Drobo 2nd Generation NAS

In a series of articles I will be featuring parts of my musical system in greater detail to promote good working ideas and highlight future possible upgrade routes to my set up.

My Drobo 2nd Generation NAS device is my external library where all my music is stored in either AIFF, FLAC or DSD.

The Drobo has four drive bays for SATA hard drives and connectivity through USB 2.0 and Firewire 800.

Mine is connected through firewire to my MacBook Pro - a standard firewire lead comes with the Drobo but a noticeable improvement was heard by connecting a Oyaide Neo d+ firewire cable which has stayed in my system since introduction.

The drives which have worked best in my Drobo are Samsung 2T SATA - these are very reliable and relatively quiet in operation.

Drobo, Inc. implements a storage technology that they call BeyondRAID in their Drobo storage devices. While not a true RAID ISO spec extension, it does provide for using up to 12 SATA hard drives in the devices and consolidating them into one big pool of storage. It has the advantage of being able to use multiple disk sizes at once, much like a spanned volume/volume set, while providing redundancy for all disks and allowing a hot-swap upgrade at any time. Internally it uses a mix of techniques similar to RAID 1 and RAID 5.   

The Drobo is powered by a switching power supply which is provided in the initial start-up pack and is perfectly adequate. I do not like switching power supplies and believe linear power supplies to be the way forward.

I have commissioned a linear power supply for my Drobo from Paul Hynes Design http://www.paulhynesdesign.com/ - I will write a separate article on Paul Hynes power supplies and the extraordinary effect that they have had on my system in the very near future.

The Drobo has a very intelligent light system to indicate drive health and capacity - the four vertical green lights indicate a healthy drive - red indicates drive failure and the horizontal blue lights along the bottom indicate drive capacity.

Because my Drobo sits outside of my music bench it is sat on 4 No Vibrapod No 1 Isolators http://www.vibrapod.com/vibrapod.htm these lessen the transference of resonances from the base which the Drobo is sat on. 

Overall I am very pleased with the performance of my Drobo Gen 2 NAS and have not encountered any problems in three years of continual useage.