Today I received my 2nd Generation Drobo from Data Robotics, Inc. Data Roboitcs makes it very simple to quickly get your Drobo online and ready for use. I threw two 1tb western digital drives in for the initial raid. The on screen instructions guide you through the intuitive process of formatting and setting up the Drobo for whichever operating system you plan to use it with. After copying all my data from another hard drive to the Drobo I placed that 3rd 1tb drive into the Drobo, which then re-built the array to give me more space without any work on my part.

So far I’ve run into only one annoying problem, previously I had an HFS+ drive that was shared between my mac and my Ubuntu machine. With the drobo, Ubuntu can’t mount the drive that larger then 2TB.

So the breakdown:

Pros

• Firewire 800 & usb 2.0
• Data redundancy
• Easy to setup and expand the storage

Cons

• Can’t mount in Ubuntu
• out of 3TB I have 1.8TB of actual space