Drobo: Online

The Drobo was up and running as of 4/16 and houses 3x1.5TB drives. The system provides 2.7TB of available space though as a result of its redundancy measurements. If I put in a 4th 1.5TB drive I would have 4.1TB of available space... how's that for funky math? :)

How does it work? Just like an external should. It's connected as of right now via the USB2.0 port to my MacBook 5.1 which will be shortly replaced with the MacBook 6.x (not sure what code name my new MacBook is). Sometimes the drive falls asleep and takes a few seconds to spool up so that I can access the data. I am primarily using it for Lr archiving. That being said even when I simply use it for Lr primary data (stuff that I'm editing), it's responsive enough to be tolerable.

I've had it disconnect on me only once for no reason. Otherwise, it's always connected and reliable. When I put the MacBook to sleep, the Drobo sleeps as well. Seeing the green lights is comforting because I know that the drive(s) are working fine. A quick Google search reveals that people used to have problems with the sleep cycle of the Drobo.

Installation was a piece of cake. I mean I don't even consider that to be an installation. I simply popped 3x1.5TB drives in there physically, plugged everything in and ran 1 small program on the disk and it was ready to go. I think you can go from unboxing to file transfer in less than 5 minutes depending on how fast you can unbox stuff :) Really it was that easy. I can't remember the last time something worked so seamlessly well.

As far as the complaints about not being able to eject the drive, I've been able to do it just fine directly from the desktop. I don't necessarily use the "Standby" function on the Drobo Dashboard. The Dashboard itself is a piece of software that I could probably live without but it's nice to have the little icon at the top showing me the Drobo's connected and how much space is left along with the full dashboard information when I double click it. Maybe it's not as over-rated as I think it is?

With all the space I feel like I ought to have more stuff in the drives :) I'm only using 400GB of the 2.7TB total. What a waste :)