My impression of Drobo and Tivo

[madneon]

Ok I have a drobo with some rather small HD's installed the largest is a 500GB I have the Drobo share so it a part of my network and with that 2 pc's and a laptop and two tivos wireless tivo HD and S3 using Pytivo ( Tivo Desktop will not stay up). So I have all of my movies on the drobo I figured it would only be able to stream maybe some downloaded content, BUT as I am writing this on my laptop I am streaming a movie on the laptop and watching a HD movie on my 50in plasma, both streaming from the drobo and I am encoding a movie being written to the drobo at the same time. Now the HD content might need about 10 mins to get started but after that it seems to run and look ok. So the drobo is not as slow a movie server as once thought..I am using a old WRT54G with DDWRT .24 firmware. Any questions please ask...Just thought I would share. One more thing there are a few posts on here about using a drobo as a external drive for the tivo actually if you set Tivo desktop to auto transfer your shows technically you could have a 16TB backup of all of your tivo shows and have all of the hard drive crash proof safety features the drobo has to offer and it seems to stream well over a G network.....

[richsadams]

Nice...thanks for the tip. I've been thinking about using Drobo for an HTPC storage unit as well. I have everything connected via Ethernet. It sounds like if it can run well on 802.11g, it'll do well hard-wired. :up:

[fishguy]

Wow! I would have thought one would need gigabit ethernet to stream HD effectively. That Drodo-share is gigabit, isn't it? I know the WRT54 isn't. I've got an old WRT54GS running dd-wrt, maybe I'll try some streaming off my Tivo HD.

[windracer]

You're running pyTiVo on a separate box though, not on the Drobo itself, right?

[wmcbrine]

It looks like you could run it on the Drobo...

[madneon]

Sorry for the wait but yeah I am running the server software on another pc on the network but I am on the look out for some server software that you can run on the drobo they have some stuff for it already "drobo apps" but I will hold out for something more refined.

[madneon]

I have been looking for a "drobo app" that can run natively on the drobo that would allow the tivo to access the .avi, .mpg, .mp3's, or .tivo files over the network I have written some programs but I dont think there is much of a demand but, I need to do some research ( does anyone know if pytivo run on linux) that is the OS that the drobo uses.....

[wmcbrine]

pyTivo most definitely runs on Linux, yes. :) Better than on Windows actually.

[madneon]

Hummmm it would be nice to run a server program on my drobo that does not need a pc running on the network also.

[byte2]

Hummmm it would be nice to run a server program on my drobo that does not need a pc running on the network also.

Let me just say "Ditto!" I'd be interested in running something like that on my Drobo too.

[berkshires]

Could this be used to transfer videos via the internet between two homes? ie. a TiVo in my NY home TTCB from a Drobo in my MA house?

Or even a PC in NY TTG from a NY TiVo (and even an MA TiVo?) to the Drobo in MA

[madneon]

You have a PM...

[mulscully]

has anyone successfully gotten pyTivo to run on the DroboShare. I am on the Fence about purchasing the drobo, but if I could get pyTivo to run on it it would be a slam dunk... and HME/VLC would be icing on the cake

Lou

[PeterP]

I bought a Drobo+DroboShare last fall as backup device. Spent over $1K on the entire setup (including 4 1.5TB disks). Over two weeks of configuration I ended up corrupting the drives three times. This was not writing my own code. This was simply adding apps. What would happen is the filesystem would get corrupted and suddenly become unreadable. Each time all data was lost. So I put it on a shelf and repurposed the disks.

Last spring I bought a 2TB Linkstation Duo and hacked it to get an SSH prompt. I have Pytivo and Subversion running on it as well as the standard Samba server. It will even transcode using a locally compiled version of ffmpeg, but it is horribly slow. Image resizing takes a couple of seconds. Altogether I'm very happy with it. It was also only $260 including the drives, just a bit more than the DroboShare alone. It has been rock solid as far as reliability.

So if you are thinking about buying the overpriced Drobo+Droboshare, you might want to reconsider and get a Buffalo NAS instead.

[PeterP]

Could this be used to transfer videos via the internet between two homes? ie. a TiVo in my NY home TTCB from a Drobo in my MA house?

Or even a PC in NY TTG from a NY TiVo (and even an MA TiVo?) to the Drobo in MA
For this purpose I would use an rsync cron job. Just synchronize a local directory with a remote directory. You might need to use a dynamic dns client running on one of the devices.

[westside_guy]

I don't want to hijack the thread, really - but is there any real advantage to Drobo if you're technically proficient (meaning if you know how to configure a Linux box and so can easily get LVM already)?

I hope that didn't sound condescending - it wasn't intended that way. It just seems like the main selling point for Drobo is ease of use - and it is relatively pricey.

[PeterP]

I don't want to hijack the thread, really - but is there any real advantage to Drobo if you're technically proficient (meaning if you know how to configure a Linux box and so can easily get LVM already)?

I hope that didn't sound condescending - it wasn't intended that way. It just seems like the main selling point for Drobo is ease of use - and it is relatively pricey.

IMO, no. And there is one huge drawback. The Drobo uses a proprietary drive format. If your array gets corrupted (as mine did 3x) you lose all your data.

[rocketman128]

Maybe it's time to revist this issue, with the new Series 4, and the Drobo S with eSATA support, I don't think the physical connection is the problem anymore. Does anybody know if the max disk has increased from 2.2TB on the new players? Also, with so many shows being copy protected against MRV, not sure if a big TIVO box in the home theather serving the rest of my TIVO boxes makes sense anymore? Any updates on MVR on the Series 4 or the rest of the line up?