On a cosy Sunday morning, when I was just checking my mails (as I always do before I get up). I saw a disturbing message in my inbox… My long forgotten DroboFS  (4x 2TB and 1x 3TB, installed at my parent’s home attic) had sent out a mail with a critical disk error. I use this device everyday, mainly for storing my backups (TimeMachine) and storing my pictures and video’s. Together with my Asrock ION 330 it is the perfect storage solution to use Kodi (formerly known as XBMC). I myself know enough about storage and software to be able to set up my own server and ZFS pool and I did do this in the past.

But: I’m amazingly happy about the fact I did go for Drobo.

Why? As you just read there was a disk error. As I only have 1 disk redundancy I panicked a little, I went to my default web shop for disks, ordered a new disk (figured I could go for a 4TB model instead of the 2TB model that broke) and let it ship to my parents. The next day the disk arrived and I asked my totally non-tech-savvy father to replace the disk. He unpacked the disk, went to the attic, I gave him basic instructions (magnetic front, remove disk by pushing the grey handle on the broken disk (red light) etc…). After a few minutes I got a call back from him with the message that the disk had been replaced and that he had sent a picture of the old disk (for insurance reasons) to my mail address.

8 hours later I received a second mail from the Drobo that the data had been copied onto the new disk and all was oke. Thank you Drobo for making my life as easy as possible :D. The kicker of it all: I am currently in Denmark and about 900 kilometers away from the physical DroboFS :D. (I use a VPN to access the data)