I’ve recently been given the opportunity to review one of Drobo’s latest creations: the Drobo FS. The FS, which stands for file sharing, is a 5-bay NAS that plugs into your local network via gigabit ethernet. In plain english, you plug the Drobo FS into your wireless router and all the computers in your home (or small office) instantly have access to a huge hard drive. From a technical standpoint, there is a lot more to it than that, but the beauty of this device is you don’t need to know what is going on behind the scenes in order to reap the benefits.

I will be conducting a more detailed review which will be posted over at my Boston Tech Gear column, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts after a week with the device. From unboxing to set-up, getting hands-on with the Drobo has been a wonderful experience. Maybe it was the little black pouch it came in, or the fact that within 15 minutes I was able to add 4TB of protected storage to my network – whatever it was, I liked it.

Setup on my Mac was as easy as it gets. Insert the installer disc, click install and restart. As soon as my machine had come back to life I was greeted by the Drobo Dashboard (more on this in the full review) and a public share with full read/write access for all the computers on my home network. That’s it.

Transfer speeds over my gigabit ethernet connection were good, but definitely not as fast as a locally attached firewire/USB hard drive. This is for a few reasons, which I will get into in the full review, but for the vast majority of users, speeds will be more than sufficient. Case and point, I asked a non-techie person in my house to copy some files to the public share and then asked them what they thought about the transfer speed – to which they replied something along the lines of “it takes as long as it normally does.”

Once you start digging into the advanced options, which there are plenty of, you can really start having some fun with the device. One can set up additional users and shares, control the time it takes before the hard drives spin down – even dim the LEDs. This Drobo also gives you the option to set up Time Machine backup shares. Have three Macs in your house all using Time Machine? Not a problem, each one can have its own backup.

So far, I have been very happy with the design, ease of setup, and simplicity of the device. There are some weaknesses, but you will have to read my full review to hear about those. Stay tuned.