I am banging my head on the limit of my internal hard drive and want a very secure place to externally keep my photos. I am looking at a DROBO as a long term solution as it has high capacity and safety.

Grateful to hear about your experience, or other ideas?

Any reason for the DROBO? They look pricey, not really sure of the benefit of the beyondRAID stuff TBH. Netgear RND4000 + 4 1TB drives would be roughly the same price as a diskless DROBO!

Thanks for the suggestion, Woody – just had a look at the Netgear site and I see why I am looking at Drobo. The Netgear site has all kinds of technical stuff like

Try setting TCP delay_ack to 0. Default is 3, which causes handshake problems with the ReadyNAS, causing severe performance penalty. You can set the delay_ack with the following command from the OS X terminal:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

Whereas the Drobo site has a video of a girl plugging in disks.

I am looking for a simple solution that doesn’t make my head spin 🙂

Whereas the Drobo site has a video of a girl plugging in disks.

well, if a girl can do it…

if you’re looking for secure storage I’d look at one of the cloud type solutions like Dropbox etc as well as an ‘at home’ external disk of some sort.

DrJ

Looking for something similar myself.

Running out of room with my current 1TB external drive and have chanced it thus far with no back up. 😯

As I have a laptop the idea of going wireless vis NAS is really appealing but the Drobo gear as good as it is remains too expensive, unless it’s for a commercial application.

I’ve found Synology gear which would seem to fit the bill. All the reviews I’ve praise the relatively low price, ease of use and choice available.

I’m still deciding which enclosure to go for…

I’m using a QNAP TS210. Works a treat. 2 x 1.5TB disks mirrored. Can see it from pc and the mac. Web management tha works from the iPad plus an app for the iPhone to stream the media to it.

I have a Drobo. 4-bay FW-800 model.

Had it for about 18 months now. The ability to plug in larger disks without moving the data somewhere else first and re-RAIDing is brilliant.

I did have some issues with volume corruption, but this turned out to be due to me unplugging or switching it off without ejecting the drives first. Once I made sure I ejected it every time, things have gone brilliantly.

It is a little noisy due to air movement, though nothing that will disturb music at even low volumes.

I tend to use it as a backup device, though if I was using it as a primary/scratch drive I would have the data somewhere else. Same goes for any device. Data is priceless in a lot of cases.

I have a Drobo (v.2) 4-bay connected to my mac. I run my photo and itunes libraries off it and use another partition for weekly bootable backups. You shove in some disks, plug it in, connect to the computer and tell it how big you want the volume to be(16GB) and how many partitions you want.

And, err, thats it.

£285 off Ebay inc 2x1TB drives. Simples.