Droboshare

As I reported earlier my Drobo had become somewhat noisier having added a third drive and so I decided that the simplest solution was to move it off my desk.

Enter Droboshare, it's a little sled that sits under the Drobo and allows you to turn it into network attached storage. Hey presto, I can put my Drobo in another room and access it from any of my other machines over my network.

It was the easiest thing in the world to set up. I simply unplugged my Drobo from my Mac, plugged it into the Droboshare, plugged the latter into the network and the power (there's a neat 'y' power cord which allows you to power the Drobo and Droboshare from the same power brick) and it just worked! My Drobo dashboard on the Mac gives me all the same information I used to get when it was connected directly.

Now I have all the features of the Drobo but over the network and in case I ever run out of space on the single Drobo, I can plug another one into the Droboshare.

It also runs applications too - although I haven't tried any of these yet.

Drobo Update

With the Drobo getting over 80% with the two 500GB drives I decided it was time to add another. I did contemplate a 1TB drive but at the present rate of consumption I thought another 500GB would probably do the trick for a while (and I do still have one bay left just in case!).

Misco provided the bare drive with their usual prompt service and it dropped in with absolutely no fuss at all; however, the Drobo has been quite noticeably noisier since I popped the extra drive in (not worryingly so but louder nonetheless). I'm hoping it will settle down, as that's sort of what happened with the original drives (although it's never been as quiet as my Freecom externals). Only time will tell.

Drobo is here!

As you will have read in an earlier post one, I have been having problems with one of my Freecom hard drives (which is has been returned for a warranty replacement - I'll report back on this when I see it again!) and this brought into sharp focus my complete absence of any storage strategy.

Having decided to get a second Mac, it was obvious that I would need more external storage and so I decided to get sensible and go for something that would give me a bit of security. After much deliberation (which included extensive consideration of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+) I eventually plumped for Drobo. I won't bore you with a run down as virtually every podcast and blog has done that to death.

It arrived, earlier than expected, yesterday along with two 500GB drives and I set it up. I've now transferred the first batch of content over to it and everything seems to be working well. The next thing will be to try out streaming from the Drobo to the Media Centre Mac downstairs to see how that works...