[REVIEW] Drobo

[Simon Wistow]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 09:50:07AM +0000, Adrian Lai said:
> It looks pretty cool, but surely this is still a potential problem?
> Lack of ethernet port is quite disappointing, too.

Ah, that's a whole other post but, in short.

I tried plugging it into both a Airport Extreme and a Mac Mini but 
neither of them will share it because it's a FAT32 drive (for maximum 
compatability). Without other evidence I'm going to put this down to 
Apple being spiteful - the Mac Mini can see the drive but just refuses 
to reshare it.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Drobo Share - yes $199 seems 
expensive but if it "Just Worked" then I'd be happy. However, in the end 
I found a cheap Linksys NSLU2 for $40. I bought 2 - one to have as 
standard and one to hack (you can install Debian etc etc on it).

After some initial woes (it seems a bit tricky to get working on a none 
192.168.0.* network) everything appeared just fine and all the laptops 
on the network plus the hacked Apple TV running Boxee saw it just fine.

There is a flaw - if no-one's used it for a while initially entering a 
directory can be a bit slow, especially if there's lots of files. It's 
annoying but not unbearable.