The new Drobo FS (which stands for file share) aims to offer the easiest way to both back up data successfully and share it easily on your home network.Now you can know in this post How to change the Drobo FS…..
Data Robotics’ Drobo FS has room for five drives, and a basic 2 TB internal drive ranges these days from about $125 to $200. Get five drives, and you’re looking at $1,100 plus.
The Drobo offers multiple bays for peace of mind. Instead of just dumping a 2 TB drive in the unit as your back-up, Drobo puts the data on at least two drives, so if one fails, you’ve still got the data on the other drive. Add three drives, and you’ve got the original, plus two.
Unlike the original Drobo, which connects to your computer via a USB or Firewire cable, the FS hooks up to your network router, via ethernet, and quickly shows up in the network drives section of your computer — in my case, both my Apple and Windows machines. I transfer material from computer to computer all the time, and the Drobo FS was a much easier solution than using flash drives.
As it is, I own the original Drobo, and have filled it with four 1 TB drives. I haven’t been able to move data from my Windows computer to the Apple, because the drives in the Drobo are formatted for Windows. It’s long been a source of pain that you can’t swap external drives from Apple and Windows computers. But with the FS, and the files over the network, no such woes. Your files show up on both systems.
We know it may seem expensive,” says Jim Sherhart, Data Robotics’ senior director of marketing, “But we can’t make (the FS) fast enough to satisfy demand. We’re 200% ahead of where we thought we would be at this time
After years of pleading, the fine folks over at Data Robotics finally gifted you with a Drobo NAS. They called it the Drobo FS, but we all know what the real skinny is. But is the five-bay, Ethernet-friendly storage robot really a dream come true? We’ve had nothing but success with it in our Time Machine setup, but as with pretty much any networked drive, we’ve heard reports here and there of frustrations and complications.
The knock on those products, I’m told from friends of mine who edit video, is that the stand-alone NAS drives are really slow when it comes to heavy duty video files. I used the FS to access a big 10 GB video file in Apple’s Final Cut Pro and saw no speed issues. Flipping through hundreds of photo files on the FS did seem slower, however, for thumbnails to pop up.
For those who have sprung for the FS, we’re curious to hear what you’d change about the setup. Need more drive bays? Would you prefer a few extra interface options? Would you make the box a little less noisy? Go ahead and get honest down in comments below — we know you need an avenue to vent after the week you just survived, right?
Resources :content.usatoday.com,engadget.com
slow transfer speeds with large photo and video files. good for backup storage and networked files like office data but not for browsing images. I still need external drives on usb or FW800 to browse and edit. I was hoping to consolidate my imaging storage but I guess i won’t.
I think the FS is spectacular, based on my experience with it. The only issue is that making it play nice with Linux is a bear (seems funny, based on the fact that it RUNS linux).
Strange crashes and freezes on the Drobo FS that are not possible to resolve have lead us to pull it from production and essentially throw it away (can’t in good conscious sell it to somebody on craigslist.). AVOID. data storage should be ROCK SOILD, not randomly flakey. See also: http://www.popcornisland.com/2010/08/drobo-fs-internal-problem/
I’d give it a good home.
I’ve had this in place for months — FREQUENTLY it goes offline and we have to reset the connection. Otherwise it works well — I would NOT recommend this as a production backup device unless they resolve this issue. *(We have more than one of these that has this same issue at different locations.)