When I'm Xmas shopping for others I confess that I usually can't resist treating myself to some nice gadget as well, to give me something to play with over the holidays.1 Last year it was an Xbox 360, the year before that it was a digital SLR camera. This year, I bought myself a Drobo.
Drobo is an external storage device that connects to a PC or Mac by USB or Firewire. Inside it, there are slots for up to 4 drives -- standard, commodity SATA drives that are really cheap these days, even in crazy sizes like 1TB. Inserting a drive into one of these slots is about as easy and quick a process as inserting a 3.5" disk (remember those?) into a floppy drive.
The Drobo does its thing with two to four of these drive slots filled, and appears to the machine it's plugged into as a single drive. It always ensures that data is stored redundantly across the drives, so that any single drive failure will result in no loss of data.
So far, so RAID, but it gets better. Unlike a RAID, Drobo will use free space intelligently across drives even if they differ in size. And unlike most RAIDs, every disk swap operation can be done on the fly. This means if I have a Drobo with two drives inside, and I start running out of space, I can buy another drive and just... slot it in. Without turning anything off. Without losing access to data. It's completely transparent, except the lights on the front will flash for a bit to indicate that it's reorganising my data across the third drive. And then, if I look at my computer, my external drive will magically have more space on it.
If all four slots are full and I still run out of space, I just pull a small drive out of the enclosure (again, while it's running, and regardless of what it's doing) and replace it with a larger one. Again, it'll do the blinky light rebuild thing, and I'll have free space again. The same procedure if a drive fails.
Andy Ihnatko, tech journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, explains this as the Drobo using cartoon physics. I think it's a confirmation of Clarke's law that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. Check out the 4.5-minute demo video to see how impressive this thing is.
This is an incredibly practical and consumer-friendly device. It doesn't need drivers and there's almost no technical knowledge required to use one -- it's got to be the easiest and friendliest approach to ensuring data redundancy I've ever seen. They are expensive, but I think it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.
Cool though this device is, though, it's functionally just a big external hard drive. But I've been playing with something else to get the best possible use out of my newly acquired storage space.
Plex is a Mac OS X port of the popular and highly polished XBMC Media Center software originally developed to run on modded Xboxes (but which now also runs on PCs). At its root, it's just an interface for audio and video playing, but it runs rings around both Windows Media Center and Apple's Front Row, both in terms of features and presentation.
Out of the box, Plex supports the Apple remote that comes with all Macs, so after setting up a single movie directory, it's already a very practical remote-controlled media centre. But the feature set and level of polish distinguish it from its commercial competition.
Unlike Front Row, it throws any format you care to throw at it without hesitating -- .vob, .wmv, .mkv, even .flv, so no pain-in-the-arse transcoding is required. It'll play from a local drive, from optical media, or stream over SMB shares.
The interface is straightforward, easily navigable, and beautifully designed. It integrates with things like the IMDB and thetvdb.com to fetch metadata for films and TV shows and integrate beautiful poster and menu art into the interface with minimal user intervention.
It really is a lovely piece of software. And it's free. Non-Mac users can get the original XBMC software instead -- which shares the interface and most of the features -- from xbmc.org.
This is all really just prologue to saying that as a holiday project I've been ripping my DVD collection to the Drobo to fill out a Plex-based media centre. At the moment, the media centre is my computer, but at some point in the future I'd like to have a dedicated box attached to a TV that would do all of this. Unfortunately the old Mac Mini I have sitting around isn't suitable for this, as it's a G4, and Plex appears to support Intel only. I already have a softmodded Xbox which is pretty good for this, but it doesn't have the CPU power to decode HD content in realtime.
I can't think of better tools to build and back a media centre machine than Plex and Drobo and I recommend them both very highly.
1 That probably sounds like shameless consumerism, but I don't make a regular habit of it, rarely make frivolous purchases, and technology is pretty much my one and only indulgence. That's not to say that I don't feel guilty about spending money on things, as this illogically-defensive-in-retrospect footnote probably proves. You know, let's just pretend I didn't say anything.
The DroboPlex