Drobo FS Review

For those of us that need functionality beyond that of simple file sharing, Drobo offers to us DroboApps for the Drobo FS. These are community created and community supported apps that can be installed on the FS. Drobo notes on the download page that they do not provide direct technical support for these apps and that you should utilize the forums for questions. Included in the list of applications are:

• Apache (required for all DroboApps) – Apache is a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.
• DroboApps Admin Utility (required for all DroboApps) – The DroboApps Admin Utility makes installing, configuring, updating, and uninstalling DroboApps even easier. It can temporarily disable a DroboApp to keep it from starting automatically.
• Fuppes – FUPPES is a free, multiplatform UPnP A/V Media Server with DLNA support. Install Fuppes, then use the XBMC client on your Mac, PC, AppleTV, Linux, Android devices, iPad or iPhone OR any other compliant hardware or software client to watch movies, listen to music, and more.
• Firefly – Firefly serves digital music residing on the Drobo FS to the Roku Soundbridge and iTunes.
• CTorrent – CTorrent is a command-line bittorrent client.
• Dropbear – Dropbear is a small SSH 2 server and client.
• Lighttpd – lighttpd is a HTTP server with a focus on security, speed, compliance, and flexibility.
• Pure-ftpd – Pure-FTPd is a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server.
• Rsync – rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
• Unfsd – UNFS3 is a user-space implementation of the NFSv3 server specification. It provides a daemon for the MOUNT and NFS protocols, which are used by NFS clients for accessing files on the server.
• Wake on Lan – This program generates and transmits a Wake-On-LAN (WOL) “Magic Packet”, used for restarting machines that have been soft-powered-down (ACPI D3-warm state).
• perl – Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language. It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors and is widely used to program web applications of all needs.

The Drobo FS offers consumers a very easy way to expand storage on their network. The simplicity behind BeyondRAID and the Drobo Dashboard makes me wonder why these devices aren’t flying off the shelves; a person would have to be crazy if they didn’t consider a member of the Drobo lineup when looking for expanded storage. As far as performance goes, the FS lags behind in transfer speeds but makes up for it in usability and power consumption. Although the transfer speeds didn’t match that of its competitors, streaming Blu-ray movies throughout my home was not an issue and proved to be an enjoyable and stutter free experience. Add the ability to have the FS un-boxed and fully configured in minutes and it makes the Drobo lineup hard to overlook. Bottom line… Would I buy one? Yes.