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Domo Arigato, Robot Drobo!

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tranglos:
While they call it a "robot", Drobo is really just a fancy NAS box.  Four bays, built-in processing & intelligence, an array of connection options.  Yawn.  So what?
-Ralf Maximus (November 21, 2007, 06:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

Drobo is absolutely gorgeous and well-worth a sigh. For me, sighs is where it ends, since they don't seem to be selling it outside of the US, Canada and UK. Might I consider moving to one of those fine places just for Dear Drobo?

Oh well, for now I've picked this NAS instead, by D-Link:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2091770,00.asp

And I have a story already. The thing was supposed to arrive today. A package arrives, a little big for what amounts to a two-drive enclosure. I pay the delivery gentleman, bid him goodbye, open the package and looksie here, what did the kind gentleman deliver? Seven (7) copies of Windows XP Home, eight (8) AMD Athlon CPUs and ten (10) Data Traveler thumb drives, 1 GB each.

Okay. For a moment I thought this was a Bioshock type situation, where you collect random goodies, like empty syringes and pieces of rubber hose, then invent something nifty out of them? Only those ten thumbdrives were bugging me, because they didn't quite add up to the 1.5 TB of storage I was expecting. Though maybe if I wired those to the cache dies in the Athlons, and did something clever to the XP CDs...

I should have ordered Drobo.

f0dder:
Ralf: the core-family Celerons are pretty cheap: Celeron Conroe-L Model 430 (1.8GHz, 512KB cache, NX bit, x86-64, 35W?) pops in at around $60, that's the same prices as a Sempron LE-1150 (2.0GHz, 256KB cache, NX bit, x86-64, 45W).

Given the lower power consumption and larger cache size, I'd definitely go with the Intel CPU - and the motherboards aren't really that much more expensive, plus you get a nice intel chipset there.

2GB of RAM might seem like a lot, but it means you can have stuff cached and wear the disks a little less. But considering that 2x1024meg and 2x512meg DDR2-800 costs just about the same, ~$100, I'd opt for two gigs.

Sure, that box might be a little overpowered for a NAS, but it has the advantage of being a fully-fledged computer, which I'd also use for torrents (instead of having my power-hungry desktop on all the time), subversion, and the occasional linux testdev.

Sure, probably consumes more power than some of the NAS boxes, but the early synology NAS were powered by Pentium4's afaik, so... *shrug*

Lashiec:
You could also get some parts here and there and a copy of Windows Home Server, and assemble your own Drobo.

Ralf Maximus:


If Ralf built his own Drobo.

f0dder:
That looks... interesting. Specs? And is that a home-built UPS? :)

Looks like it's in a hidden place, is that where you stash all your pr0n? :D

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