Gotta Get a Drobo

brian on 2008.07.08
at 08:24 pm

Have you heard about the Drobo ? I’ve thought it was a wonderful idea for a long time: A little box in which you place however many hard drives you have, in whatever capacity they may be, and Drobo treats them like a RAID 1 & 5 simultaneously.

If anyone out there isn’t geeky enough to know a RAID allows you to store data in multiple places in case of drive failure. The group of disks acts as if it’s one simple drive on your computer.

However, RAIDs have their drawbacks. The main one being maintenance. Set up is a bear and recovery from a disk failure is tough. Your disks need to be matched in capacity. Drobo claims to have fixed all this. Drive fail? All your data is still available. Two disks may even be able to fail and you could still be up and running. Drobo filled up? Eject your smallest disk and insert a larger one. Drobo will rearrange. Ejecting is super easy. An array of lights tell you disk status and capacity status.

Very cool. And until today, I wouldn’t want one because it was USB 2.0 only. I’m no fan of USB.

Today, Drobo heard me and released a new version with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Nice. Wish granted.

Except I don’t have $500 for an empty one. Maybe some day soon.

Posted in: Technology · Hardware