Thanks, Jane, for this report on the Drobo as a disk storage device. I
think it was Shaun who wanted to get one of these based on the reviews
in various PC magazines. Is the only alert mechanism that a drive is
failing through the colored display lights? I'm wondering whether
checking through something like Disk Utility's SMART drive check, or
other accompanying DROBO-specific software might not also flag a
warning of potential disk problems. Then, the information could be
sent via a Growl alert or other notification method.
Cheers,
Esther
On Sep 9, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Jane Lee wrote:
Alright, I promised someone on this list I'd mention something about
this when I get my Drobo, which I got yesterday. Here's a quite long
summary of what the Drobo is, how to set it up, and my take on the
accessibility of this all. Please take it with a grain of salt since I
am sighted although somewhat familiar with vo and jaws (just a
geek/programmer interested in accessibility in general), and if you
have any questions just reply!
For those of you who don't know what a Drobo is, simply put it's a
storage device. You can connect it to your computer, or you can
connect it to a separate device called DroboShare to share it on your
wired network with gigabit ethernet. The drobo device itself comes in
two versions, the older generation is USB 2.0 only and the newer
supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Both generations of drobos can
be used with DroboShare, but DroboShare must be purchased separately.
Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to buy DroboShare yet, so my email
is going to be about the Drobo itself connected straight to a
computer.
Ultimately what Drobo does is that it lets you put up to four 3.5"
(regular desktop sized) SATA hard drives in a redundant configuration.
That means you don't have to worry about losing data from a failed or
failing hard drive. The downside to a redundant storage scheme is that
you are not able to use the full space available. Say I put in four
one terabyte drives in the Drobo, I'd end up with approximately three
terabytes of space, and one terabyte will be used to make it
redundant. If any single drive fails, I can switch it out and put in a
new one and it'll rebuild the hard drive for you with no loss of data.
The storage to overhead ratio on the Drobo (i.e. like I said, 3
terabytes out of 4 is usable) is a lot better than something like
mirroring, also known as raid 1, where if you had 4 terabytes, you'd
only be able to use 2. However, it's really important to keep in mind
that redundant storage like Drobo is absolutely not the same as a
backup. You can use Drobo as a backup, you can use Drobo as primary
storage, but absolutely do not go without a backup of some sort. Drobo
only takes care of the possibility of a hard drive dying (which is
only a matter of time, not an "if"). It does not do anything about,
for example, your fat fingered deletion of a really important file you
needed. You delete a file off the Drobo and it's gone forever from the
Drobo. Please absolutely do not forget that!
Physically, the drobo is the height of about five hard drives stacked
on top of each other and it's about 1.5 times longer. It's actually
quite a small device. Also, I think it's fairly quiet just barely
louder than my mac mini and the iMac as well as all the laptops when
it's writing a lot, especially if the drives you get are quiet as
well. Any 3.5" desktop SATA hard drive will work with this device.
Right now, one terabyte hard drives can be purchased for around $130.
Installing drives in the Drobo is ridiculously easy. All you have to
do is take off the front cover (it's magnetic, it'll come right off
with a small tug outward), then grab one drive, hold it so the circuit
board on the drive is facing the floor and that the SATA port is
facing the drobo, and shove it right into any of the four spaces for
the drives, which are all stacked one on top of each other until you
hear the click from the latch to the left of the drive. To eject, push
that latch to the left and the drive will pop out. After you are done,
just put the front cover back on. No screws or screwdrivers necessary.
The main software you use to monitor Drobo is something called Drobo
Dashboard (from here on for the sake of convenience I'm just going to
call it Dashboard, not to be confused with Apple Dashboard). It is
accessible provided you don't go into the main dashboard interface,
but instead you go into the advanced interface. You can do things like
format your Drobo, put it on standby, monitor how much space is on the
drobo (since the reading from Finder and Disk Utility will NOT be
accurate) and more. You can also set it up so the Dashboard software
will send you an email alert if anything is going on with the Drobo
itself, like a failing drive or a new drive inserted, but the software
has to be running on your computer all the time. Dashboard comes with
a menu extra, but it's pretty useless since the only useful thing
there is the icon itself showing drive space available and that icon
is inaccessible.
So here's the problem. Drobo and the Dashboard software both use
colors and lights to show the health of the drives. The drobo itself
will use colors next to each drive on the device, and the Dashboard
software will also show this in colors. I've played around with it in
VO and basically while you will be able to figure out if something is
wrong with or without email alerts (it will go from "I am healthy" to
something like "Data at risk"), you won't know which hard drive is the
issue. And this is a problem because Drobo's greatest strength is
handling issues like these. So unless you can get sighted help once in
a while, I don't think there really is a way to deal with this.
Voiceover just chokes on the image representation of the drobo in
dashboard, which is the only way to see the hard drives having
problems. Upgrades are also similarly problematic since unless you
labeled the hard drives you're not going to be able to figure out
which drive to replace when you want to upgrade the space available.
Anyway, that may or may not influence your decision. I have not tried
many devices similar to the Drobo before purchasing it, just knowing
that it came highly recommended by many friends. I had a RAID array
before this, and the Drobo makes my life so much easier. I love the
redundancy because I know that some day these drives will fail. So
your mileage may vary. So far, I've only had it and used it for a day,
but it's been pretty good. Performance-wise it's not fantastic, but
it's par with most external USB/firewire drives out there.
The drobo with firewire 800 is going to be around $500 (search for a
promo code if you are buying from the drobo store, you can usually
find them for $20 to as much as $100 off). The older USB 2.0 only
drobo is around $350. Droboshare is $189 or so. All these figures are
USD, give or take a little depending on where you buy them. They're on
sale at drobo.com as well as on newegg and macmall - there is a list
of resellers on the drobo.com website.
Hope this comes in handy for someone, hehe.
Cheers,
Jane
