot swapping, while WHS needs you to tell it you want to remove the disk to allow it to move critical data elsewhere first. It's unclear to me whether you can do an in-place drive upgrade with WHS like you can with Drobo.
Is WHS good enough for most people and at a more attractive price point? Definitely. Is it a better and simpler redundant disk solution than Drobo? I don't think so, not for storage. But it's really not a head-to-head comparison, because there are unique features to WHS that Drobo will never replicate.
word
This network usb attachment seems more a stop-gap product than an actual upgrade. While you get gigabit lan, you're still locked to the usb 2.0 speed of 480 Mbits/S.
A drobo with on-board gigabit is needed. Add to that esata and you've got a winner.
The Netgear ReadyNAS mentioned in previous comments is priced at over $1000 without drives. So, $700 is quite competitive.
Yeah, that's what I don't get either. Gigabit ethernet... so what?
As a Drobo user, this is kind of a shitty thing. $200? That's a bit much. Apple router will do me just fine, thanks. Might not get the nifty e-mail alerts but honestly, do you really need them?
actually, the netgear readynas has on the fly expansion. with redundancy.
read up on their X-RAID
X-RAID has two drawbacks compared to Drobo. (1) It uses the smallest drive as the common denominator for RAID. From the ReadyNAS User's Guide, p. 1-26, "X-RAID has One Data Volume. X-RAID devices have only one data volume. This volume
encompasses one to four disks, utilizing the capacity of the smallest disk from each disk. For
instance, if you had one 80 GB disk and two 250 GB disks, only 80 GB from each disk is used
in the volume. (The leftover space on the 250 GB disks is reclaimed only when the 80 GB disk
is replaced with a 250 GB or greater capacity disk." That example configuration yields approximately 240GB with X-RAID vs. ~538GB with Drobo.
(2) X-RAID's expansion process is not on-line. From the User Manual, pp. 1-27 to 1-28, "A year or so down the line when you find the need more disk space, and 600 GB disks are available at an attractive price, you can expand your volume capacity by replacing the existing disks. Keep in mind that you must power down several times to replace out your old disks.
"First, power down the ReadyNAS, replace the first disk with the large-capacity disk, and then
reboot. If your ReadyNAS supports hot-swapping, you can hot-swap the disk without powering
down. The ReadyNAS will detect that a new disk was put in place and resynchronizes the disk
with data from the removed disk. This process takes several hours, depending on disk capacity.
The disk is initialized and scanned for bad sectors first before the rsync process is started. The total time from the start of initialization to the end of resynchronization can be around 5 hours or more, depending on disk capacity. You will be notified by e-mail upon completion.
"Upon completion, power down, replace the second disk with another large-capacity disk, and
reboot. This process is the same as for the first disk; repeat this process for the third and fourth
disks, as well.
"When you receive a completion notification for the fourth disk, reboot the ReadyNAS. During
reboot, volume capacity is expanded with the additional capacity from each disk. For instance, if
you replaced four 250GB disks with four 600GB disks, the capacity of the volume increases by
approximately 350GB x 3 (the fourth disk is reserved for parity). The expansion process takes
several hours depending on the expanded capacity, and you will be notified by e-mail when the
process is complete. There is no access to the ReadyNAS during this time."
With Drobo, there is no rebooting and you can read and write to the array during the whole upgrade process. X-RAID is definitely better than RAID (which Infrant called "Flex-RAID"), but it's not the same as Drobo's protection scheme.
since v4 of the firmware, the expansion is online :)
How about the D-Link DNS-323?
Ooops...this was supposed to be a reply to Neeko's post...