DroboShare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo
From Data Robotics
DroboShare is the ideal companion to the award-winning Drobo for users who want to share data over a local area network. The combined solution automates network management, safeguards your data and lets you easily add capacity as needed. With DroboShare, users can now access the information stored on the awardwinning Drobo from almost any client on the network. DroboShare can host up to two Drobos.
Brand: Data Robotics Model: 905-00001-001 Platform: Windows Format: CD Dimensions: 8.80" h x 21.20" w x 34.00" l, 2.20 pounds CPU: AMD Athlon 1 GHz Memory: 128000MB DRAM Hard Disk: 1GB Processors: 1 Networking: Hi-Speed USB Native resolution: 640x480 Display size: 669.2913385827
Nice but too slow This is a neat product, much like the original Drobo device in that is very easy to setup and use. The big problem, however, is that it is very slow. I expected some added latency with this device but I have to say that it is much more significant than I was hoping. The device goes into a sleep mode after a period of inactivity, so waking it up takes some added time, 3 or 4 seconds maybe. But even after it is spun up, it is still quiet slow, particularly when I am moving files around or flipping through photos. This is the first personal home NAS device I've used so maybe this amount of slowness is typical with these things. The convenience of being able to access my Drobo easily from any computer in the house is worth it to me and it integrates very nicely with my Drobo, so I am keeping it. Update 23 October 2008: I can't deal with it anymore. It is just too slow. I am going to look at other options. I should have just done this in the first place. Extremely unreliable To provide a little background on me: I'm a software developer by trade. I have built numerous PCs including a server that was using a RocketRaid RAID-5 controller. I switched to Drobo and DroboShare because, after my RAID array became critical, I could not find an adequate device that could support my desire for RAID 1+0. At this point, I just wanted something that worked. Just to make the point clearly: I'm technically savvy; I have a fairly good idea of what I speak. I bought a 2nd Gen Drobo and a DroboShare about a week ago. While the Drobo is performing well enough, DroboShare has proven out the opposite. DroboShare is supposed to act as a NAS head for Drobo. In this simple capacity, DroboShare generally fails. While DroboShare will connect to my network and performs adequately, it does so for brief periods of times. The DroboShare spontaneously loses connectivity to the Drobo within an hour of being connected! At this point, the only way that I can make Drobo responsive once again is to cycle the power! Interestingly, the DroboShare will still respond to pings. However, I could no longer SSH in nor access the storage attached to the DroboShare. Unfortunately, you can only determine the severe unreliability of DroboShare upon signing up for DroboSpace. Data Robotics sagely made a valid S/N a requirement for registering on DroboSpace. This has the benefit, for them, of keeping prospective customers from realizing how terrible DroboShare truly is. Reviewing the DroboSpace forums, there are a multitude of posts discussing lost connectivity as well as anemic performance (i.e., 15MB/s on a supposedly gigabit device). Also, from reading the forums, it becomes fairly clear that Data Robotics technical support is extremely poor. Given all of the above, caveat emptor! DroboShare is very much an alpha product that should not be on the market. While it may work for some, it was an utter failure for this user. Too slow for a network drive The data transfer over the network is slow that it does not meet the standard of today's network drive. You probably won't notice it if you copy a file or two. But if you try to copy large files (over gigabyte), you may want come back in a few hours. Trust me, I have other network drives at home in comparison to the Droboshare. In addition, it's overprice for something that doesn't perform.
