Data Robotics has taken external storage and made the thought of storing lots of content on one drive a safe, secure and easy proposition with their Drobo Data Storage Robot. If you are a content creator with lots of video footage, music or photo files stored across a hodge podge of USB drives Drobo will make your life so much easier you will wonder how you got along without it.
Drobo allows you to take one enclosure and store your data using mirroring, or mirroring with parity depending on how many drives you put into Drobo. The drives and be any brand or capacity so long as they are SATA drives. Drobo can start with as little or as much storage space as you desire from a single disk or you can stuff its four hot-swap bays with 1TB drives for a massive amount of storage.
One of the best parts about Drobo is that you never risk losing your data to a drive failure. That is always a risk you take if you use normal NAT devices running mirroring where you lose one drive to a failure and you lose all your data. With Drobo if one drive fails your data is still secure and complete, you merely replace one disk and you are back to work. As Drobo fills up a light will illuminate beside empty drive bays to signal you to add more storage. Once all four bays are full, the drive with the lowest capacity will be illuminated by LEDs to tell you which drive to upgrade. This means that Drobo never runs out of storage space, as higher capacity drives become available and as you need more space you simply swap disks and your data never knows the wiser.
No configuration is required with Drobo, the device even formats your new hard drives for you. Another nice feature with Drobo is that you do not loose capacity. In some RAID arrays when you add drives with different capacities you lose storage space. For instance if you were running a normal RAID array for mirroring and you had a 80Gb drive and a 100Gb drive, only 80GB of storage space would be available to you. With Drobo, you would get 80Gb of secured data with 20Gb of non-secured storage space.
Setting Drobo up was as easy as plugging it into an AC outlet, plugging in the USB 2.0 cable and slipping hard drives into the hot-swap bays. Drobo did everything else and within 10 minutes I was ready to save data to Drobo. I added various brands and capacities of drives to Drobo and it just worked flawlessly. Data Robotics does not bundle backup software, or any software for that matter with Drobo. You can use any backup solution available with Drobo or simply save data to the drive as you normally would while working with your computer. Drobo is seen as one large drive no matter the capacity of storage you have equipped.
Once I save data to Drobo, I removed various drives to see if I could still access the several GB of files I placed on it, and I could no matter what drive I removed from the Drobo chassis. Pricing for the Drobo unit is $499, and that includes no disk drives. That may sound steep when you can get USB drives with hundreds of GB of storage for the same amount, but you need to keep in mind that Drobo is literally the last external drive you will need to buy. So long as SATA drives are still made and PCs use USB connections, Drobo can be expanded.
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