As we may all remember, I had a serious drive crash a few weeks ago. It obliterated my iTunes library in the process, including the many many hours of both old and new Doctor Who which had formed the basis of the reviews I had been writing for several weeks. While I still have notes on one, I have decided to postpone the entire event until I get back up and running, which will probably be a few months yet.
In the meantime, as anyone who has been bitten by data loss will tell you, I decided to make sure something like this would never happen again. I had heard about this product called Drobo for several months prior to the fatal crash, and was intruiged by the innate coolness if being able to hot plug the device and exchange the drives on the fly. The other cool thing that Drobo did was create a uniform pool of storage that could be accessed and used as a primary data pool. Very neat.
There were two problems with the original Drobo. One, the interface was only USB which posed a problem for the seemless transfer and playback of video files which was to be the main point of existance. Secondly, the price of entry was rather steep. At $500 I could use the setup I already had And still have some money left over. Five hundred is just the price of the exterior case, no drives included. I was still interested, but having a solution that already worked and that I had recently purchased I was reluctant to replace it. Then two things happened. The second generation Drobo appeared replete with FireWire 800 (which is absolutley essential for streaming video) and my drive setup crashed, hard.
Even though the setup cost was substantial, I have to say, after using it for several months now, Drobo is with every freakin’ penny. Redundancy, expandibilty, and ease of use trump any other storeage system out there. The abilty to just pop out a drive and replace it when it’s full or damaged means that you can buy for your storage needs now and upgrade when you have the need to without damaging any of the data or even interupting active transfers. It’s quiet, mostly unobtrusive, and above all fast and reliable enough to be used as a primary storage solution. I have enough video sitting on my Drobo to watch continuously for nearly a month. My daily backups also sit safely and redundantly on my Drobo. This is quite possibly the most important purchase that I have ever made for enhancing my digital life style and I couldn’t be happier with it. As the fellas on MacBreak Weekly say, I’m feelin’ Droovy.
