Disk Storage

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for ‘cause you just might get it. Readers of Computer Audiophile and nearly every publication have been wishing for honest but negative reviews in one form or another since product reviewing began. A cursory scan of letters to magazine editors and forum posts often provides evidence of this wish. Numerous comments begging for writers’ blunt honesty about products that don’t live up to expectations and questions about how every reviewed product can possibly be good are common occurrences. Frequently negative review comments come in the form of a writer skirting around the obvious conclusions and forcing people to read between the lines. Irrespective of the motivation to hold back or stretch a writer’s creative liberty to the max, it’s neither what readers want nor what readers deserve. With this in mind I present my review of the QNAP TS-559 Pro Turbo NAS. An inconsistent product that did not perform to reasonable expectations.

Data Robotics has just announced two new versions of its Drobo disk storage solution. The Drobo Elite is now the top of the line model with 2 iSCSI ports and no direct connect options. Audiophile will likely be more interested in the Drobo S. The S model has five drive bays allowing up to ten TB of disk space. In addition to the added drive bay Data Robotics has included an eSATA port for vastly increased speed over FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. eSATA does have some very short cable length requirements so the DroboShare is still a recommended option with the Drobo S if a music server must reside in ones listening room.

If 8 Terabytes is not enough for your music collection you'll be happy to know Data Robotics has just introduced the DroboPro. It has a 16 TB capacity, USB 2.0, FireWire 800, and iSCSI interfaces. The DroboPro uses BeyondRAID technology and can use a multitude of different disk sizes in a single enclosure. New to the Drobo lineup is the iSCSI capability. This enables connecting to the DroboPro over a standard computer network. iSCSI is similar to Network Attached Storage (NAS) in that it allows disk access via a network connection, but that's were the similarities end. Connecting via iSCSI is a little trickier and has more limitations than a standard NAS unit, but the benefits are plenty. I like iSCSI because the external/network drive mounts automatically upon boot-up and appears like a directly connected disk. This allows the user to format the disk and view the disk in Disk Utility or Disk Administrator, etc... It's not clear if the standard DroboShare is compatible with the DroboPro at this time. Read more for some close-up photos.