I never knew Drobo was this sexy

A friend of mine needs to safely store truckloads of video data. After several(!) terabyte Lacie drives started failing on her, she asked for my opinion about Drobo. At first I didn’t think very highly of what looked like yet another rather generic external RAID hard drive box. Until I saw this little video.



That’s simply amazing. There must be some pretty clever software inside this little box for it to be this flexible. From what I gather it uses a mechanism similar to RAID5 to keep your data safe. So this thing isn’t just sexy on the outside, its innards are equally impressive.

Too bad the people at Data Robotics know this. Given their current pricing they’re apparently hoping for a “no matter what it costs, I need this right now” feeling among their target audience. Fully pimped out it’ll run you at least $1200. Sure you can swap the drives as bigger ones become available, but the box itself isn’t cheap, nor is the optional NAS module.

Other than that, the only things I don’t like about Drobo are the lack of eSata and the fact I really don’t need one right now.

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Roy | February 27, 2009 | English,Gadgets | Comments (10)

10 Comments

  1. I think that Video sold me as well… stopped by initially to compliment you on that Flash tag cloud you wrote, pretty damn cool.

    Reply Comment by David — February 28, 2009 @ 7:12 am

  2. I just stopped here to find something about that flash tagcloud. And now I wanna that small black box which is going to keep my data in the best shape. Damn

    Reply Comment by Nashai — February 28, 2009 @ 11:07 pm

  3. Thanks for the compliment on the video, yep – that’s me giving the demo. I no longer represent data robotics, but I am still a HUGE Drobo fan, and believe it’s the best solution for anybody looking for safe, easy to use storage. I think you are a bit high on the pricing though, at $1200. You can pickup a Drobo for $450 (if you sneak around a bit), and a 1 TB drive is running what? $100? Figure 4 of those at $400, you are under $1000.

    Also – DON’T buy for the future. Get what you need now, and in the short term, and add drives as you go, because it’s SO easy on the Drobo. Any other RAID box with 4x1TB is gonna run you in the same ballpark, so it’s a great deal.

    Anyway – thanks for appreciating the video, we made them to show just how easy it is to manage your storage with Drobo.

    Cheers,
    Jim

    Reply Comment by Jim Schaff — March 2, 2009 @ 4:13 am

  4. Hi Jim. I factored in a droboshare NAS as well. That adds another $200. A lot of money, but definitely also an awesome setup.

    Congrats on the video. It’s very hard to resist :)

    Reply Comment by Roy — March 2, 2009 @ 5:21 pm

  5. With regard to cost, one nice thing they point out on the site is you only need to buy the amount of storage you need today. I got one and only bought two drives to start and also threw in one other I had lying around. That is enough for now but as my baby videos fill up, I’ll buy a new drive but I can buy it a year from now when drive prices are even cheaper. In most RAID5 setups, you can’t add different size drives like that so you have to buy everything at today’s higher prices.

    Reply Comment by Robert — March 2, 2009 @ 11:49 pm

    • The friend I mentioned in the article need the most storage available today. Filling it up with 1.5 TB drives probably isn’t even going to cut it. And she’d like to be able to access the files from two locations. Being flexible is great, but if you really need tons of storage right now, waiting for drives to become more affordable isn’t an option.

      Reply Comment by Roy — March 3, 2009 @ 9:36 am

  6. Now, this is one snazzy little gadget. Thanks for opening my eyes to a cool external storage solution.

    Reply Comment by Bronson — March 4, 2009 @ 2:18 pm

  7. Darn, I should have charged Drobo for this post :) .

    Reply Comment by Roy — March 4, 2009 @ 2:39 pm

  8. Nice product ! Great Demo , one drawback of the product , only USB & FW are supported ; I need to host and share both with high availability/redundancy .. ( RAID + Network storage ) doesn’t exist on linux ???
    -Yacoss-

    Reply Comment by Yacoss — March 13, 2009 @ 10:01 am

    • @Yacoss: The Droboshare module lets you ad a drobo to your LAN.

      Reply Comment by Roy — March 13, 2009 @ 1:39 pm

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