The Drobo is supposed to be one of those solutions that essentially pops out of the box and with very little effort, just works. I ordered my Drobo FS through an Amazon retailer. What I wasn’t expecting was an experience…
The whole “Drobo Experience” starts out when you open up the box it’s shipped in. The first thing you see is a box that reads, “Welcome to the World of…” What a great way to start. This would make Seth Godin proud. The actual unit was wrapped in a black cloth that said Drobo. In fact, when you remove the top box that says, “welcome to the world of”, you see a black box that says Drobo. That’s just cool. The front even has a magnetic cover (very weak magnets in order to not affect the drives) in the front to provide a clean look.
Now on to the actual product. This could not have been easier to get going. I had myself all geared for a few hours of work. Instead, I just threw the drives in, powered them on and was in business. And the fact that the Drobo now natively supports Time Machine made it all that much easier. One thing I did do is download a Drobo app that limits the size of a Time Machine Partition. This ensures that Time machine doesn’t eat up your entire Drobo partition (which Time Machine can do quickly if left unattended).
Now that the important stuff is out of the way and I have the Drobo setup with Time Machine, I moved onto setting up DroboApps. Again, this could not have been any simpler. Just mount the DroboApps share and copy the .tgz files to it and restart the Drobo. Boom! Done deal.
This has seriously been one of the most pleasurable hardware experiences I have had in a long time. I wish someone at Data Robotics was paying or something for this glowing recommendation, but no such luck. This is just one of those products that gets its right. Remember the cliche, “you get what you pay for?” Well this is a perfect example.
