Introduction to the Drobo Dashboard and Configuration

The hardware was very easy to put together, and the software was just as simple to set up.  There are a lot of screenshots here, but you can see it was pretty much a case of "next, next, next" to get the dashboard installed.  Once installed, you will have the dashboard up and running.

1. Once the Drobo Dashboard software is installed and running, it is looking for Drobo devices.

2. The Drobo device is detected, but at this point my device was still starting up.

3. Clicking on the "Advanced controls" and looking at the "Data" tab, I can see what is in the device and it has correctly identified my four 1TB 3.5" SATA hard drives.

4. The "Tools" tab, offers a number of commands, alert settings, device settings and updates.

5. The dashboard shows how much free space I have and the shares available.

6. Expanding the "How is my storage being used?" shows more drive information.

7. As I selected the option to check for updates, this box somes up.

8. Clicking on the highlighted option to change the Admin password, shown in images 6 & 7 above, brings up the "Admin" under the settings.  There is also an option to enable DroboApps (which I plan to investigate more in the future)

9. By default, the Drobo device will protect your data in the event of one hard drive failing.  There is a option to enable dual disk redundancy, which will protect the data in the event of two drives failing.  It does use more hard disk space, but I guess it depends how important you data is.  As my device will be holding family photos and my MP3s, I will be enabling the dual drive redundancy.

10. On the "Network" tab, the network settings can be configured.  I will be setting this to match my internal network.

11. On the "Shares" tab, shares and users can be created.  By default, you have one share called "Public" and the administrative user called "Admin" by default.

13. On the "Email Alerts" tab, the email server information can be configured.

As you can see, the software interface is clear and concise.  Lots of features are available and seems much easier to configure that my existing NAS device.  Now the device is on my network, I will be investigating more about DroboApps.