Drobo A little shy of four years ago, I picked up a second generation USB/Firewire Drobo to be the repository for all our household media. I already had a pair of 750GB drives, so I picked up a pair of the new at the time 1TB drives from Seagate. I put it all together for a net capacity of 2.2TB and it’s worked flawlessly ever since.

This past weekend, I noticed that Drobo was flashing all sorts of unhappy blinkenlights at me. I could still access my data, but it was telling me that one of the 1TB drives had failed. So, I ran down to Fry’s and picked up two new 2TB drives. I replaced the bad drive with one of the new ones and let it do its thing. 48 hours later, RAID redundancy was restored to the array and all was well.

I just slotted in the other 2TB drive in place of one of the 750GB drives, which will up my net storage capacity to 3.6TB. I’ll also replace the one remaining 750GB drive with the 1TB drive that I’ll get from Seagate because the one that failed was still under warranty. This all worked out to my advantage, as I was starting to hit 85% full on the 2.2TB I had. Now with the upgrade to 3.6TB, I’ve got 40% free space.

A lot of my geek friends give me crap for buying a Drobo and not building some Linux RAID box instead. I work hard at work. I don’t want to have to play sysadmin when I get home. I want my home gear to “Just Work”, which is exactly what Drobo does for me.