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April 14, 2008
Drobo First Impressions
Ok, last week I got my Drobo. got the USB attached one. Maybe should have gotten the NAS version with the 1gb ethernet card as I think that is faster than USB, but that wasn't at NewEgg when I ordered. The thing was dead easy to set up. Just stick the drives in, plug in the power, plug in the usb and put in the CD. A bit confusing was that it asked me what format to use formatting the drives, FAT32 or NTFS. As a geek I appreciate the choice and chose FAT32 as I am using Vista. But not sure even this choice is in the purview of most of the target audience. It formatted the drives. One confusing thing is that the format offered me to make two partitions since I had 4 750Gig drives and the NT limit is a 2TB partition. Of course it said it in more user friendly manner, but I know what was behind it. So I said, ok, two partitions and gave them two different drive letters. Then after the formatting was done, I looked for two new attached drives. There was only one, H:. That was 2TB. Hummmm. Looks like it didn't format two partitions and somehow I lost 1TB. So over to the Drobo Dashboard. It said 3TB of drives, but (2.72TB actual*). I never found in the help or anywhere what the "*" refers to. Somehow I am guessing Windows overhead, I loose 280GBof storage. Then Drobo says I hve 2.03 TB "avaiable for data" and 704.2GB "used for protection" and "overhead" of 2.23GB. I am confused about all the different numbers and why it takes 25.8% for mirroring/protection. That is less than typical RAID so I am happy, but I just hope it works when a drive fails.
I am playing music off the Drobo drive, MP3s. Ok, now the fun part. Lets pull out a drive. Ok, the pulling was easy. Drobo is now flashing red and green and the music continues to play. The Drobo dashboard is flashing "data protection in progress" an dthe free space went down by 750GB. But the data is stil lthere and I am still streaming. Wow. While it is running, I just plugged in the 750GB drive again. Still flashing red to green lights, and still playing the music. In about 3 seconds, the "free space" goes back up to 1.44TB and actual back up to 2.72. Still flashing Data Protection in Progress, but still playing music. I don't care what it is doing. I pulled out a drive and put it back in without interruption to the music playing or loosing any data.
Drobo RULES!
Posted by Martin at April 14, 2008 11:03 AM
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