Last night I put out a note on Twitter about installing a Drobo in my home office for data storage; that generated lots of questions, so I thought I would “peg the geek meter” this morning and show you the deal…
A Drobo is a “storage robot”, that allows you to put up to four drives in the box for a big pool of storage. I put four 1 TB drives in the Drobo since I work with lots of video and have much data to store. The cool thing about the Drobo is that the data is protected to a pretty high level in that what a drive fails, the data is still safe (all drives will eventually fail). And, you can add or upsize drives at anytime; just pop in a new drive and you immediately have protected capacity.
This thing is basically a fancy RAID array, and accordingly you won’t have 4 TB of storage with four 1 TB drives since some of the storage is used for redundancy and protection. With the 4 1 TB drives I have a working capacity of 2.7 TB. But, knowing I am protected from drive failure is the whole point and the reason I installed the Drobo. I also love the ability to swap drives in real time and add capacity on the fly.
I have the Drobo attached to an Airport Extreme wireless router via USB (you also have the option of Firewire), and all Macs in the house are backing up to it with Time Machine. I also have our big iTunes library there, which serves not only computers, but also an Apple TV that is connected to the basement “man cave” plasma TV. So, the Drobo is handling backup storage, and acting as a media server.
Understand this is not the perfect backup solution; there is no such thing. I have off-site backup for the important files as well. But, this seems to be a wonderful solution for my needs; I am looking forward to seeing how this performs. So far, so good. Learn more about Drobo here (no, I don’t get any commission and this is not a paid advertisement, I just am responding to many questions on Twitter!).
