Introducing the Drobo

I don’t remember exactly how I learned of the Drobo, to be honest, but I’m glad I found it. A Drobo is a really cool external storage device. It’s not a hard drive, but an enclosure into which you put hard drives. Then, you plug this thing into your computer via USB.

What’s so neat about it? Well, it has four slots. If your storage needs are moderate to begin with, maybe you buy a drobo and put two 250 gig hard drives in it. Down the road, after you’ve downloaded lots of music and imported tons of digital photos, or delved into iMovie, you can pop a third drive in and automatically expand the storage. You don’t have to configure anything - no formatting, configuration, etc. It just shows up like one big gigantic hard drive.

But hands down the best part is how it protects your data. If you put in more than one drive, it automatically spreads out the data so that if one drive died,  you would not lose any files. All your data is protected. You would just simply pop out the dead drive, and put in a new one. You can be copying 100 megs to the Drobo, and add or remove drives without hurting anything.  It has lights on the front that tell you if drives are healthy, how much space is left, etc. 

Below are screen shots of the software it comes with, Drobo Dashboard. That’ll give you a great idea of what this unit’s all about.

This is one of those devices that hurts a little bit upfront in terms of cost (about $500, plus the cost of whatever SATA drives you put in it), but I subscribe to the “if you’re going to do it, do it right” mentality. Get one of these, and you’ll be set for a long time because they’re so expandable. You won’t be changing external USB or Firewire drives in or out, or messing with a bunch of cables. And, you won’t have toss out an entire external drive kit when it goes bad - including it’s power brick and the enclosure and everything else. You just work with bare drives. Which can be obtained anywhere, cheap. AND the drive sizes don't have to match, either (a drawback of traditional RAID systems).

The only downside I've seen so far is that being a USB 2 device, it's not exactly a speed demon. If this thing were firewire 800 or even 400, you could actually use it for video production. But, it's great for backups (at least for personal or small business use) which don't have to be blazing fast.

The Drobo web site is well-done, with a neat “Drobolator” function you can use to simulate what happens when you add or remove drives to the Drobo. Check it out to learn more, including their video testimonials.