December 5, 2010
Feedback submitted!Unable to submit feedback! I've been using a 1st gen HP Mediasmart Windows Home Server as my "NAS" solution for years. The reason I love WHS is its drive extender capability (can add any drive with any capacity) and folder duplication feature (saved my behind many times). However, the original WHS is based on Server 2003, and doesn't support newer hard-drives with 4K sector and/or drives larger than 2TB. I already maxed out my WHS with 2TB drives. I was waiting for Vail, the next-gen WHS, but Microsoft took away the number one feature, Drive Extender, THE feature that enables the things I like about WHS mentioned above. So much for Windows Home Server then. I need another solution with better expandability. I finally decided to migrate to the drobo FS, and it's great.Pros:-dead easy upgrade/replacing drives. Want to put it new drives? Just take out the old one, and put the new one in, while the machine is running, literally. It's plug-n-play in its literal sense! No need to worry about recovery as the unit is self-healing. Even better, it supports those new 4K sector drives.-redundancy is automatic. Unlike WHS where you have to explicitly enable folder duplication on each shared folder, drobo will protect from single-drive failure automatically. The FS can also have 2-drives failure protection, but total capacity goes way down.-built-in Time Machine support.Cons:-speed. Even on a gigabit ethernet, transfer speed is only around 20MB/s, give or take. Although this is decent enough for my usage (eg. streaming video), the slowness can be felt if you transfer or manipulate large files. In comparison, the 1st gen HP WHS machine I have can go about 50MB/s transfer speed.-expensive. The FS is $699, bare. No drives included. In comparison, you can get the latest HP Windows Home Server with 1.5TB storage for less than $600 (1TB for less than $500). If you know you won't use drives with 4K sector (newer 1-2TB drives are formatted this way), then WHS is much more economical.-Compared to WHS, drobo FS is more like a straight forward NAS. WHS has a lot more functionalities, including automatic backup for Windows Machines, which is an excellent feature if you're on Windows. Not a huge deal for me as my primary machine is a Mac.In the end, to me the drobo FS is worth the price. A lot of people balk at the price, and quickly dismissed drobo, but many doesn't consider how to recover from hard-drive failure on other solutions, especially traditional RAID solutions. Even Windows Home Server is not fool-proof when a hard-drive fails. Not with drobo as you can just eject the bad drive and insert a new one, and that's it.