DroboShare - The network companion to use with Drobo

As promised on my last Hub, here I'm talking about DroboShare, A Gigabit Ethernet Companion to Drobo

With Drobo "docked" in Droboshare you instantly get an expandable networked storage system for sharing your data.

Some Pros...

Out of the Box Solution

DroboShare provides a really fast and easy setup experience. It will take you longer to get it out of the box then to set it up!

Open the box, take DroboShare out of it, take the Y conector and USB short cable, get an ethernet cable, disconect Drobo, lift up Drobo, place Droboshare beneath it and deploy Drobo "feets" on the wholes of the top od Droboshare, conect the usb cable from Drobo to Droboshare, conect the ethernet cable to you router or switch, use the Y conector to plug both drobo and droboshare. And that's it... Less than 5 minutes of your time and is up and running!

One DroboShare -> two Drobos

DroboShare as the capacity to support two Drobos at the same time. If you do the maths, you'll see that your networked storage can grow up to a theoretical 32TB on a single DroboShare since each Drobo can grow to 16TB as hard drive sizes expand.I think that this gives you enough space for your data...

Share your world

Nowadays the ability to share your data over a local network is critical. Whether you’re sharing video in a production studio or streaming a high definition movie to your home media center.

Automatic setup—in just seconds.

When I received Droboshare, I had high expectations on how to set it up, because with Drobo it had been very easy and quick. But with Droboshare, it was even quicker... is really simple to set up. Just plug it in.

Drobo comes with a free software, Drobo Dashboard, that has the built-in intelligence to automatically search for every DroboShare on your network. Once it detects a DroboShare, it automatically mounts the drive and maps it to your operating system for Windows and OS X. It works great!

NAS and DAS

With DroboShare and Drobo you can have both NAS and DAS solutions. Simply put your Droboto sleep and detach it from DroboShare at anytime to take advantage of FireWire 800 or USB 2.0. Repeat the same process to put it back on your network so your files are network accessible again: simply put your Drobo to sleep and attach it to your DroboShare.

DroboApps... More about this, at the end of this Hub!

Whatever you want! Really!

DroboShare supports DroboApps, an entire world of applications that can be run on DroboShare’s Linux-based operating system. What you do with them is up to you. Some are simple and lightweight, some are complex and powerful. I'll bet you can find one that suits your needs or if you don't... just write one that does or ask the DroboApps comunity to do it for you :)

Traditional NAS devices ship with a fixed feature set. Drobo and DroboShare allow you to install the applications you want, when you want them. That means you can avoid the complexity of configuring applications you don’t want, but you also have the flexibility to use the applications you do want.

Keep checking this hub because soon I'll write one about DroboApps and link it here.

Data Sharing Ethernet Interface Interface: 10/100/1000
Ethernet Number of Ports: 1
Network topology: Shares data on a single subnet
USB Interface to Drobo Interface: Type A, USB 2.0
Number of Ports: 2 (shares 1 or 2 Drobos)
File System Options: Windows - NTFS; Mac OS X - HFS+ ; Cross-Platform - FAT32 Linux - EXT3
Dimensions:
Width Height Length
Inches 6.0 1.8 10.7
mm 152.4 44.5 271.8
Other Specifications
Power: 12VDC @ 0.5Amp
Weight:
2lbs 4oz (1.02 Kg) Operating Temperature: 10°C-35°C (50°-95°F) Operating Altitude: 2,438m (8,000 ft)
Drobo Dashboard (optional): Microsoft® Windows® OS, Apple® Macintosh® OS X v10.4+

OS Independent

Built on Data Robotics’ exclusive BeyondRAID™ technology, Drobo and DroboShare are file system and operating system agnostic. Format your Drobo NTFS (Windows), HFS Plus (Mac OS X), EXT3 (Linux) or FAT32 (Various).

DroboShare operates on the open, cross-platform SMB protocol. so you can connect to it no matter which file system you’ve chosen.

So, it works on Windows, Mac, Linux, ....

Another Great Detail

As I mentioned in my Drobo review, Data Robotics products have amazing details, it looks like you're dealing woth Apple :)

One simple but very usefull thing is the Y conector that comes with Droboshare. You can check it in my pictures on in the video at the end of this Hub.

With this Y conector you can use Drobo Power Supply to on both devices: one power supply, two devices powered :) Simple and very effective. You don't need extra outlets for it!

But, is it perfect?

Against DroboShare we have it's connection to Drobo... This is without a doubt the biggest problem of it... Because in one hand you have the Gigabit connection (1000Mbps) on Droboshare but on the other hand you have USB2.0 (400Mbps) connection from DroboShare to Drobo... This, as you can imagine creates a big bottleneck...

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