Author Archives: Erik Pounds

Drobo and Sonos: Music To My Ears

Drobo Sonos1 300x188 Drobo and Sonos: Music To My Ears

Sonos Wireless HiFi Music System

My Drobo works beautifully with Sonos. For me, few things are more relaxing than hanging out at home (when it’s clean) and listening to music. I rarely do it though. I have kids, so usually there are many things happening and it’s too much work to turn everything on, in the right room, so I can enjoy some tunes. Thankfully, we do not have to hassle with physical media (CDs, tapes, records) anymore just to listen to the stuff you love. Digital media and wireless music systems like Sonos changed all of that for me.

While Sonos can play a myriad of Internet radio stations, it’s often nice to listen to your own familiar playlists. I have a lot of music on my Drobo, so I definitely wanted to get my Drobo and Sonos hooked up together. Doing that was very easy.

While it is simple, I wrote a how-to guide for adding your music library stored on a Drobo to Sonos. For those who want to have your music stream throughout your home network, hopefully this will give you the confidence to take the next step. The only items needed: a wireless router, Drobo, and a Sonos speaker. Once you get going, you can then expand your Sonos system to play music in multiple rooms at the same time.

Listening to Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road” as I write this…yes indeed—it’s a good day at home.

To learn more about the Drobo 5N, request a Drobo live demo here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Apple endorses Drobo’s strategy of BOTH …

blog epounds Apple endorses Drobos strategy of BOTH …… well, not directly, but Apple’s new Fusion Drive feature is the internal drive complement to Drobo’s Data-Aware Tiering technology. These technologies provide the value of BOTH capacity in hard disk drives AND performance from solid state drives. Both are affordable, fully automatic, and easy-to-use. If you want high-capacity storage that’s affordable, you need to use a hard disk drive, but that HDD can be made much faster by combining it with a little bit of flash. Seagate (hybrid drive), Intel (Smart Response), and others are also creating intelligent technologies that use HDDs and SSDs in exactly the way that uses them best. So it’s a pretty easy decision: if you want to leverage the best of modern storage technologies, you should take advantage of products that can utilize both types of drives.Continue Reading

Is the tiering technology in the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the same as the B1200i?

blog epounds Is the tiering technology in the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the same as the B1200i?This question came in from a blogger and we thought it was a pretty good question. There is a difference and it’s a long answer, but I’ll try and summarize.

We ship the B1200i with 3 SSDs, leaving the remainder of the drive bays available for HDDs. Because the B1200i is in “dual disk redundancy” mode by default, those SSDs are in a triple mirror, allowing you to lose two of them and still have access to your data. Continue Reading

A new generation of Drobo technology

blog epounds A new generation of Drobo technologyWow. Six years ago, I was working for a muti billion-dollar storage company and I saw my first demo of BeyondRAID (before a Drobo existed). I was blown away by the simplicity and flexibility of the storage stack. I had to have it and I quickly became an early Drobo adopter in my own home. Now, I manage the Drobo product family and we are releasing new Drobos based on a platform that has a ground-up design. I am very excited!

The new Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini have everything that we (and I) have always loved from Drobo, with the addition of blazing fast performance, more robust data protection, and an innovative use of solid state drives (SSDs).Continue Reading