drobo, Day 1

My drobo arrived at the office today along with a nice 750GB drive for its first slot. At the moment, 750GB drives seem to have the lowest price per gigabyte as 1TB drives are still the shiny new hotness.

Data Robotics has done a nice job with the packaging; there’s an almost Apple-esque attention to detail as far as the cover pieces and packing materials go. Manuals are sparse, but this is to be expected in a product that’s selling point is its ease of use. Their cardboard is a little flimsier than Apple’s — but hey, they’re a startup…

Installation was a snap. There are no cables involved, each drive just slides neatly into one of the four drive bays where it meets a connector which is solidly attached to the case. I’ve heard reports that the drives are difficult to remove, but I haven’t given it a shot yet. There is a very high “blinky light” factor with this device, which is somewhat muted by the smoked plastic faceplate, which is held to the case with magnets.

Integration with Mac OS X was similarly easy. The drobo appears as a 2TB drive to the host OS, which allows the software on the drobo to dynamically rearrange space as needed. On power on, OS X recognized the drive as unformatted, and once formatted the drive in the drobo was immediately available for me to start transferring my media library. Transfer speeds are reasonable given USB 2.0 (I haven’t run any benchmarks yet), but you can expect to spend several hours waiting for a half-terabyte of media to copy to the drobo. Definitely not a great device if you’re interested in editing DV movies, but certainly more than adequate for archival and playback.

The next steps for me are to finish copying over my existing media, swap out the 2×320GB drives that are currently in the G5’s internal drive bays into the drobo, and reinstall the original 160GB boot volume which shipped with the G5.

So far, so good. More to follow.