ReadyNAS Pro vs Drobo

xxclixxx

Hi All

Well I decided to give my Drobo to a friend after purchasing a ReadyNAS Pro. Since I have used both I thought I'd give you all feedback since periodically people mention it.

Basically they both do the same thing: Keep your data safe. They both expand easily (Drobo's RAID comparison chart doesn't include X-RAID or X-RAID2, so it sounds like only they have the technology =P) and do the syncing for you.

The fact that I gave the Drobo away should tell you which one I liked best. The Drobo didn't do me harm or lose my data, but it lacked one key feature: Ethernet. And I thought it was lame having to buy the Drobo Share to do it..

So I decided to try the ReadyNAS Pro. I went with the Business version but the Premier version is pretty much the same thing. I got the Business because it has a 5yr warranty, and a few features that I could use for my online business (so two birds one stone thing).

What I liked:

• The community. Kinda like why so many prefer Smugmug, they have an active forum where you can get tons of help. And when users can't help each other out, a support hero is there. Netgear has it setup so you can allow them access to your ReadyNAS if there's a problem, and they can fix it for you (sometimes even if you totally screw it up yourself LOL).. Drobo on the other hand, it seemed you were on your own if something failed. You also have to pay a yearly fee for support/updates, and they apparently forgot about their user forum because it's now a domain placeholder ad site.
• The advancedness of it. You can use it as is, or you can go in deep and do tons of cool things. You can even upgrade the RAM on it if you want to. Some have even upgraded the CPU LOL.
• Speed. Drobo seemed to have a delay before doing any actions on it. ReadyNAS I haven't noticed any at all. You can also do a full Gigabit connection, even two in load balancing mode.
• Tons of Services. It supports protocols for windows, mac, time machine, linux, http, ftp, rsync right out of the box. I don't have a mac, but I've read mac users saying how easy it was to use too.
• Company. I know Netgear, I don't know Data Robotics. I'm using this to keep my data safe, so knowing the company behind it is a big deal to me.

So there you go. I wouldn't say the Drobo is bad, but that the ReadyNAS is better. The things that bugged me about the Drobo didn't make it unusable..

Tim