On September 25, 2012 I decided to get myself a big enough hard drive to store my files in a safely manner and ‘offline’. This was the year that services like Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive started to gain traction and online storage was starting to become normal.
From the many options available, I went with a product called Drobo. At the time storage and RAID was all new to me, so Drobo presented an easy way to get started and seems to made everything very straightforward: get our product, insert multiple hard drives, the software will make it seem like one drive while the Drobo software takes care of all RAID and back up.
In short: the set up was easy, its usage was simple, and upgrading/changing hard drive was literally plug’n’play. It served me good for well over 10 years! On June 2022 Drobo, and its parent company, announced they filled for bankruptcy; and on February 8, 2024 their website (www.drobo.com) seized to exist. So it was time to start looking for a new way to store offline files.
After much research and debate (that will be for another post) decided on a Synology DS923+. Since I was upgrading ‘enclosure’, went with new hard drives too, so it was easy to move over the data. Even easier since this time I had an almost full OS in the web browser through DiskStation Manager (DSM). Now it’s literally a whole new world!
In conclusion, after an amazing run of 11 years, 5 months, 21 days my Drobo has officially retired and gave way for the new generation of storing, hosting, and much more inside a Synology.
