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welcome to an unboxing featuring what is possibly the worst retail box that I've

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ever seen this is the drove o as you can

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tell by the small sticker located somewhere on the outside of what

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otherwise looks like a shipping carton so I went and I opened it up thinking oh

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there's probably a retail drobo unit inside no no they sent me an oem one

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which is fine there are retail boxes and that's what you'll see at your local NC

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Store but for the purpose of the video that we're doing they just sent me an

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oem one because I don't think they realized I was going to do an unboxing

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in addition to the actual Tech tips video so here we are let's find out what

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comes with the data robotics droo s

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welcome to the world of drobo all right so we have power got

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your AC to DC adapter got your AC power

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cord which is your standard computer one rather than being that notebook one that

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there's never one handy when you need one so that's perfect restore CD as well

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as a getting started guide which is about 4,000 Pages thick I really hope

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this is in a number of different languages

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here yes it is oh good because if the manual was that thick and the whole

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point of this product is that it's easy to use then a step was missed somewhere

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okay here we go USB 3 cable eSATA cable

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nice long robust feeling EA cable very very

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confident about this particular SATA cable it's about a on linous height so a

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little bit more so it's about 6 ft tall

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long uh and then we also have a fire wire B cable so they include high

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quality versions of pretty much all of the cables you require and nice long

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cables too so they're not like a lot of companies with their external enclosures

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that include short little rinky dinky cables so that you have to put the box

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next to your monitor or next to your PC they give you the option to put it

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somewhere more convenient so this is also a 6t long cable and that's the USB

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3 A to B so that's the extra pins are

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all in there remember you can use a USB 2 A to B cable so that's like your

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standard printer cable but it will only operate at USB 2.0

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speed so let's go ahead and Tuck all of this stuff away and get the actual drobo

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s itself out of the box so comes very

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very well packed you can see it's using a closed cell foam with a good inch of

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empty space an inch plus of empty space on all sides so your drobo is going to

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be nice and protected in transit all right let's take these off

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there you go I always prefer closed cell

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foam because it is more durable and more resistant to multiple impacts it also

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has nice little dust cover on it so it's not going to get scratched or

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anything okay let's go ahead and extract

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it so the Dr OS is the natural progression from the original drobo so

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this isn't sorry this isn't the network version of the drobo that's the drobo fs

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but the advantages that this one has over the original drobo is that it

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has five Bays as opposed to the original

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drobo four bay it also has a much much

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wider variety of interfaces so the original drobo was only USB and then

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there was an additional version of it that I think added fire wire something

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like that yeah and then the drobo S adds to that by providing not only USB but

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USB 3 es oh I think there was an es version at some point as well okay

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whatever this one is the current one this is the one that matters USB 3 two

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firewire 800 ports eat your power

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Kensington lock so that you can make sure that it doesn't walk away on you a

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power switch on the back oh it's just a power cycle switch interesting or oh

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okay we'll have to find out why it is that it turns itself off right away

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maybe it's a matter of it has to actually be plugged in in order to do

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that you've also got a reset button here and the cooling fan at the back of the

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unit so I wonder if I can even take this apart the drobo was meant to be more of

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an appliance so you can see here there's a warranty void if removed so I'm not

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going to be taking the panels apart and actually pulling the uh the unit limb

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from limb let me just see if I can figure out how big that fan is at the

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back cuz I wanted to be able to tell you guys yeah that's a 120 mm fan I can see

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the blades moving now so it's a 120 mm fan at the back which means that it's

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going to stay nice and cool and also be very quiet when it's pulling air across

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the drives remember once you install a drive in here it will stay open like in

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fact you know what let's let's just throw a drive in here really quick so that you guys can see uh here we go so

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here are some of the drives that we're going to be using to test out the drillo

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I haven't talked much about what makes drobo special overall though so let's

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show the easy installation first let's just kind

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of yeah there we

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go hold

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on there we are so it locks in place like that so you can put it up to five

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drives and once it's open you can see there's actually a gap so some air flow

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will come through so what makes drobo special drobo is the easy answer to raid

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so raid can be complicated because you do need a RAID controller so you need an

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actual logic board if you want to have any kind of reliable raid five or Raid

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six okay so you need that you need highly recommended you need

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identical drives so raid works best when

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you have all the same hard drives so that they all perform exactly the same

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and so you don't have any weird issues like with your WD greens dropping out of

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the raate array or one drive performing better than the other one or one drive

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performing slower than the other one dragging down the performance of the whole array drobo you don't have to

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worry about that because rather than using a standard type of raid it

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actually uses their proprietary uh non

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raid but also redundant backup so what

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that means is that it protects you from drive failure much like raid but it

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doesn't use a standard raid so you just pop in whatever old drives you want

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whether you you want to mix up capacities you want to mix up

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manufacturers you want to mix up speed bins none of that matters you just throw

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in whatever you please and drobo will automatically balance the storage around

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between the drives to provide you redundant storage so safe storage as

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well as convenient storage now the other thing that drobo does really well and we

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will of course be doing a full episode on this is protects from data loss so if

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any one of those drives fails it will notify you and all you have to do is

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replace the drive it'll rebuild itself and take care of you that way dble is

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also scalable in a way that raid isn't really raid you usually have to get

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everything you want unless you're talking about very expensive raid cards

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like Hardware raid cards youd have to have everything you want for your storage pool you have to add it all at

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the same time and then you're pretty much kind of locked in drobo you buy one

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of these you buy one driver or I'd recommend two drives at least you buy

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two drives and then as The Sweet Spot changes for cost per Gigabyte in terms

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of hard drive capacity you can add drives that are higher capacity and less

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expensive in order to expand the drive as you go so you might buy it with two 1

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tab drives now while hard drives are expensive due to the shortage and then

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as prices go down you might add a 2 terabyte and then you go okay I'm out of storage now add a 3 terabyte and so on

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and so forth so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the droo S don't

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forget to subscribe not only to lonus Tech tips but also to NCIX Tech tips for

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more content like this as well as more content about this and check this out

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there's a handy little guide there all

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the drives have their own indicator LEDs which tell you what's going on nothing

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system healthy add a drive here soon cool don't remove this drive because

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it's balancing data add a drive here and drive failure replace