I have a Drobo S with a firewire connection that contains a lot of my valuable photo archive.
I have recently bought a Mac Mini M1 and would appreciate your recommendations as to the best way to access them from this new computer,
Personally, until Drobo announce support for the M1 units, which they’ve only just got themselves to begin testing with, I’d suggest:
“By using your old machine to share the files on the network”.
This is one of the downsides of being both an early adopter with Apple stuff, and also using third party hardware, there’s an inevitable gap between Apple releasing things, & those third parties getting them themselves so they can even begin adding support. Adding a pandemic to the mix & also “Big Sur” which has had some issues Drobo have needed to fix, doesn’t help.
If it doesn’t “Just Work” then patience is about the only answer. That or checking compatibility before you upgrade, but from the screaming over virtually every OS version jump, it seems Apple users don’t ever do anything so basic for hardware or software.
Yes, you’re right - Apple’s advances almost always cause disadvantages, at least initially.
The goal of ‘plug and play’ seems to be pretty unattainable.
I am keeping my old trusty MacPro running for the foreseeable future, certainly long enough to allow Drobo and Apple to find some common ground to enable simple file transfer.