DroboShare makes your Drobo NAS -- for a price
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.
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