I’ve been looking for a backup solution for a while. Apple want’s way too much money for their Time Capsule device and it’s maxed out at 1TB. Other RAID based solutions are complex and expensive.
I had never heard of Drobo before. Kevin Rose from Digg posted a coupon code for $100 off a second generation Drobo. This was only good for the first 100 people to make the purchase. I was one of those people.
The Drobo is as expensive as the Timecapsule. It doesn’t come with any disks and it doesn’t do NAS but it’s infinitely extendable and supports disks of variying size not to mention it’s much easier to manage than RAID. I came close to cancelling the order but I was unable to find another solution that was worth the money. I’ll post a review once I’ve had a chance to play with it.
WAAAAAALLLL-E
So how do you like the Drobo? Doing some research after my machine crashed and nearly lost all my stuff. Is it a good buy?
I returned the Drobo and got a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II. It came with 2 TB of storage, Firewire 200 and 800 AND eSATA. I have it connected to my MacPro via Firewire 800. I could hack an eSATA connection but the speed diff isn’t worth the trouble.
This turned out to be much more economical. And the Studio Edition looks like a little mac. It’s funny to look at and it’s surprisingly quiet.