Digital Media Enthusiast

Technology is the spice of life for Jennifer Landefeld.  She uses technology to enhance her life! Jennifer is an Administrative Associate for the Computer Science department at Carnegie-Mellon University. At CMU Jenn creates videos of the presentations made by PhD students and visiting professors. The PhD students use the videos to review their efforts in response to critiques by their professors. The visiting professors give presentations on a variety of subjects. These are “one-time” events and Jennifer has always worried about losing them. Especially since the work was stored on external drives without redundancy.

Storage Pain: Running Out Of Space

Jennifer’s work life becomes complicated when she exceeds the available free storage in the middle of a project. An altogether too commonly occuring event. She would then have to do the ‘free space shuffle’, moving things around to make enough room to finish a project.  Other times she would purchase another, larger drive and continue her work once she got the new drive connected and her work-in-progress copied over. Jennifer suffered with this problem every couple of months. Whenever she ran into storage problems, it resulted in delays for the CMU PhD Students.

Drobo solved Jennifer’s problems in two stages. The first generation Drobo was the perfect storage solution to archive her work, but was not fast enough for editing video. No Jennifer can edit her videos off of the Second Generation Drobo when its connected to her Mac via FireWire 800.

Drobo is Good for Work, Good for Home

Jennifer’s experience with Drobo at work provided the confidence to purchase one for home use. At home, Jennifer prefers to have her audio and video available online, and has over 3 TB of media available online. She and her family use an Airport Express to wirelessly share music and video throughout her vintage farm home. They have two MacBook Pros, an iMAC, a Mac mini plus an HP laptop. Jennifer stores her iTunes library on Drobo. A DroboShare lets her share Drobo on a network. Jenn can access her music from wherever she finds herself working.

She has used EyeTV to record the television programs she and her family watch so they can view them at more convenient times.  She has used Handbrake to make her movie collection available to any Mac on her home network.

On Drobo Jennifer exclaimed, “Drobo’s expandability is amazing! You just pop in a new drive and you've got more space. It is really easy to set up and get it working. This makes it a no-brainer to give yourself as much storage as you need. You don't need to crack anything open to add space. This is an ideal product for the small users and even good sized businesses who want to edit video, or for home users who deal with video.”

Jennifer looked at a home server product from HP and at storage products from Buffalo Technology. Jennifer explained, “Those products look nice, but neither of them offers the ease of expansion that I can get with Drobo.”

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