At work we use 323's at all our locations. Really good dependable devices. The only issue with NAS's is that they are truly meant for a home environment. They can only transfer about 5 megabytes a second compared to a server that will transfer around 120 megabytes per second.
- have your cleaning lady knock it on the floor when she tries to extract the mop from the new wires in the closet where your modem/router hangs from their power cables and now the nas is balancing...
Generally I agree, but with one exception: The DataRobotics DroboI have the non-NAS option, and the things are expensive as hell (especially/ w NAS: $600 last I looked ($400 w/out)), but they actually offer benefits over just building a RAID in your PC, or in a spare box.Namely, without any setup you get a 2-4 disk fully redundant hot-swappable array. At any point I can pull one of my 4 drives without affecting active reads/writes, or losing any data. To increase capacity, just toss a new, larger, disk in it's place and it rebuilds, again without interrupting active reads/writes.To do the same thing with a conventional setup would require a decent RAID controller, a lot of available room in the case, extra PSU strength and strain, a lot of configuration, and even then I don't think you can make it hot-swappable.So yeah, they're expensive compared to any other NAS, but I'm really happy with mine, and would gladly buy another one as opposed to setting up my own RAID to match it's functionality for mass-storage.Only possible downside is the USB 2.0 connection, which makes the initial data load painful. But after that it's plenty fast, even copying DVDs to it over the network (again, no NAS on mine, so that's going from PC A -> router -> router (opposite side of apartment, where several more devices are located) -> PC B -> Drobo, and on casual observation it's still on par to the read/write speed of another disk in the same PC)
Drobo is just a really overpriced piece of software in a plastic enclosure. If they would just sell the software instead, they would sell a lot more. $500 for a data storage device with no storage? No thanks!
jonnymaNov 9, 2008
It's like DropBox on steroids.. Central storage is the future.
linageeNov 10, 2008
share it with who? gets a bit creepy when you put a name to that person.
kjcdudeNov 10, 2008
At work we use 323's at all our locations. Really good dependable devices. The only issue with NAS's is that they are truly meant for a home environment. They can only transfer about 5 megabytes a second compared to a server that will transfer around 120 megabytes per second.
jakewNov 10, 2008
Until mom figures out what Bittorrent is... I think I'll be safe.
Closed AccountNov 10, 2008
- have your cleaning lady knock it on the floor when she tries to extract the mop from the new wires in the closet where your modem/router hangs from their power cables and now the nas is balancing...
jektalNov 10, 2008
Generally I agree, but with one exception: The DataRobotics DroboI have the non-NAS option, and the things are expensive as hell (especially/ w NAS: $600 last I looked ($400 w/out)), but they actually offer benefits over just building a RAID in your PC, or in a spare box.Namely, without any setup you get a 2-4 disk fully redundant hot-swappable array. At any point I can pull one of my 4 drives without affecting active reads/writes, or losing any data. To increase capacity, just toss a new, larger, disk in it's place and it rebuilds, again without interrupting active reads/writes.To do the same thing with a conventional setup would require a decent RAID controller, a lot of available room in the case, extra PSU strength and strain, a lot of configuration, and even then I don't think you can make it hot-swappable.So yeah, they're expensive compared to any other NAS, but I'm really happy with mine, and would gladly buy another one as opposed to setting up my own RAID to match it's functionality for mass-storage.Only possible downside is the USB 2.0 connection, which makes the initial data load painful. But after that it's plenty fast, even copying DVDs to it over the network (again, no NAS on mine, so that's going from PC A -> router -> router (opposite side of apartment, where several more devices are located) -> PC B -> Drobo, and on casual observation it's still on par to the read/write speed of another disk in the same PC)
adkencNov 10, 2008
any cool things we can do with NOS?
enchoritoNov 10, 2008
Drobo is just a really overpriced piece of software in a plastic enclosure. If they would just sell the software instead, they would sell a lot more. $500 for a data storage device with no storage? No thanks!
daemonxNov 11, 2008
5MB/Sec? If ur on a gigabit network and use jumbo frames you could squeeze upto 20MB/s.