[devin_mm]

Does anyone have any experience with the DroboPro? I'm thinking of connecting it via Firewire800 to one of those new Mac Mini Servers to host all of my media and that looks like it would be the perfect device.

 

[bigshot]

I found it more cost effective to get two regular drobos. I packed them with 8 1.5TB drives and use them as my media drives. Very happy with them.

There is a limit to how big of a volume you can make on these. If you make the volume over 2TB, the mounting time gets inconvenient.

 

[devin_mm]

Hmmm... I thought about that the only issue is that the Mac Mini only has 1 Firewire800 port and to get two Drobos and a DroboShare it costs the same as a Pro.

 

[rhythmdevils]

I love my regular drobo, 4 slots. It's been really solid so far. I don't work off it, it's just a backup, so I don't know how fast it is. Don't realy care though, I just backup overnight.

 

[bigshot]

I run my Drobos off USB 2. For DVDs and playing music, that's plenty fast.

 

[devin_mm]

I'm looking to stream backups of my blu-rays so I don't think USB 2 would be enough.

 

[kb1gra]

Don't do the DroboShare. It is notorious for being S-L-O-W.

I personally use a Buffalo Linkstation Quad 8TB, connected via ethernet, in RAID5.

I looked into the DroboPro when I was looking for storage, but what I really needed was an NAS which it doesn't sound like exactly what you're looking for?

The mini has one FW800 but you can daisy chain FW drives, and theoretically connect one FW800 to another.

 

[devin_mm]

Thanks all for the information so far
I'm going to pick up a mac mini server first, personally I think that is the coolest piece of tech they have come out with since they moved over to the intel processor.

 

[oldskoolboarder]

I considered the Drobo w/ the Share. But it was too $$ w/o the drives. I wanted something that supported OSX and was relatively good w/ throughput. The 2nd Gen Drobo is good via FW but I hate that you have to buy the Share. I really wanted that RAID5 type of storage though.

I ended up w/ an HP EX490 and added another 1 TB. Yeah, it's more of a RAID0 mirror since it only does folder duplication but that's much better than no redundancy on my Time Capsule. It's VERY quiet and doesn't get hot. I've already had to restore my Macbook from a Time Machine backup and it was pretty painless. I recommend it for multi-OS environments.

 

[devin_mm]

Well I picked up a pair of Drobos (non pro) and I'm going to return them, the transfer rate is just not high enough. I store my HDTV programs (blu-ray movies) on my Drobo that is connected to my PC which does on the fly transcoding for my PS3 it used to work fine on my EX475 (with it doing the transcoding) for 720p content but now with my Drobo it seems to stutter all the time. I have the Drobo connected (FW800) to a Windows 2008 Enterprise server with 2x quad 2.66GHz Xeon processors, and 16GB of ram so it's not the PC, and it's networked to the PS3 using gigabit hardware.

I might just have to brake down and get a 16 port SATA/SAS RAID card and a new case.

 

[MCC]

A SATA/SAS card and a new case sounds like your best option. I have experience with the 3Ware 9690SA and it's FAST. Too bad it's in a server machine for Dad's business and not my PC.

 

[dishkyun]

How would the WD ShareSpace compare to the Drobo?

 

[devin_mm]

The Drobo is nice because it's really easy to swap out drives as you need more room but by default it is not networkable (without a Droboshare) where as this is a NAS box. As far as performance goes I don't know. I am quite fond of my HP Mediasmart EX475 since you can install whatever software you want but my needs have outgrown it.