I’ve been using a Drobo and Drobo Share since July. For those that don’t know, Drobo is an enclosure that accepts up to four SATA drives, and uses a proprietary RAID-like technology to make the drives appear as one drive to the operating system. Unlike RAID you don’t have to use identical drives, and the Drobo indicates when it’s almost full. When that happens, the smallest capacity drive can be replaced with a larger one and overall capacity is increased. Drobo Share is a network attachment that turns the Drobo into a NAS device. It’s been working fine until this past weekend when I noticed I couldn’t connect from my Mac. The lights on the Drobo appeared normal, and I could ping the IP for the Drobo Share. I tried all the troubleshooting options on the Drobo support site, including restoring the Drobo Share to defaults using a paperclip, but nothing worked. The Drobo itself is fine and still works over USB, so it was a relief that no data was lost. The Drobo Share appears to be dead though.

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Tags: drobo, Mac, tech support, Windows

Since switching to a Mac full time last spring I have tried to use native Mac apps wherever I could. I need Windows to do parts of my job, but there is a lot I can do without bringing up Parallels. It has its detractors, but Outlook 2007 on Windows has been very good to me. Granted, if we didn’t have Exchange at work, I would still be using Thunderbird, but since we do (and I have to support it), I’m glad it works so well. It’s a great improvement over Outlook 2003, and has been my primary e-mail client even after moving to the Mac.

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Tags: Entourage, Exchange, Mac, Office 2007, Office 2008, OSX, Parallels, review, technology, Windows