SMB or AFP ?

Microsoft was pushed harder by commercial customer's to improve their file sharing protocol over the years. It has evolved from the original implementation. Apple not so much until more recently, but by then SMB was well established, and interacting with other systems became more important that continuing to push AFP.

I use them to back up my photographic work and have come to trust the dual disk redundancy. Hope that trust is not misplaced.

The Drobo will protect you from a single drive failure (just make sure you either have email notifications, or keep checking the lights to look for "Red", telling you to replace a drive).

But Drobo will NOT protect you from "Fumble Fingers" (messing up the data because you made a mistake). It will not protect you from theft. It will not protect you from fire or a natural disaster.

If the information is valuable, then it should have 3 copies

• The original is one copy
• 2 backups using 2 different backup utilities going to 2 different backup devices will protect against bugs in the backup utilities and failures of a device (Drobo help a great deal here)
• 1 of the cpies off-site, protects against theft and natural disasters.

But I think the Drobo will serve its purpose of being a reliable storage device. It has for me, which is why I've kept buying them, even though a simple USB disk is much cheaper.

SMB is faster (the protocol is more efficient). SMB is the personal computer file sharing industry standard (that does not always mean it is the best thing since sliced bread, just that everyone is using it 🙂). SMB is the direction Apple is moving.

AFP is needed if the volume is going to be used for Time Machine, as AFP provides a few edge case Mac file system access tricks, that the generic SMB protocol does not.

Apple's SMB implementation is still evolving, and sometimes does not play nice with every 3rd party server. But if it works for your Drobo, then feel free to use it. NOTE: Drobo has been working with Apple products for years, and has lots of experience working with Macs (I've owned 5 direct attach Drobo's, with 2 of them still in service).