Scoble interviews Jim Schaff in the video above. Jim is the Director of Marketing for Data Robotics, the guys who make the Drobo
I wrote a review on the Drobo last week and think it is the best consumer level back up and storage device that I’ve seen yet. If you are not backing up your photos up, it is only a matter of time before you will lose your photos. With replication, the Drobo provides a much better, safer, way to back up your bits. While those of you who are supergeeks can build replication of your data by building your own server, the Drobo represents a cheaper and more simple way for most consumers to do this.
Mr. Thomas. you should rather take care of your business, zooomr, which is in limbooo
It will be interesting to see how the Windows home server competes when it is released.
It will come down to cost but the home server will have a lot of other useful features which Drobo is missing.
Cheaper than what? It’s cheaper than ReadyNAS and probably cheaper than a Windows home server solution will be, but more expensive than say a typical (non-RAID) USB drive and more expensive than an online storage solution like Mozy (not that an online solution could handle these quantities of data).
Though my only real problem with Drobo is that it doesn’t sit on the network – why create such a kick-ass solution, essentially modernizing the RAID, but lock it to one computer via USB? (Yes, I know you can movie to other computers or share the drive – not as efficient.)
Thomas, I read somewhere that stated you scan all of your pictures and important documents/files. I was wondering how you went about scanning thousands of these documents and what scanner is best for this. Thanks.
Francis, I use a Canon photocopier/scanner combo. It’s a commercial unit at my work so it’s probably not affordable for everyday use. It converts copied documents into pdfs that are emailed to me and then saved on my hard drive.
I’m sure there are cheaper alternatives, I’m just not sure what they are.
taratara, I’m working many, many, hours on Zooomr every day. It’s getting better and better. Today the system is very fast and stable. Much more than it has been any day since our launch. We are working hard on making Zooomr everything it can be.
Hey Dave, cheaper than ReadyNAS or Windows home server.
More expensive than a USB drive, but actually not by much when you consider replication, which USB drives can’t do at all.
The value of the Drobo though is that is as easy as a USB device but replicates. For many people configuring a ReadyNAS or their own server will be not only more expensive but much more difficult than just plugging in a drobo.
Even though I’m fairly tech savvy and a geek. I’ll probably buy a couple more drobos before investing in home server technology. The speed issue isn’t really that important for me with my storage and especially with the Windows solution I’d be afraid that it would perform less like a USB drive and more like a PC which is to say bugs galore.
I’ll give up some speed and functionality for a cheaper, easier device that replicates.
Keep in mind too that as internal drives are cheaper than external drives, the cost of the drobo is at least partially offset by the money you save buying internal drives vs. external USB drives.
For me though it’s real value comes down to the replication of your data and I don’t know of a cheaper easier way to replicate data to ensure recovery of live data.
The drobo has finally pushed me to make my own networked storage server. I took my daughters Ubuntu PC and two 230GB hard drives and (sweat) put them into that machine. Then I created a RAID0 array of the two drives on the machine. It took a lot of reading to get there and I accidentally wiped out my photo hard drive (but had a two week old backup).
I hope in the future to just add drives and manage them via the LVM. This saved me about $700 ($500 drobe + 2 400GB SATA drives) and I learned a lot. Only for people that are comfortable with man pages and HOWTOs written by geeks.
marstein:
You do realize that RAID0 is nothing like Drobo right? What you have created is actually making your data twice as likely to be lost.
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The topic is quite trendy in the net right now. What do you pay attention to when choosing what to write about?