Submitted by The Computer Au... on Tue, 04/07/2009 - 18:34
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.
More info available on the DroboPro web page.
Retails price of DroboPro unit without any disk is $1299
Chris Connaker
Founder
Computer Audiophile
My understanding is that iSCSI allows only point-to-point connection of drive space to a particular PC (Mac) as opposed to "normal" shared network where multiple users can access the same files when using SMB or AFP networking.
I guess if you could use a separate Ethernet Network for the iSCSI traffic from the rest of your network traffic this would be the ideal way to attach one computer to remote storage, but wouldn't allow sharing with multiple computers.
Mac OSX 10.5 with iTunes (mostly ALAC) --USB--> Musical Fidelity A1008 --> B&W CDM 7NT (iPhone remote)
16TB !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HTPC: AMD Athlon 4850e, 4GB, Vista, BD/HD-DVD into -> ADM9.1
just say no to virtual filesystem layers!
I must say that rackmount looks pretty goofy to me. I was tempted by the Pro model only because the premium you pay for larger drives. Right now anything over 1 terabyte is not cheap. That will forever be the case in increasing increments. Of course one of the advantages of the Drobo over other similar solutions is that you can mix drive capacities/sizes and the system reconfigures itself. So presumably since I purchased the standard Drobo and three 1TB drives, I could throw a 2TB in the fourth drive or something even larger - a gazillion terabytes??? - and have as much storage as I'll need in this lifetime. As long a two drives don't fail at the same time. :(