Data Robotics "Drobo". Anyone ever heard of this?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gary Seven
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Gary Seven

Just wondering if anyone has used or seen this so-called "raid alternative."
They call it a "storage robot." No, I am not spamming for this company, I
actually just read about them in PC Photo's enewsletter, and was wondering
if anyone out there has heard anything about this storage solution, good or
bad.

Link: http://www.drobo.com/products.aspx#products_nav

Later,

G7
 
Previously Gary Seven said:
Just wondering if anyone has used or seen this so-called "raid alternative."
They call it a "storage robot." No, I am not spamming for this company, I
actually just read about them in PC Photo's enewsletter, and was wondering
if anyone out there has heard anything about this storage solution, good or
bad.
Click to expand...
Link: http://www.drobo.com/products.aspx#products_nav

G7
Click to expand...

I would stay away from this. The whole "no need ti understand anything,
this black box will jsut take care of it" is highly suspicuous. You
also do not get any information on how safe your data is and what
happens if drives fail.

From the stated size figures, I conclude this likely is a
Linux box with some LVM scripting to atomate things and
using the RAID5 ''grow'' feature (a two disk RAID5 is
possible with Linux...). I think thins thing is overpriced and
that knowlede of how RAID works is essential in order to
avoid nasty surprises.

Arno
 
Just wondering if anyone has used or seen this so-called "raid alternative."
They call it a "storage robot."
Click to expand...
Link: http://www.drobo.com/products.aspx#products_nav
Click to expand...
This got a few mentions on some of the Linux fora a short while ago. The
consensus was that, as Arno says, it's probably a single-purpose distribution
with some clever configuration work which has been done on it. It might (as
they claim) contain some proprietary, patent-pending technology which does a
job similar to RAID, but from the descriptions that have been put out, it's a
duck ("if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and
tastes like a duck ... then it's probably a duck.")
Most of the discussion centred on if it was likely to contain code that
should be published due to being derived from GPL'd code (or some other Open
Source License) ; no-one had examined an actual device, but the general
consensus was that it was not necessarily the case that to build such a machine
on top of an existing body of code would require writing new code that would
require to be released. It could be done with un-modified GPL'd utilities but
using freshly-written ("clean room") code in the script files that glued things
together, and that any *brand new* software they wrote (implementing their
"patent-pending" technologies) wouldn't need to be GPL'd, because it's by
definition, new code. Or they could have built it on a code-base under a
BSD-ish license. Or they could have built it from scratch in a clean room.
But the betting is that they didn't do a "clean room" re-implementation
- there are enough FLOSS projects for making dedicated NAS-like systems to give
a good indication of the number of programmer hours that are be involved in
producing the necessary code on top of an available corpus of code ; building
an entire OS to "enterprise" levels of stability is a very large project for a
relatively small company. So, the likelihood is that they've either done some
clever configuration work and written their own "non-RAID--RAID-alike" part of
the system, or they've conveniently forgotten to release source code which they
should have.

Be interesting to see if anyone cares sufficiently to buy one and take
it's "system code" apart.
Seeing what file system is used would be a good start.
 
[snip]
Seeing what file system is used would be a good start.
http://www.drobo.com/support.aspx#q11


Q. Can I switch my Drobo between a Macintosh and PC?
A. That depends on how you formatted Drobo in the beginning. Generally,
Window's-based PCs use "NTFS" formatting. Macs use "HFS+". Macs can "read-
only" from NTFS formatted drives. PCs can't read HFS+ drives without
special software installed (You can experiment using "FAT32" (MS-DOS)
formatting for use between Macs & PCs but this format is not officially
supported - see drobo.com for more information).
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

If it's a NAS ("Network Attached Storage") device, what matters to the
network-ed devices is if it can talk an appropriate network "mass storage"
protocol. (examples include "NFS", "Microsoft Windows Shared Volume", "CIFS",
"FTP", "whatever-protocol-YouTube-uses".
How the drives are internally formatted is only of interest if you're trying
to access the metal of the drives from outside. For example, if they're as
legible as internal drives in a Windows Network.
 
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