After seeing this offer I’m wondering if there’s any reason now not to buy a DROBO? My file server is constantly at 95% full and being able to buy the DROBO unit, and the drives, at about the price I had figured for the 4 x 1TB drives alone ($500+ savings?!?!?!?!)
Pros
- Comes with full size drives…. if I were go to with the 2TB version it would be 2 x 1TB drives, not 4 x 500G, restricting upgrades later.
- Would be able to downsize the case that naked is in from a 10 drive bay monster to something much smaller.
- Would no longer be terrified of rebooting the file server for fear that the EVMS/LVM/RAID multi-disk hodge-podge stops working.
- The drives in the current system are ooooooold, and are no doubt approaching the time to be replaced anyway.
- Quadruple my current disk space, meaning lots of headroom.
- The magic-disk-swapping-we-don’t-care-about-drive-size technology.
Cons
- What happens if the next size up of drive over 1TB isn’t SATA, but some other connection that’s not compatible?
- The tests on engaget show less than stellar data transfer rates (will have to compare that against copying to/from my current fileserver).
- Would have to still get the $200 NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit to share files on the network directly instead of going through my server.
- Are the included drives going to be really crappy quality due to the cheaper price?
- Is the magic-disk-swapping-we-don’t-care-about-drive-size going to be a frequent enough activity to justify having that ability? Especially with 4TB of space?
- Is it really 4TB of space, or is that theoretical due to the data-protection magic?
So am I crazy, or should I just do it.