Drobo Again

As previously discussed I've been gradually moving data over to my Drobo. I recently invested in a DroboShare, which lets me share the contents of the Drobo as NAS.


Although I run my data through a Windows Server, I have been toying with the idea of having a large majority of the content available through a NAS share rather than let the Windows box do the work. In this way, if the server is down, then I'm not affected. This is effectively what the Drobo can achieve, however configuring it wasn't as simple as it seems.

The first issue I encountered was understanding whether, when plugging a Drobo with data on it, I would need to reformat the Drobo to work with the DroboShare (turns out you don't reformat and the data just gets passed through). This "feature" wasn't at all clear in the manual so I decided not to use my primary disk storage and data to test the theory and I just plugged the Drobo alone into the network.


At this point, I'd expect the Drobo to get a DHCP address and be visible in the Drobo dashboard software, but it wasn't. A quick check of DHCP on the server and a trace from Ethereal and I was sure the Drobo had requested and successfully picked up an IP address, but it wouldn't appear on the dashboard.

With fingers, toes and anything else I could find, all crossed, I decided to plug the Drobo into the Droboshare. As if by magic, the drive appeared, presented through the Drobo - with all data intact.

I wouldn't advise anyone to try this kind of cavalier approach but I guess that is part of the underlying Drobo design of simplicity, however I think I like the idea of having a bit more control of my storage.

After a few days of use, I started to notice problems; firstly the DroboShare wasn't always visible; it wasn't clear in the first place how the Drobo would present itself and after tweaking the settings I managed to get it named as \\DROBO\ on my network, but it wasn't always accessible and it wasn't clear why.

The second problem was to do with security - or more precisely the lack of it. Anyone with children will recognise the desire to prevent little fingers tinkering where they shouldn't. For me, that means making my music, video and picture shares all read-only to everyone except me. I can't achieve that with DroboShare.

Eventually the teething problems caused me to take the DroboShare out and resort to my previous configuration. I'm disappointed but perhaps I shouldn't have expected anything over and above a basic NAS setup. Since reverting to plain Drobo, I've had seamless operations once again.

Second hand DroboShare anyone?

Drobo Update

I’ve had my Drobo for a few months now. For those of you not familiar with the technology, the Drobo is a storage device from a company called Data Robotics. Follow the link above to their website for full details.

I’d been looking for a decent home/home office storage device for some time. RAID support was a must and initially I thought I wanted NAS because my solution at the time was to keep a server running continuously. The server performs other tasks and I was using it for file serving too.

Previously I had taken the plunge with the Linksys NSLU2 which runs a modified version of Linux. Unfortunately at the time, the device only supported ext3 filesystems and as I loaded the device with more data, responses became erratic and I found the exported systems going read-only and losing content. Lucky for me the problem seemed to be the device rather than the actual data on disk and I was able to recover everything using a little software utility which allowed me to read ext3 devices on Windows. This experience scared me and it was time to look for something else.

The Drobo hit the spot for a number of reasons; firstly it was a dedicated device which took SATA II drives. It has a USB connection, allowing me to plug it directly into my existing server and third (and at the time most importantly) Data Robotics had just released a NAS head which could be used with the standard Drobo, or removed without affecting the format of data on the device itself.

So, as I said, I’ve had it for a few months and what is there to say about it? Well, not a lot. It works – and so far has worked flawlessly. But there are a few things of note.

Firstly, I have a BIOS incompatibility issue; when my server reboots, if the Drobo is plugged into a USB port, it hangs the server. I haven’t bothered to resolve this yet; weighing up the relative merits of just living with this problem or upgrading the BIOS on my server, then I fall squarely on the side of accepting the workaround of unplugging the drive at boot time and plugging it back in as the system comes up. If I was using a standalone PC, then I would obviously have fixed the problem.

Second, I was interested to see that despite my system having two 1TB drives and RAID protection, the X: drive I’d created reported back a 2TB file system. Was RAID on or not? Well, yes it was; the Drobo presents a 2TB file system regardless of the drives you have installed. It’s virtualisation in action! As you allocate all of the physical storage available, you get prompted to add or swap drives to match the physical demand. I like this feature as it’s a painless way to upgrade your storage over time and as terabyte drives drop in price (currently I’ve seen them at 1TB for £99) it helps smooth out the cost of upgrade because drive sizes can be mixed and matched.

Last, there’s the issue of firmware upgrade. Version 1.1.1 of firmware is available and it was a simple task to upgrade, however I can’t implement the code without rebooting the Drobo and that requires closing all the active files accessing the Drobo on the server. This is not a major problem though and wouldn’t be a problem on a standalone PC.

All in all, the Drobo looks good and does the job. Having 1TB of new capacity has encouraged me to spend time moving my data over in a controlled and structured fashion. The process will take months (a subject I will return to), but in the meantime I have bags of spare capacity and an easy upgrade path for both additional capacity and NAS connectivity.

Now, if anyone out there would like me to review their NAS product, then I’d be only too happy….

My Drobo Has Been Ordered

I've been mulling over for some time whether to purchase/evaluate the Drobo storage device. Up to now I've been put off by the lack of NAS support, as the device only supports USB2.0. However all that has changed; I read today that there's now the DroboShare, which converts the Drobo into a NAS device. I've yet to see the full details (and I doubt the DroboShare will not be available some time in the UK) however this now justifies my purchase (as no-one has offered me one so far!).

The order is in - for Drobo and two 1TB drives. I can't wait...