Drobo: An interesting USB storage device

[Richard Sharpe]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007, Benno Lang wrote:

>>
>>     http://www.drobo.com
>>
>> A USB Storage device that will be available in Australia soon I am led to
>> believe.
>
> "Unlike other storage arrays, however, Drobo uses patent pending software ..."
>
> Thanks, but no thanks.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion ...

The device looks like a disk drive (from the Linux point of view, since it 
is just another USB Storage device) that is variable in size and supports 
some mode pages to handle the extra features. It can be used under Linux 
but there are some issues, like the fact that it pretends to be a 2TB unit 
but doesn't really have 2TB unless you have, say four 750GB drives or some 
1TB drives and some 750GB drives and then it will pretend to have 2 LUNs 
each with 2TB ... so some utilities (and/or a library) will be needed to 
allow the device to be used from Linux in the same was as it can be from 
Windows or Mac OS X ... and the info for that will be available.

Also, Seagate doesn't make the firmware for their drives available, I 
believe. Neither do the other drive manufactures. There's a fine line 
between pleasure and pain :-)

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com