http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/ Engadget Comments for http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
It isn't drobo pretty, but it is in a cupboard :)]]>Nov 25th 2009 11:16AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Of course, Windows Home Server does the same thing so there are other, potentially less expensive options.]]>Nov 25th 2009 11:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:30AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Which atom mobo's have ten sata ports?
Can you link me to it please:)]]>Nov 25th 2009 2:06PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
It was probably an Atom motherboard with one or more PCI slots, and additional SATA controller(s) installed.]]>Nov 25th 2009 3:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 3:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:20AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Hey ! How much comission do you get from DROBO each time you post a comment ??]]>Nov 25th 2009 3:39PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:20AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
HP sells true home servers with the same auto-add random harddrive sizes to the array and much much more for far less.]]>Nov 25th 2009 11:21AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Not sure if the HP home server is a true comparison as the internal capacity is limited to under 2TB. You can only add capacity via USB/eSATA connected external drives. Also, the HP doesn't have any RAID option. It uses "folder duplication" as part of the Windows Home Server software.

From my reading of the complete rundown it seems that although the Drobo is a bit pricey, when you combine the feature set, ease of setup/configuration and build quality the Drobo is a win. Unless someone can show me that they can build something with EQUAL or BETTER capabilities for greater than a $200-300 less, then the Drobo would be my choice. My time has significant value for me and the prospect of sourcing, building, testing and configuring my own comparable unit just to save $200 bucks sounds like a net loss.]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 1:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
How's that for packaging?]]>Nov 25th 2009 11:23AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:30AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 12:06PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
It's the name for WHS' lazy RAID tech. It duplicates files across volumes for redundancy without relying on RAID. See the technical brief here for more than you probably wanted to know:

http://bit.ly/gt2I]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:11PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server#Drive_Extender]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:19PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 12:41PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Like RAID 5, the percentage of space lost to tolerate the failure of a single drive goes down as you add more drives to the storage pool. Your space is only halved if you've only got two disks. With three (the minimum required for RAID 5), you're giving up roughly one-third of your space to duplication (minus roughly 20 GB for the OS).

Additionally, like the Drobo, this WHS supports using drives of varying sizes in your storage pool. If you did this in a RAID setup, you would need to have the same partition size across all drives. You won't benefit from mixing and matching as the extra space in the larger drives would go unused. Lastly, you typically cannot dynamically increase the size of your volume as you add more or larger drives to the array as you can with the WHS or Drobo.

Lastly, with WHS you don't have to duplicate. For instance, I store my Recorded TV from my Media Center on my WHS. I don't duplicate that share as it takes up a lot of space and I can live with losing those shows in the event of a drive failure.

There are some performance trade-offs to do this, of course. I don't have any figures, but I can't imagine that a WHS or Drobo could even hold a candle to an iSCSI RAID enclosure with comparably spec'ed drives.]]>Nov 25th 2009 7:04PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 9:59PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:34AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/ more...
...like the pretty town girl that YOU CAN have but you know you'll have to spend a lot on to please her ! :) lol]]>Nov 25th 2009 3:42PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 11:56AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/You implying magnets are just magic.]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:06PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
I wrote "Dark Magic"]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:47PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 1:24PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
man there are plenty of tests which show magnets are no prob for hdds.
i think tomsharware even testet it out with some sort of industrial super hyperstrong magnets. didnt affect the drive.]]>Nov 26th 2009 3:22PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/I replaced it with a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro (also pricey) and have been nicely surprised by the throughput I get over GigE. YMMV

E]]>Nov 25th 2009 11:58AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 12:00PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 1:40PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/That being said,
I just built a freeNAS box with room for 20 drives only 10 installed for around that price.]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:04PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
What components (particularly case) did you use? I'm looking to throw together a build of something similar.]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:07PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 5:55PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Unique? WHS and unRAID will do this for a hell of a lot less money.]]>Nov 25th 2009 10:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
http://www.qnap.com/Products.asp]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:07PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.lime-technology.com/) server.

Definitely a lot cheaper and expandable to 16 drives. Only thing missing is online/VPN access.]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:27PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
While I do like the idea of a downright simple system like this, the cost is just far to high for what you are getting. The other downside is Drobo's system is proprietary. In most situations, I would prefer Linux software RAID over a dedicated hardware based RAID. Linux software RAID performance scales with CPU power rather then being locked into a RAID controller or proprietary system like the Drobo. Anyone who had a proprietary RAID controller die and is stuck with data on drives that can not be read by a card with different firmware revision will understand what I mean.

I would take a reasonable server+JBOD and Openfiler over this any day of the week. For the money and performance you can't beat it. ]]>Nov 25th 2009 12:36PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 12:46PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 12:51PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

]]>Nov 25th 2009 5:30PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
"What a ripoff! I can hold X TB on my WHS/Linux server/RAID array for Y$ less than it costs for the Drobo Z."

Also, if you can configure 15 TB RAIDs while riding a unicycle, then the Drobo is not for you. It's for the rest of us that lack the time, experience or patience to deal with standard RAID and JBOD setups.

Note: if the droboshare is too expensive, google 'nas adaptor' . There are a few in the 50$ range.

]]>Nov 25th 2009 1:00PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Oh, and to be clear, you CANNOT build something with DroboPro's capabilities at home for any price. If you think you can, you don't understand the product and/or have never used one. Its not just the hardware that makes it useful--its the software features that are unique. And to the questions about it being proprietary--yes it is, but so are all SMB and enterprise RAID systems used by real corporations. For instance, try to take your EMC RAID disk pack and put them in a Promise Array or an Equallogic box.]]>Nov 25th 2009 1:32PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 10:10PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
That being said, I love my Drobos. Not fast by any measure, but does what it was advertised to do and does it well.]]>Nov 25th 2009 1:18PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 1:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Also, I can configure this while riding a unicycle (because it works out of the box), the Drobo is not for me. It's for the rest of us that lack the time, experience or patience to read a simple manual for 5 minutes.

Note: if the droboshare is too expensive, google 'Netgear Stora' . There are a few in the 200$ range.]]>Nov 25th 2009 2:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 2:58PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/My question is what happens when DROBO fails... suppose in 2 years and that model is no longer available ... What then ?]]>Nov 25th 2009 3:18PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/Nov 25th 2009 4:44PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/25/drobopro-raid-array-causes-reviewer-to-fall-madly-in-love-video/
Engadget posts a laudatory article every time Drobo breaks wind.

Users overwhelming say "This stinks!"

Engadget response: Post another fart.

Either somebody is completely out of touch with this market or they are a paid shill. ]]>Nov 25th 2009 5:01PM