I’m on the Data Robotics website right now and I’m trying to figure out if a Drobo and Drobo Share unit would be beneficial to my apartment when I get back home (to NYC).
My brothers and I have duplicate copies of MP3s, movies, etc. at the moment because we all keep a local copy for ourselves. There’s benefits to having a local copy, of course, but most of the time, I find that I don’t need it. A central storage location would be great!
The only thing is that I don’t know if this is worth it or not. It seems a bit steep considering the continuously falling price of disk space. Plus, Norman is pretty much 24-hour service IT department, so maybe he can think of a cheaper solution to network sharing. If anything, it’s always nice to have a black box with blue, yellow, and green blinking lights. OooOoooooOoooo…
That would be cool to have but I say for that price get two Buffalo linkstations. Circuit city had one on sale recently for $134 for a 500gb network storage (NAS). I say get two because one would be used for storage and the other one would be used to back up the storage drive. That way you do not have a single point of failure. It is now back up to 189. I have a Buffalo Linkstation Drive as well and it is definitely not bad at all.
http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/productDetail.do?oid=181266
I’d say to head on over to the Drobo community boards at http://www.drobospace.com and poke around. While the DroboShare is IMHO not the best NAS solution out there (nor was it designed to be), the Drobo has some compelling features that other NAS or DAS solutions do not have. Those features include on-line rebuilds that preserve access to data as the array rebuilds from failure, ability to use size- or brand-mismatched SATA drives, bit-rot protection, the ability to upgrade drives in-place, large volume support (>2TB on most recent OSes), and native FS support (NTFS, ext3, HFS+).
It really depends on whether you’re looking more for the redundancy aspect, the ability to expand, raw performance, or NAS functionality. Drobo does well on the first two, but is somewhat limited on the third and fourth.