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the amazing drobo click for larger image

I finally got myself a drobo. It’s a unique storage   device that adds unlimited capacity and data redundancy in a very simple product. They market it as a ‘data robot’ and thus the name drobo. It’s  a USB 2.0 or firewire 800/400 (that’s ieee1394 or ilink to some people) external drive enclosure that will hold up to 4 sata drives of any capacity. Some geeks love to set up RAID arrays and will argue whether RAID 5 or Raid 10 is best. I’d rather not have to worry about striped and/or mirrored arrays where you must use disks of the same size (and usually exact brand and model or you are likely to have problems). The drobo eliminates all the hassle. You just slide in two or more drives of any capacity and connect the USB or firewire cable. There is a simple software application that gives you the drobo dashboard. You first decide how you want to format the drives. NTFS is best for windows user, but Mac and linux users have their options too. In a couple of minutes the drives are formatted and you have one large volume that you can map as any available drive letter and name whatever you want (Mine is the X: drive named drobo). Now I can dump anything I want on that drive and it is safe from system crashes and hard drive failures on my computer and even more importantly on the drobo itself. the drobo uses a proprietary sytem (it’s not RAID!) that allows the drobo to rebuild itself when a drive fails with no loss of data. All your precious pictures, music, video, even your memoirs are protected against drive failures. The cost of this is reduced capacity of all the drives. You can figure about a third of the total capacity is lost to this redundancy. A small price figuratively and literally when you look at hard drives these days.

Drobo has 4 bays and accepts any sized sata drive

I had a 250gb, a 320gb, and a new 1terabyte drive on hand and slid them in. This is not the most efficient combination since the available storage is less than 500gb overall due to the difference in sizes and how the data is spread over all the drives so that the failure of any drive allows all the data to be recovered from the other two. The drobo is smart. It’ll tell you when a drive is getting full or is in danger of crashing. Just slide out the smallest drive and add a bigger one. The drobo will rebuild all the data with no muss or fuss. This is a great data protection and back up solution for anyone who has important information on their computer(s). Keep in mind that while drobo will guard your data at home or office, it can’t protect against fire, flood, earthquake or even thieves. A comprehensive data storage and protection system has to incorporate some sort of off site storage plan. This could be an external drive with your critical data that you take to work, or a dvd your burn and send to your mother, brother, or friend.  There are online solutions like carbonite or amazon’s S3 service. Microsoft has Windows Live (http://home.live.com) and you get 25gb of free storage and a number of other interesting services as well. However you choose to do it, you need to have multiple copies of important data in more than one place or you are only one act of God away from lost data. Drobo is pricey compared to simple external hard drives. I have a small forest of drives next to my computer for storage and back-ups. The drobo will be replacing most of them due to its set and forget ease of use. I can use a free app like SyncToy from Microsoft and set up folders on the drobo that mirror folders and files on my desktop and laptop machines. SyncToy will copy any changes and keep the folders synched. Check out the drobo and see if it fits into your back-up and storage plan. www.drobo.com