GoKawiilThe clock started ticking three years ago when I learned Drobo was going out of business. That name not ringing a bell? Drobo made external storage devices that bundled hard drives into an easy, set-it-and-forget-it RAID configuration for people like me who wanted to keep our data safe and in one place.
My family bought one in early 2009, when my daughters were little, and we were concerned about protecting all the baby photos and videos we'd collected. The Drobo, with its four hard drive bays, seemed like a good place to park our media and other data in addition to creating online backups using Google Photos, iCloud and Flickr as our off-site protection.
For the next 17 years, the Drobo never failed us. It wasn't fancy, it wasn't attached to any network, and its USB 2.0 and Firewire ports were soon left behind by devices with faster connections. But as reliable, if slow, external storage, it did the job and was a stalwart under-the-desk companion. Although network-attached versions of my device and competitors eventually put this type of storage on home networks, the Drobo was a preview of what the marketplace would look like in about 15 years. Network-attached storage devices, or NAS, would become more attractive, easier to set up and use and increasingly important for those who want to wrangle and use their data in addition to backing it all up.
At the time, the Drobo was all I needed. When I primarily used a Mac, I backed up to the Drobo using Time Machine. When I moved full-time to a Windows PC, I made sure to update backups regularly, even though most of my important files were synced to cloud services more frequently.
It took me until this year to find the right replacement for the Drobo, even though I knew that a hardware failure in a gadget no longer supported by its maker could be a big problem for my data.
So I started looking. And I got lost and confused very quickly. This is my journey into the rabbit hole that is network-attached storage.
What's changed since the Drobo days
For its day (the late 2000s/early 2010s), a Drobo device was a good option for personal data storage. The company is no longer in business. Drobo
When I started looking online for devices that could replace my Drobo, I found that the only people still talking about it were photographers and video editors, with blog posts detailing how they'd migrated their image libraries to faster, bigger storage solutions.
Everyone else talking about the type of solution I was looking for seemed to have evolved into a different type of gadget lover altogether. They were NAS enthusiasts, hungry for more and more space. Critically, they weren't just looking for the safest, easiest way to park their data securely. They were expanding on all the things their NAS could do beyond just storing files.
... continue reading