Drobo: Worlds first storage robot
Now, this rocks! Drobo is a storage robot which allows you to not have to think about storage any more. One of the problems I have is my photos being stored in places. I have 2 300 GB external hard drives, which both store my Aperture vault. Then I have the original data stored on my main hard drive in my Mac Pro. Now, with Drobo, in theory, I could store the aperture library just on Drobo, and not have to worry about it. It’s not a RAID array, as such, but it does do mirroring, migration of data, and other cool features.
It connects via USB, takes SATA Drives, and just automates your storage needs.
Couple of things I want to see:
- Support for more drives (say 8 or 16)
- NAS/iSCSI support. Linked in with above. My thinking behind this is if you have one of these with 16 750 GB HDDs, you would make images (think VHDs) of drives, which would be mountable over iSCSI or connectable via SMB or NFS. The reason I think iSCSI would be to allow Media Center to connect to it, and actually record to it. Also, Exchange could have a chunk of storage, same with SQL. I am thinking of my own network here, but it should work with everyone’s. or at least guys with as many machines as I have.
I have read about this before, but <a href=”http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/05/robotic\_hard\_drives.html” mce_href=”http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/05/robotic\_hard_drives.html"this> post over at Inside Aperture</a> made me want to post this.
[This post is being posted on both my main blog, for the techie content, and my photography blog because of the Aperture stuff].