May 2008 Gadget of the Month

Say “hello” to Drobo— the world’s first storage robot, providing “fully automated data storage that ensures your data is always protected…with no special knowledge or expertise.”

You may say, “I already have an external USB drive,” but don’t dismiss the Drobo all at once. The Drobo is much more than just a USB drive. It is a RAID storage array, but at the same time it isn’t. Unlike a RAID storage array, adding capacity to the Drobo is mindlessly easy. If a hard drive fails, or you need to add more space, you can swap out the drives on the fly, and the Drobo does the rest.

No need to reformat anything. No need to back up all of your data first. No need to dismount the volume.

The Drobo comes with 4 empty hard drive bays at a price tag of $499. It will feed on any brand of 3.5” SATA I or SATA II hard drive. Keep in mind that it will accept mixed capacities and manufacturers. The Drobo automatically configures the drives for redundancy, so a minimum of 2 drives allows you to rest easy knowing that your data will be available.

A more recent addition to the Drobo product line is the DroboShare. DroboShare takes the Drobo and allows data to be accessed over a network. Most firms already have a File Server, but consider Drobo for as an extra data redundancy solution, possibly paired with Xcentric Online Backup™. Let’s say you are using Online Backup but you also want to have locally stored redundant data, the Drobo could be exactly what you are looking for.

Some cons about the Drobo are the somewhat steep price, considering it doesn’t come with drives and making it network accessible costs an extra $200. But all in all, the Drobo could be a nice addition to your gadget collection. We here at Xcentric are looking forward to taking one for a test drive in the near future.

Here is an excerpt from a Cnet.com review, found here: “We installed the Drobo (with two drives, an 80GB Seagate Barracuda and a 160GB Seagate Barracuda) on our Windows-based system, and it was as easy as the start-up literature promised. After the initial formatting was done, we copied over several gigabytes of data, including photos, music, video, and data files. To test the ability to access data during a drive failure, we started a video from Drobo and proceeded to extract one of the hard drives and replace it with another (a 400GB Hitachi Deskstar). We didn’t see any hiccups in the video (or any of the other files we accessed), and the formatting of the new disk and the rewriting of the data progressed in the background.”