Does Drobo Play Well With AppleTV?

Question

My media collection is filling up my Mac Mini and I am starting to look for an external drive the can play my movies smoothly on my AppleTV.
I have been considering the "Drobo" because of the ease of use, self back-ups, easy to add more space when needed and heals itself in case of hard drive failure, plus having Firewire 800.
However I have read that it has a noisy fan, slow and gets hot.
Noise - Should not be an issue for me since I will be streaming the media to another room.
Slow - My understanding is that it does slow down and chops up your video if it decides to do some backing up while you are using it, but I only use this Mac Mini as a media server, so hopefully it does not decide to do its thing while I am using it to listen and watch my media.
Hot - Not sure about this one, I normally leave my Mac Mini On 24-7, an would like to do the same with the Drobo. Not sure if the Drobo goes to sleep along with it's fan or does this Drobo need to be turned off.
Let me know what you guys use for external drive and if you leave your external drive on 24-7.
Would love to here from Drobo users and if your happy on how it works with Apple TV 2.

Answer 1

I've got a Drobo with 8TB of drives giving about 5TB of storage with built-in backup/redundancy.
Funnily enough I've never used it for AppleTV, and it's actually been disconnected for a few months after I moved my Mac Pro. I mainly use it for photo/home video archival and for storing clones of working OS installations.
The fan on the 4 bay Drobo unit can also be somewhat noisy. While it's a nice solution, I do not trust it alone for backup, and as it's not currently connected I'm using other external drives for that.
While it has Firewire, it's not exactly blazing fast for either read or write but that's not important for AppleTV anyway.
Personally I have always tended to use external drives for iTunes media storage - so long as I back these up I regard them as expendable. My current strategy for iTunes media backup is to use Home Sharing to copy material between a cheap 2TB USB WD Elements drive connected to my Mac Mini and a 2TB drive in my Mac Pro.
I have used lots of WD and Seagate drives over the years but the last Seagate I bought put me off big time due to noise/clanking/clicking and general sounds of impending failure echoed by many on the web - this was a 1.5TB external I just don't trust and don't use, they may have improved again now.
The more expensive WDs these days often have annoying extra 'CD partitions' implemented by firmware, the cheaper 'Elements' series don't, they're no slouches either.
With 1TB portable external drives available, I think these are also an option for external storage and in fact I was happily using a 500GB portable external on the Mini until it started to fill up.
I think the main thing is to ensure you have backups for purchases, or things you don't want the hassle of ripping (CDs etc) and/or converting for AppleTV use again (time vs cost perspective).
Secondly you need to establish the size you currently need and for at least a year or so for new additions.
If you want built-in redundancy also consider the WD Studio series which come in 2TB and 4TB RAID configurations allowing 1TB or 2TB of automatic backup, they also offer USB and FW.
There will be many other options out there.
AC