I installed it on Monday, and finally finshed shuttling around several Terabytes of data today. So far, so good. I was a little worried about the fans in it, and how loud it would be, since my studio is basically a converted bedroom that functions as the control room and the tracking room, so all the gear is in one spot, and any fans in this room are noise issues. The Drobo is definitely not any louder than my Mac Pro. It's for sure quieter, but I can't tell by how much It's right next to my Mac Pro and when I put my ear down there all I hear is the Mac Pro, but I know the Drobo is making noise, so, it's a win in that category.
It looks beautiful, and the Drobo dashboard app, which comes with it, is a very informative app that also shows you the status of your drives, so remote access monitoring of the lights on the front from the road (echoed in the app) should be a snap.
3 1.5TB drives and 1 TB drive gives me 3.6TB of redundant backup. 1TB of that is reserved for aTime Machine backup on the studio Mac Pro, and the Drobo is formatted for 16TB so I'll be able to grow the volume up from 3.6TB as bigger drives come out without reformatting or hopefully ever shuttling data around again. Or for at least a very long while.
Eventually, it will hang off my Airport Extreme router via USB as a NAS (network attached storage) with RAID 5-like capabilities, and everyone on my house network (A Mac Pro, Powermac G5 and a Macbook presently) will be backing up to it, with 3 1 TB Time Machine sparse bundles for each Mac (Currently the Airport Extreme limits you to 1 TB for a Time Machine backup if the drive is not directly connected to your computer).
Note that even though the Drobo gives you three chances to replace three dead drives, nothing's perfect, and the Drobo should definitely not be the sole backup solution. I still have a clone of my studio Mac's boot, dedicated project audio and soft synth library drives in my Mac Pro that are being synced nightly with Chronosync or incrementally updated with Carbon Copy Cloner in the case of the my boot drive. I'm also using a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) solution, various raw SATA drives triple backing up the most important stuff using the Thermaltake BlackX, and storing them in Weibetech static-free cases. A couple of these will be stored off-site, in case of fire/flood/theft.
Anyone with massive amounts of precious data, especially any of you audio or film people, should definitely consider a Drobo. Hell, anyone with any precious data.
Click on the image at the top for a closeup view of my studio desktop and the Drobo Dashboard App.
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