Of course I challenged him with a bunch of questions but he had all the answers. I also figured I’d keep him out of my hair for a few days.Ībout 15 minutes later he sent me his answer, choosing the DS1019+. I wanted him to research it for me because while Synology has a nice little selection tool, there are soooo many models to choose from I was hoping he’d just narrow it down to a few options for me. Plus he really likes to spend other people’s money. He’s followed along with my Drobo adventures and was the recipient of my then-functioning (and now dead) Drobo FS. Synology DS1019+Īs soon as the Drobo died, I tasked Steven Goetz with choosing a Synology model for me. We interviewed the Synology folks a few years ago at CES and I’ve been listening to Dave Hamilton on the Mac Geek Gab sing their virtues for years now and I have really felt like I was missing out on all the fun. While it does its job ok to store data and give it back to me via the Finder, that’s pretty much all it can do. I have to admit that I’ve been really hoping it would kick the bucket because I really wanted to get a Synology NAS and get away from Drobo. Luckily it wasn’t my only copy, it was my backup of the 5N. If that Drobo had been my only copy of the data, the only way I could have gotten it back would be to get another Drobo. There isn’t much you can do about it when a Drobo dies like this. One day it simply said that all of my disks were gone. It was about as exciting as going from the iPhone X to the iPhone XS and about the same cost even though I didn’t even buy the device itself. So they look like just a bunch of disk to me. Most of the time I connect to them via the Finder using the handy Go, Connect to Server menu and connecting over SMB. My main interaction with the Drobos though isn’t via the Drobo Dashboard. These are computers, not just a bunch of disks, so why can’t I have some fun with it? I was unable to even find an application that would allow me to back up from the 5N2 to the 5N. The apps you can load are few and not terribly useful. While that interface has gotten faster over the years, it’s still clunky and uninteresting. I still have to use the Drobo Dashboard software to interact with the device. The Drobo 5N2 is a lovely piece of kit but guess what? The interface is identical to the 5N. I should mention that these were the least expensive, available right now 4TB drives not made by Seagate that I could find. Remember, that’s not the cost of the network attached storage (NAS) device, that’s JUST the drives to put in the Drobo. I forget what they cost back then but today a good 4TB Western Digital Black drive is $170, so 5 of them cost $850. When Drobo offered me a 5N2 to test (and let me keep it which I disclosed loudly in my review), I still had to pay a fortune to fill it with 4TB drives. The FS lived on as a backup to the 5N in our data storage life. Oh sure, the 5N had official app support while the FS required some jiggery-pokery on the command line, but the apps for the 5N aren’t much to get excited about. Eventually, we replaced the FS with the Drobo 5N, spending a lot of money to do so, and when I got it all set up, it was essentially the same as the FS except it was way faster. Many years ago we bought a Drobo FS so we could offload this giant amount of data off of our internal drives. Steve doesn’t create new files every week, but for the months after CES, he creates hundreds of GB of data with the videos he generates. You can imagine that this data would fill up my internal drive on my laptop pretty darn quickly. In a typical week where Bart and I record Security Bits and Chit Chat Across the Pond, the NosillaCast files add up to 3GB, and Chit Chat Across the Pond is 4GB. If you have the intelligence and patience to wait longer between upgrades you’ll love the speed difference, but are these things fundamentally different? A Series 3 Apple Watch and a Series 5 have the same apps and 90% overlapping functionality, so in some cases you have to know to look for the differences. I went from the Apple Watch Series 4 to Series 5 and only noticed my battery getting worse. Have you noticed in the last few years, new gadgets and even software don’t seem all that different? I went from an iPhone X to an XS and couldn’t tell the difference after about a day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |