Storage paranoid freaks...

My wife got me a DROBO (www.drobo.com) for Christmas. It is the answer to my prayers and fixes my backup fettish I have for my pictures. I slapped 4 1tb drives in it and it is humming right along. I can try to answer and technical questions anyone might have.

Just thought I would post this incase someone hasn't heard of it or was thinking about it but not sure...

what happens if your house gets struck by lighting and the hard drives fry?

Steve, Congrats. It's nice that you have (4) tb drives but for those who aren't familiar with Drobo, one of it's unique features v. technologies like RAID is that all four drives could have been different capacities and the Digital Robot would have still protected their files.

How do you know which drive or drives your data is stored on? I have looked at the DROBO units and I want to be able to remove the drives with my data and store them off site.
Is the data accessible via your network or only by USB?
Thanks

it is stored on all the drives. It manages all the data across all the drives. You can 4 different size drives or all the same. It dedicates the largest of the drives to helping span the data. They have a decent video tutorial on the front of there website that shows how it all works. I will be Building another Drobo that mirrors this one and will be keeping it in another location. Plus My whole house is on UPS's so I feel a little better about surges etc. All in all it manages the data for me and i dont have to try to manually syncronize multiple drives all the time and spend house making sure it all copied ok with no errors etc.

The unique part of it is it is not raid, it is its own technology. So you dont have to put the drives back in order if you ever have to replace the unit, it just knows whats what when you put them back in. You can use drives of different size, and it makes use of the capacity unlike raid etc.

Thanks RichNY, I have been working with it all day getting it setup etc.

I am actually going to 'put it to sleep' when not in use backing up photos that way it is not on all the time and unplugged from the wall untill I need it again.

Savagebasher wrote in post #4585923
what happens if your house gets struck by lighting and the hard drives fry?

Same thing that would happen to any computer or external HD i reckon....

PaintballPhotography.c​om wrote in post #4586307
How do you know which drive or drives your data is stored on? I have looked at the DROBO units and I want to be able to remove the drives with my data and store them off site.
Is the data accessible via your network or only by USB?
Thanks

It's USB interface only right now. I don't think they are interested in making a NAS so to speak. This is designed for personal data storage redundancy not so much network storage. But you can hook it up to a Airport Extreme router USB port and use it on the network as long as you do not format with Journal turned on.