January 14, 2008
Filed under: Features, Storage, Networking
So we snagged a
DroboShare to hook our lonesome, directly-attached Drobo into. At $200 for what's essentially a USB network adapter we had some pretty high expectations, but thankfully we've been pretty impressed so far. Setup simply entails upgrading your Drobo hardware and Dashboard software to the latest versions (v1.1), restarting the box, and then plugging into the DroboShare. That's it. Detection, configuration, everything else is entirely automatic. Within a few moments it auto-mounts as a shared network drive via SMB, regardless of what file system the Drobo itself is running, or whether you're running Windows or Mac. (For those running on Linux or other operating systems, the DS is still accessible over your network via standard SMB share just like any other server.)
Click on for more on network auto-mounting and a couple speed tests.
Continue reading DroboShare Drobo NAS mini-review
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January 14, 2008
Filed under: Storage, Networking
The number one complaint about the
Drobo is pretty obvious:
getting the damn thing on your network without using a host computer. Well, consider that complaint sorted. Today Data Robotics is releasing a NAS upgrade for Drobo called the DroboShare, which will support:
- Gigabit Ethernet (yes!), static or dynamic IPs
- Auto-mounting SMB shares via Drobo Dashboard (supports SMB authentication)
- Dual USB 2.0 ports for two Drobos per DroboShare
- EXT3 file system support (officially!)
- Capacities up to 16TB per Drobo (provided you feed it 4TB drives that won't be out until, say, 2010)
- And possibly our favorite: email alerts, should a drive happen to crash, for example
It's also worth noting that Drobo is still capable of switching between NAS and direct-attached modes if you decide you want to take your Drobo OFF the network (but why would you do a thing like that?). The biggest problem with this add-on? It's $200, which brings the total cost of a DroboShare NAS rig to $700 --
without drives. Still, we have a feeling for many a Drobo user -- ourselves included -- the value of the functionality will far outweigh the borderline unreasonable price tag.
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