Category — Storage

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.

I finally had the chance to install Seagate’s new Momentus XT hybrid hard drive, and let me tell you, this thing is cool. What is a hybrid hard drive you ask? Well, it is basically a 7200 RPM hard drive topped off with 4GB of solid state memory. Seagate says the memory is “intelligent,” meaning it knows to store the data you frequently access for enhanced read/write times. So how does this little guy perform in a MacBook Pro? Quite well.

Seagate designed the drive such that the computer thinks it is a normal drive. There are no special drivers needed to run it, which is a huge plus in my book. I installed this one in a 2010 i7 MacBook Pro. This laptop was purchased ‘off the shelf’ and therefore contained a 5400 RPM drive – why Apple doesn’t include the 7200 as the factory standard in a $2200 “pro” laptop is puzzling (wish I was still a shareholder). Coming from a 5400 RPM drive I knew the performance gains would be significant, but I never realized it would make this much of a difference.

Boot time has been cut down by about 1/2 and launching apps brings a smile to my face with each click. Some my biggest offenders: Tweetdeck, Lightroom, and Photoshop now open within 2 hops (that’s a Mac technical term, you know). It is really the icing on the cake with this machine. Now if I only had 8GB of RAM…

So should you run out to Amazon or Newegg and put this baby in your shopping cart? If your machine currently as a 5400 RPM drive installed – YES! If you already have a 7200 RPM drive, it will really depend on how thick your wallet is. For me, it was $130 well spent.