Your World With Drobo; Drobo Is A Labor-Saving Device; Drobo Is Primary Storage; No Computer Software Needed (But Provided Anyway) - Drobo User Manual

Drobo User Guide
III. Your world with Drobo
If you bought Drobo, you're someone who has valuable data and
knows that it's growing. You also know there are many ways to
work with data storage. Here are a few important concepts about
Drobo that may affect how you incorporate it into your workflow.

Drobo is a labor-saving device

Drobo was designed to take the pain out of making your data for-
ever accessible. Drobo does the heavy lifting of drive monitoring
and data protection so you don't have to. However, to experience
these labor-saving benefits, you will need to know a few things
about what Drobo is, and what it isn't.

Drobo is primary storage

Drobo acts as a large, single pool of storage. One of its biggest
benefits is the ability to provide
massive storage that is always
available and not spread across
multiple disks. That makes it best
for use as "primary" storage, not
merely a high capacity location for
periodic backups or archived data.
Now you can keep all your data
close at hand because in addition
to being always available, it's also
inherently "backed-up" on the Drobo
and protected against drive failure
or disk corruption.
Hot Tip: USB limits any single "pool" of storage to two terabytes. If you
install more than 2TB of hard drive capacity, Drobo will automatically
create a second "pool."
Hot Tip: Drobo can't protect against fire, theft, or acts of God, so it's
always a good idea to have a complete backup of all your most important
digital "stuff" in another location.
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No computer software needed (but provided anyway)

One of the nicest aspects about Drobo is that you just plug it in,
and it works. Anyone familiar with the complex array configuration
tools common on RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
systems will appreciate that. But even though no computer appli-
cations are necessary to use Drobo, we have included one — called
Drobo Dashboard — on the Drobo Resource CD. Drobo Dashboard
lets you easily moni-
tor Drobo functions
on your computer.
It also provides an
easy way to update
the Drobo Firmware
and to initially for-
mat Drobo all from
within one easy-to-
use program.

Sharing Drobo between computers

Drobo connects directly to one computer at a time via the provided
USB 2.0 cable. This is by far the most widely available connection
and easiest to use. However, you may wish to configure the Mac
or PC connected to your Drobo to allow file sharing across your
network. Doing so will allow other computers to "see" Drobo in
their list of network devices and allow centralized storage or easy
file sharing between computers. Check the documentation that
came with your computer's operating system to find out how to
set this up.
You could use a specialized network adapter to share Drobo on a
network. Apple, Linksys, and other companies, make devices to
which you connect a USB drive, like your Drobo, and it shares files
over your network. Apple's Airport Extreme 802.11n is an exam-
ple. Consult the Application Notes section at drobo.com/support for
more information.
III. Your world with Drobo