Testimonials
Drobo in action - Max Pickering
I've had the drobo for a couple of weeks now and have been very impressed with it. After loading it with 500Gb drives, hooking it up, (which was easier than installing a printer!) it swallowed the entire contents of three hard disks. Having got it full of all the data the next thing to do was pop a drive out of it and see what happened. Not for the fainthearted but disaster recovery is no use unless you test it! It behaved exactly as the nice people at Data Robotics said it would and soon enough, all the lights were green again. Nice.
There is much discussion about the "lack" of gigabit or Firewire connectivity with the drobo to a host PC or MAC based system. While the addition of either of these protocols would speed things up in the photographic world, where large volumes of multi megabyte images eternally expand to fill all the available disk space. These protocols will be available at some point, but this shouldn't preclude the advantages of the drobo from being used today.
The methodology I use could be described as taking advantage of the cost to performance ratios of on-line, off-line and near-line storage. I use the USB2 drobo in my workflow and can't say I have found any problems with the transfer speed with this method. If anything it has speeded up my workflow and vastly improved the resilience of the process. To put this into perspective, my image library runs at over 350,000 images and as a matter of course I could be dealing wth up to 6000 images at a time.
If I'm working in the studio, the RAW, JPG and sometimes both depending on the job are firstly transferred from the camera to a local internal hard drive on the PC using a firewire card reader. From the internal drive they are automatically copied to the drobo while the PC is idle, or overnight. After any images are culled, modified or in any way changed, the output of the modified images are saved to a different directory on the same drive (thereby always keeping a clean and modified version of any image) and again, these are automatically transferred to the drobo when the PC is idle or overnight. As an extra precaution, a quantity of external 500 gig drives act as off site backup. I'd be forever changing DVD disks if I used them to do backups.
In the field, I back the memory cards up onto a Archos unit as and when required, then on return to the studio I use the system descibed above. When the data is safely on the drobo, then the cards are reformatted and the ARCHOS wiped and recharged.
Having the nearline facility for the images gives me the speed I need, where I need it... on the local drive when the image is being manipulated... but I can still bring back great tracts of data should the need arise, without looking for incremental tapes or hunting down the correct DVD that has the data on it. In the same way that computers use fast memory as the worktop, and a hard drive as a filing cabinet, to borrow an office based analogy, using a fast HDD as a desktop and drobo as a filing cabinet works very well for me. I'm not sure if the phrase has been used before by another product, but "near-line backup" is how it could be described in the system that works for me.
You can find Max's thoughts on Drobo in amongst the many wonderful examples of his work at
