I've had my Drobo for about three weeks now and a lot of people have been asking how I'm liking it so far. I decided to get the Drobo because I wasn't happy with my current backup situation. I wanted a device I could use for primary storage and backup that would also keep the data safe. The Drobo seemed like such an obvious necessity so I decided the high price of the Drobo was going to be the price to keep my data safe.

As you can see, I only have two hard drives in the Drobo for now: two 500GB 7200rpm Seagates. I went with Seagate because I've never had a problem with their drives, and I didn't go with Western Digital because I always have problems with their drives. Two 500GB drives give me 461.42GB of actual storage available for data, the rest is for protection and overhead. I'd say this setup will last me a while; as you can see from the capacity lights, I'm only using about 20% of the capacity. That's because I've never really had this much storage available to me, so I eventually have to delete things. If I had it sooner, it'd be filled with the RAW images from my camera I couldn't afford to keep.

Once plugged in, it'll show up as a normal external hard drive that needs to be formatted. I think I used Disk Utility to format it to HFS+. You'll also have to install the Drobo Dashboard software which is to update the firmware on the Drobo and give you on-screen notifications in case you lose a drive you near capacity. As you can see, it puts this ugly little icon down in your Dock which I can do without. I might get around to changing it one day, but for now it'll just be annoying. They also put something up in the menu bar, a pie chart of your drive usage with a menu of options, which is good enough for me, so hopefully they'll give an option to turn off the dock icon.

The noise: As far as complaints about the hardware, I'd say it's the noisiest piece of hardware in my room. I normally have about two or three computers on all the time, and luckily they'll all pretty dead silent. When you start reading and writing data from the Drobo and the fans and hard drives start kicking up, it's very apparent and there's nothing else to drown out the noise. The fans compared to an Xbox which I say is notorious for being noisy are not as bad, but the clicking of the hard drives might be more annoying than an Xbox. I don't know if it's the particular drives I got or what, but it seems to be a common comment about the Drobo.

Drobo Share: At first, I was sure I would want to get the Drobo Share along with the Drobo, but after some digging and some observations, I just can't justify it anymore. I thought it would be great to have the Drobo as a stand-alone network storage device and have all my computers have quick access to it, but you know what? It works just as fine as a shared volume off of my Mac, and Samba takes care of any file-system conflicts, which was said to be a problem with the Drobo Share. Also, the Drobo Share is advertised as having gigabit network speeds. What's the point if USB 2.0 can't even handle gigabit speeds? What the Drobo needs is an integrated gigabit ethernet port so we can read and write to the drives at gigabit speeds. And of course, the Drobo Share costs an absurd $200.

Bottom line: Despite the minor inconveniences of the software and the noise the Drobo produces, and not to mention the hefty price tag, I'd still recommend this product to anybody. It's a great feeling knowing your data is safe. The little bits and pieces I did complain about weren't even that big of a deal which shows you have to nitpick to find faults in this product. Everything seems to work just the way it does in the demo videos. It's intuitive, reliable and functional, which makes a good product. Now I just have to find a way to sync the device to Amazon S3 and I'll be quite a happy camper.