Click on for more on network auto-mounting and a couple speed tests.
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The real magic happens when you leave or arrive at the network your Drobo's on, though. Unplug and, depending on the OS, the drive dismounts -- usually between 30-60 seconds. Plug back in and it's back up in under 20 seconds (usually). Sometimes it took a little longer when switching between wired and wireless networks on our LAN, but once we made a few manual connections things started working fine automatically. For what it's worth, to date this might be the best network share auto-mounting system we've seen -- it's certainly way ahead of Apple's weak showing of autoFS in Leopard.
Here are a few quick bits to chew on.
780MB file write to DroboShare:
- 802.11g - 9:20 (1.4MBps)
- Wired gigabit Ethernet - 2:10 (6MBps)
- (Read from DroboShare over gig Ethernet - 1:40 [8MBps])
- The DroboShare has a Y-cable for the power cord, so it doesn't need another brick. Lovely!
- The email alerts worked well and immediately. We tested an unexpected drive swap and immediately got an alert from the DroboShare to all the email addresses we specified. This feature alone might be worth the $200 for some.
- Should you dismount the drive by accident, the client will auto-mount it again for you every time. This process took about 16 seconds for us.
- Data Robotics has tested the DroboShare to with Time Machine over SMB with HFS+, and while it's "not recommended," it does, apparently, work.
- The drives do power down after a set period of inactivity -- unfortunately this period is neither openly documented (we hear it's about 15 minutes) nor configurable. If you like to keep yours spun up 24/7, you might have to complain and wait a while for an update.