VariableGHz

There’s something intensely alluring about tech like the Drobo. I am reminded of a time when solving a problem permanently was a primary goal. A time when devices had clear purposes and switches had a satisfying click to them. The Drobo has both a satisfying power switch and also some auto-on creative capabilities.

The proprietary BeyondRAID filesystem scheme which cleverly makes use of multiple drives in a JBOD-like-manner but with redundancy is also, it turns out, is its greatest weakness, preventing the product from being dependable over the very long term. The reason for this is simple: relying on a proprietary filesystem requires having a backup for the Drobo device itself. Sure, the data is still intact, but unreadable on anything but a Drobo. Worse still, the Drobo 5D is not compatible with the Drobo 5N for some reason. So, swapping the drives in that way could easily destroy all of the data.