Quote Originally Posted by kmcgreg View Post
Does anyone here own a Drobbo?
I've had a 4 disk Drobo for maybe 18 months or so. It seems to work pretty well and has handled a failed HD without data loss - it sends you an email to let you know if you set it up to do so and flashes all its lights in any case. Swapping out smaller drives for larger ones is also painless, though it does take a while to rebuild - up to 24 hours recently when I swapped out a 750GB drive for a 2TB.

My only real complaint about it is that they're not all that fast. I've never measured it, but it's the slowest disk in my system, which includes a couple of 5400RPM laptop drives in the Mac Mini Server that the Drobo is connected to. It's more than fast enough for streaming hi bit rate music to everything on the network and handles low res tv shows fine, but gets a bit stuttery with 720P video.

It does make a bit of noise too. The fan runs all the time and, whilst it's not particularly intrusive, I really notice the silence on the odd occasions it's been turned off. My office contains a number of (very quiet) computers and, unless the UPS is working hard or the printer is on, the Drobo is the loudest thing going. I imagine that this would be the case with anything though - any device with 4 disks in it is going to require a fan and they're all noisy.

Also, be aware that Time Machine is extremely fussy about the disks it will use for backup. I just checked now and I can select the Drobo as a TM disk from the server itself, but not from a client machine which has access to various shared directories on the Drobo. This fussiness of TM is good though - it's a sophisticated system and provides excellent data security and restorability.