I’m trying to figure out what Drobo to get to replace my original (2nd generation? firewire and usb 2.0) Drobo.
I want to use it to be on our home wifi network, to serve as backup and file resource for our various macs around the house. But I also want to use it for my work mac in my home studio. My home studio mac will be using it’s ethernet connection for tieing several macs together for music production.
So it seemed like the optimum connection for a drobo in my situation would be thunderbolt for the home studio main (host) mac, and ethernet for the wifi network. Is there a drobo that has both ethernet and thunderbolt, and can be connected to both at the same time?
A direct-attach Drobo (such as Thunderbolt, USB, Firewire, eSATA) is just a storage device, formatted with a filesystem and mounted directly on the host computer. The only thing on the disk pack is your data. A networked Drobo is actually a mini Linux computer (full operating system, memory, etc of its own), which mounts an EXT3/4 disk pack internally, then shares the contents over the network using a protocol like CIFS or AFP. The two operate completely differently and use disk packs that are formatted and organized completely differently. It’s not completely impossible to design a unit that could support both (very little in computer science is utterly impossible), but it’s far more difficult and fragile than would make sense.