Drobo

I very recently had an unexpected windfall. My wife, being her wonderful self, said, "Go to Fry's Electronics and buy yourself something nice." I didn't want to be selfish, but I knew just what I wanted: a Drobo! At least it would benefit her, too (we have been needing an always-on network share).

I've been eyeing the line of Drobos for quite a long time. I have a tendency to collect data, and therefore hard drives, and at present have a pretty big pile of drives (18 bare drives of both PATA and SATA persuations varying from 60GB to 1TB in size) that aren't being used, but are storing data. It's been bothering me a lot lately, and this was the perfect opportunity. So, without further ado, I went to Fry's and (thanks to their internet price matching policy), bought myself a Drobo FS for $499.

The first thing I saw when I opened the box was... another box! The pretty blue box it comes in is just a very thin cardboard cover for the real, thicker cardboard box. When I opened that box however, I saw... another box! Did I buy a matryoshka?

No, as it turns out, the third box I was seeing was the small box containing cables, manuals, and CDs. On the box it said, "Welcome ot the World of..." Underneath it was two nice, large foam blocks, and what looked like a black cloth bag. Printed on the bag was simply the word "drobo" in white. Nice!

I shuffled some data, set up a work space, connected the Drobo, and fed it two 300GB hard drives, but... the instructions said to have the dashboard installed and running already before turning it on. Since Linux is my primary operating system, I spun up a whole new VM just for the Drobo. Yes, Drobo, you are that special to me!

The installation was trivial, and soon it was scanning the network for the new Drobo. I turned it on, and was quite pleased to see some blinkenlights on the unit, and not just a simple progress bar or simple dancing pattern, either. It took only a few moments to initialize the drives, and then the lights were on steady, and the dashboard found the new unit. It asked me to set up a username and password, and to name the unit. I was prepared. The name Drobo comes from "Data Robot", because it's smarter than your typical RAID/NAS. This unit will eventually have a very large amount of storage. Here I am, brain the size of a planet... welcome to the world, Marvin!

The first configuration was complete, so then I set up some logical users and shares for our needs. At this point, it was ready. It was operational and configured. Time to start moving data, right? I said to myself, "Nope! I'm not done with you yet, Marvin. I'm a Linux geek, and you're running an embedded Linux distribution on an ARM processor. I definitely need to have some more fun."

Enter Drobo Apps. The makers of Drobo were smart, and knew that people like me would want to use the heck out of their products. They pre-ported some tools that people are likely to want, but would take up enough space to overflow Marvin's meager root partition, and I definitely needed my SSH fix. I love the command line, after all! I installed Dropbear, Lighttpd, Pure-ftpd, and rsync. That was much better, but I had bigger plans than that... I very much wanted this to become the single, always-on server of the house. For that, I have to be able to edit my files from afar, and I always use Vim. Marvin, however, only had the stripped-down version of vi preinstalled, not the full program, and they didn't provide a package on their apps page. So I went looking. Surely I'm not the only one who wants this?

I discovered Drobo Ports. Many thanks to Ricardo for his excellent instructions and many existing ports. I installed quite a few of them, but... he didn't have Vim. He did, however, have very good instructions on setting up an environment to compile ports. I ran into a few snags along the way, but I'm an engineer, and I love Vim, so I made it happen. Lo, gaze upon Vim for Drobo! Ricardo, thank you again for adding my submission to your site.

Now begins the long process of moving my data off old drives and into Marvin's head, then feeding the larger of those drives to him each time he starts to get full.