McMonky

I bought a Drobo + DroboShare to replace a Snap NAS to put my music library on my home network, which is a bit overkill, frankly. (APC Symmetray 8-hour UPS, SonicWall firewall, Cisco switches, bunch of Mac and PC servers etc.). Do not buy DroboShare. It's VERY slow and is a waste of $$$. DroboShare itself is also SLOW. Mine has 2 1.5 Seagates and is currently attached to a regular MacMini. Idea was to take advantage of the FW800 connection, but for some reason, it's still having speed issues. With the DroboShare, I could connect 3 older macs (2 Cubes, 1 white iMac) that I was using as a digitization farm solely to digitize CD's into the system using iTunes (no compression, just straight AIFF conversion, so each CD is 650-700mg - total library is 1000 CD's, so final storage will need to be need to be about 1TB including headroom). With the DroboShare, I could get all 3 macs to stream into to the Drobo with a sprinkling of self-correcting "file busy" errors along the way, but now with the Mac Mini, only one mac can talk to the externally-attached Drobo. I think this is some config or permissions issue. Once I solve this communications issue, I will get a fast 1-2TB external drive and attach it to the just-released MacMini server (great deal!), and use the Drobo as a backup. I will also add a clone 1TB road drive (for travel and DJ'ing) and park another one at our second house. The Drobo is fussy and there are enough stories out there of people losing all of their data. Mine had an issue from a PC where it would generate a warning box on the PC that would say that "file could not be saved," but on the drive it would leave a 0mg residue file with the original name. On both mac and PC, folders with a huge number of subfiles (like my current iTunes Folder, which has 900 items) will often take 20-30 seconds to display the first time, which seems to point to a spin-up issue. I also have issues with the Drobo doing odd permissions related stuff, and I seem to have to verify permissions every few months. So lame. Data Robotics service, however is very solid and responsive. And they don't seem to be dumbed-down people reading a script. They have actually solved most of the issues, albeit with combos of sequenced power-cycling and permissions exercises. Given this I cannot recommend Drobo products for file serving, ESPECIALLY for any streaming music or media applications. BTW, there seems to be some notion in this thread that the type or format of drive/network that one uses can affect the sound quality of the music. Not true. It's all the same (ones and zeros) until it hits a D to A (digital-to-audio) converter. If that converter is cheap, like the ones in iPods, then it will not sound that great. If it's just the A/D on your mac, then it will sound a bit better. If you want best, then a dedicated HW device like an Apogee DA 16X is right choice. Any cables, busses, electronics, or transducers (speakers) between ears and the converter will additionally affect the sound quality.