Any experience with the Drobo Elite?

I have to upgrade storage soon, does anyone have any experience with the Drobo elite Storage Array?

Comments

[Rich Mattingly]

Stephen - I thought the price point for the Drobo boxes were a little out-of-touch once you consider what they really are. What I did was find an old PC case that looks like it was used as a server at one point, so it had 8 sata ports on the motherboard, suitable for 8 hard drives of my choice. I then installed a free program on the machine called FreeNAS (I got mine free when the UB science dept. was ready to chuck it out, but a similar box would run you 100 bucks, max - you don't need much hardware oomph to run what I'm doing). What I'm left with is a normal-looking PC tower that does EVERYTHING the Drobo systems do, including being able to hot-swap hard drives and expand with new drives infinitely. The biggest plus is as a multi-machine studio, I can hook my "DIY Drobo" to my network via the network card that was already in the box when I rescued it and achieve gigabit ethernet-level speed for read/write which is impossible for the Drobo's. The Drobo's are crippled by needing to have an extra, expensive proprietary network device that attaches to the Drobo via USB - thereby limiting you to USB speed at best, which can really suck.

Anyway - here's the project's website: http://freenas.org/freenas It's well worth looking in to and it saved me a grand. AND I'm NOT a big computer technical guy - the setup was pretty damned easy.