There were a few hiccups over the years of course. I was truly able to “set and forget” as I’d hoped.
Drobo dashboard missing drobo apps mac os x#
It was slow and prone to error (especially the first version of Time Machine, which was released in 2006 in Mac OS X Leopard), but it mostly worked. I’ve also always been a big proponent of having a solid backup for your computer, so I was using the Drobo/Airport combo to back up the computers in the house too. My first child was born in 2006 and like any proud parents, my wife and I were taking hundreds of pictures and the occasional video, so a lot of what I was storing were the high-res RAW images from her digital SLR. Like I said, I wasn’t too demanding to start out. I guess I spent a pretty penny on this new solution: the Drobo was about $500 new, and disks to populate it ran another $400 or so, but for my pains I got at little under 2TB¹ of storage, which was huge for the time, and I happily started filling it up. It was mildly frustrating to set up (mostly due to the limitations of the Airport’s ability to share disks to the network), but it replaced a gigantic old Linux computer running a 1.5TB¹ RAID 5 array that required five times the power, room, and maintenance time, and generated about twenty times the noise and heat as my new solution. It was mostly capable of streaming video if I didn’t demand too much of it, and in 2006, when I first entered into the NAS market, my demands were mostly in-line with its capabilities. The Drobo wasn’t quite the speed demon I’d hoped - in fact the performance on the 1st generation of Drobo, with its USB 2.0 connection, was pretty terrible for anything except backups. This is all fine and well, and my first NAS, a 1st generation Drobo connected to my router, a 2nd generation Apple Airport Extreme, mostly worked the way I wanted. You set it up and basically forget it, and it happily stores your stuff and serves it up to the myriad devices you might want to get at your stuff from. The thinking is the NAS is like a little dedicated computer.
You use a NAS when you want to share a bunch of data with a bunch of local computers without the hassle of having to have an always-on computer hosting a file share, which can take up more space, power, and, by their more complicated nature, possibly going wrong. They’re typically two or more hard drives in an enclosure that provides a way to (ahem) attach some storage to your local network. A NAS, for those of you who aren’t total geeks, is typically something you’d find in a small/medium business or a “prosumer” home environment.
I’ve had a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device for a very long time.
0 kommentar(er)
