I’ve been a long-term user of Drobo storage units for my photography. I purchased one of the first units in the UK and immediately loved its ease of use. Buy a bunch of cheap(ish) computer disks. Push them into the slots in the Drobo and you have a huge hard drive.
You also have greater data security because data is spread across the disks. If a disk fails, pop it out and replace it with a new one. You won’t lose any of your images. For the technical folk reading this, it’s a bit like a RAID drive, except it’s more flexible, in my opinion.
One limitation of using some RAID drives is that disks must be identical, but with a Drobo, they don’t. You can mix different-sized disks, manufacturers, and even spin speeds. It’s extremely flexible.
But as great as I’ve found the Drobo, there is a problem. Last year, the parent company faced financial difficulty and filed for Bankruptcy. At that point, they also stopped updating the Drobo firmware and software.
Not a problem you might think; surely the software will last years.
That may be true on Microsoft Windows, but we Mac users must contend with Apple’s annual OS update. I was forced into this in October 2023 when I upgraded my ageing Intel Mac to a Mac Studio M2. That’s when I discovered my new Mac and Drobo wouldn’t play nicely, and I couldn’t access the photos in my library.
I won’t tell you the rest of the story except that I’ve now replaced my Drobo with a Synology DS423+ NAS drive.
While many people say this should be easy, I think you need a reasonable degree of knowledge to set up and maintain one of these. It certainly hasn’t been plain sailing for me, and up until recently, the drive’s performance was terrible. Fortunately, I’ve fixed that now, but it was quite by luck.
If you have a Drobo and are considering replacing it with a NAS drive, this article on my website explains my experience and offers some tips.
Now for a photo which I took back in October 2023.
The location is Padley Gorge in the Peak District on a misty morning. It’s a great location in the right weather conditions. This photo was captured using my Fuji XT5 with a Fuji 16-80 lens at 20mm. I had the camera mounted on a tripod for a 1/5 second exposure at ISO125 and f/9.0.
The RAW processing was done in DxO PhotoLab, where I also applied a custom Profile that I created for the XT5. As good as the Fuji film profiles are, I wanted to produce the most accurate colours for this image because the light was so nice. I then made some minor tweaks to the image in Photoshop using the Nik Collection.
On a related theme, DxO released PureRAW 4 this week, which I’ve been very impressed by. You can watch my review of the new feature in this YouTube video.
I hope you like this week’s photo, and have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 