Hard Drive & Storage - News & Reviews

Drobo

Drobo, the first “Storage Robot”, is merely a USB drive enclosure with four empty bays that can house any combination of DATA hard drives. Drobo acts like a robot by keeping your data intact and detecting read and write errors before they become critical issues. In other words, it automates all those tasks and decisions that RAID arrays require you to make in order to protect your data. It can salvage and rebuild your data in case of drive failure, and you can add larger drives to it as your storage needs grow by just inserting a new one without any data migration or configuration.  It is an excellent choice for both Mac and PC user.

Design:

Drobo is made of all black body; it is small, simple and user-friendly. The front the rare panels of the device are made of glossy, black plastic, while the top and sides are matte black. The front panel can easily pop-off, that contains four empty drive bays to hold the hard drives. At the bottom of front panel you find a series of 10 blue LED’s to indicate the capacity used for data storage. Each blue light indicates about 10% of the drive. This helps to identify the capacity left on the drive.

On the right side of the front panel are four LED’s, one for each drive bay. These are called “Action Required” indicators with different color light patterns. Explanation of the light pattern is as follows:

• Green: No action needed. (System is healthy.)
• Solid Yellow: Add or upsize a drive here soon. (Drobo is 85% full, add more capacity)
• Blinking Green & Yellow: Don’t remove any drives, operate normally. (Drobo is optimizing data layout. You still can read and write to Drobo during optimization.)
• Solid Red: Add or upsize a drive here. (Drobo is over 95% full, add capacity soon!)
• Blinking Red: Replace this drive, immediately! (This hard drive has failed. Depending on capacity, your data could be at risk until you replace this failed drive.)

Drobo includes:

1. Drobo storage robot,
2. External power supply (100v-240v) with U.S. 110v power cord,
3. USB2.0 cable,
4. User Guide & Quick Start Card (printed),
5. Drobo Resource CD with Drobo Dashboard application,
6. Help files, How-to Videos,
7. Electronic documentation.

Features:

1. Simple to use, user-friendly and easy to set-up.
2. Dimensions 6.0” wide x 6.3” tall x 10.7” long.
3. Excellent choice for Mac and PC users.
4. It supports NTFS and HFS+ file systems. (Does not support FAT32)
5. System Requirements: Apple Macintosh OS-X 10.4 or greater; Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista.
6. Interface: High Speed USB 2.0
7. Drives: One to four 3.5” SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives from any drive manufacturer with any capacity.
8. Intuitive indicators with different color lights to inform what actions are required.
9. Infinite and easy expansion of capacity.
10. Consolidated capacity. Regardless of how many hard drives are installed, your Mac or PC sees one large drive.
11. Robotic Operations for keeping your data safe and optimized. The operations include:
    o Auto-formatting of added drives.
    o Auto-repair of data after drive failure.
    o Auto-repair of data corruption.
    o Auto-repair of data redundancy.
    o Auto-expansion of storage pool.  (When drives are added or upsized).
    o Auto-sense & display of capacity used.

Limitations:

1. Currently, only a USB version is available.
2. Data Robotics has plans for an Ethernet version, but we’d like to see a FireWire or eSATA version, as well.
3. No FAT32 support,
4. Not bundled with a good backup application.

Comments:

If you need a lot of storage or want to keep it managed, then Drobo is absolutely the best choice for you. This storage robot is easy to use and manage. The hard drive indicator lights are simple and lets you know what’s going on with your drives. Furthermore, the ability to add drives as needed is the greatest advantage. With Drobo you can enjoy having massive amounts of data available without fear of losing it. The major weakness of Drobo is it does not support FAT32. Support for FAT32 would be a welcome addition for such user environments.

The coolest feature of Drobo which admire is that it’s Automatically Redundant. For example, say you’re watching a video that is stored on Drive 1. You can pull Drive 1 out while it’s being used and your video playback will be uninterrupted. This could be useful if you’re in a rush to get data into Drobo and have to pull out a drive right away. Drobo appears to solve anyone’s storage problems instantly.