Product Description

As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, Data Robotics has created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7573 in Consumer Electronics
• Color: Black
• Brand: Data Robotics
• Model: 900-00002-002
• Dimensions: 12.80" h x 15.50" w x 11.00" l, 11.00 pounds

Features

• Automatically protects your data with no setup or configuration. If the status lights are green, your data is safe.
• Drobo The Worlds First Storage Robot
• Drobo uses Data Robotics' SAFE (Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable) StorageTechnology
• Makes storage manageable for anybody, regardless of computer knowledge or technical expertise.
• Non-Stop Data Protection

Customer Reviews

A solid external SATA HD
Its been 6 months since I've used this external Hard Drive I am very please despite some imperfections.

The GOODS
-Able to combine different SATA hard drive size.
-Able to detect and warn capacity limit
-Gives indication light to warn possible problems.
-Does not need to defragment or clean-up drives. Drobo will automatically maintain when necessary
-Automatically backup files. When data is corrupted it will restore to its previous condition.
-Automatically copies the files when inserting a new drive.

The BAD
-Does not have a reset/power switch. You have to manually remove USB and power cords to reset.
-9 out of 10 times Drobo will not detect that you have started your computer. In which case you would need to remove the USB and power cords to reset.
-When I bought this unit I got it with 2 1-Terabyte hard drives. Drobo said it only detects just 927 Gig. So I'm missing 1473 Gig. Even with the back up I should be getting around 1.7 terabyte.

Unreliable
I own three Drobos. In the last 2 months, two of them have failed; one terminally so, taking with it ~1TB of data. (The other required a series of reboots and rebuilds before the data was accessible again, the whole process took almost 3 weeks.) The worst part: Drobo Customer Support is unreachable, non-responsive, and generally unhelpful.

When it works, it's fine. When it breaks, there's nothing you can do. Unfortunately, it seems there is a lot that can cause it to break (even specific brands and models of HDDs seem to be incompatible -- although one can only find out after owning a Drobo and accessing the User Forums part of the website...)

Great concept, lousy execution, even worse support. Avoid.

Stable, Quiet, and Easy
Media center PCs are an indispensable part of your entertainment center, but once you start recording high definition video, they fill up quite quickly, leading you with a desire for more disk space. Unfortunately, the setup of many media center computers makes it difficult to add drives -- either because the drives would make too much noise, or because the case isn't large enough to add drives to. Enter Drobo to the rescue.

I've been incredibly impressed at just how easy the Drobo is to use, just plug it in, throw in a couple of hard drives, and you've got an ever expanding file system. What's better is that the Drobo takes care of all the mundane issues such as setting up RAID and doing data integrity checks for you. What does this mean for you? No more mucking around with software raid. No more managing drive health. No more wondering what to do when your RAID 5 array becomes full. The Drobo just takes care of it.

My Drobo was purchased to replace a 4x320GB drive RAID-5 array for Linux and MythTV. Along with the Drobo I purchased a pair of Western Digital 1TB Green Power drives. Setting up the Drobo was trivial, plug it in, plug in the drives, and format the drobo. Then I copied all my data over to the Drobo, broke down the RAID, and moved two of the drives into the Drobo to give me more space. It's so simple, I just don't need to worry about my drives anymore. I can get about 25MB/s from the Drobo, which is more than enough for multiple high definition video streams.

Some people have raised issues about the noise of the Drobo. Truthfully, I've hardly noticed the noise of the Drobo in my media center. Most of the time the fan isn't running, and even when it does run, it's quiet enough that the TV or stereo easily drowns it out -- even when listening at moderate volumes.

Other folks will raise an issue with the price. The Drobo is not cheap, but it's also not the most expensive of external enclosures. One of the biggest features you get with it is the ability to have on-the-fly limitless expansions, which allows you to incrementally increase the size of your array without having to worry about matching disks. I haven't seen any other enclosures that allow this. So, once your external RAID-5 is full, on a traditional system you'll need to spend lots of money to upgrade all your drives all at once -- not so with Drobo. Pick up new drives at your pace. The Drobo even provides helpful lights so you can see when you need more disk space.

Of course, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say some things that are sorta strange and less than ideal about the Drobo. First, it takes a while to boot up when power is restored. Usually just a couple of minutes, but if you tell it to allow for very large volumes, it can take much longer. Second, my first Drobo had a bad fan, luckily Data Robotics' customer support was able to ship me a new Drobo with no difficulty. Thirdly, under Linux it seems like the first time the drive is mounted on system boot, it fails quickly, so I need to try and mount the drive twice -- which increments the drive letters for the system. Finally, there is no network interface for the Drobo. You can pick up a Drobo Share to go along with it, but you're probably hooking the Drobo up to some home media server, so it shouldn't matter anyway.

As an experienced system administrator and generally picky person about computers, I was really hesitant about purchasing a Drobo and losing some of the minute controls you can have over a RAID system. After using it for a while, I wonder why I didn't do it before. The Drobo just works -- something that is all too rare in technology today.