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Drobo unboxed and dissected in one fell swoop
Just when you thought we couldn't geek out anymore about Data Robotic's new Drobo "intelligent" storage array, along comes tipster Ben with a snazzy photoset complete with unboxing shots and scandalous pics of the internals. Apparently Data Robotics was selling 'em at a "lemonade stand" outside the company HQ in Mountain View, CA for $200 off the rather pricey $700 sticker price, and Ben just couldn't pass up the opportunity to buy one and rip in. Any unconfirmed reports of Engadget editors patrolling the streets of Mountain View tomorrow in search of such "lemonade stands" will most likely be baseless and unfounded.[Thanks, Ben L]
The Drobo "storage robot"
There's been a lot of buzz the last few days about Drobo, the "storage robot" from Data Robotics. The best way to get a sense of what it can do is to watch this promotional video. Basically, the Drobo, which has four SATA drive bays, plugs into your Mac via USB and looks to the Mac just like a large USB mass storage device. According to our blog compadres over at Engadget (who have the full skinny), it "uses pooled virtualized storage" (not RAID) to create what looks to your Mac like a single drive, but which has data protection and redundancy features. Best of all, the hard drives are hot swappable. You can add and remove hard drives on the fly without corrupting your data either because of hard drive failure or merely to add more storage space. All of this is transparent to the host computer, which never notices anything has happened.All of this storage robotics coolness is expensive, however. The Drobo sells for $699 without any drives. You'll need to install at least two SATA hard drives in the Drobo and it handles all the rest. [Via UNEASYsilence]
The skinny on the Drobo storage array device
While not quite a robot as we here at Engadget typically think of them, there's no doubt that Data Robotics's Drobo storage array / external enclosure is making some interesting propositions with this new storage device. Here's everything the storage-minded need to know about the company and its forthcoming product: The device will come drive-free, and cost $700. It will launch in the summer. It does not use RAID of any kind. Instead, it uses pooled virtualized storage. Unlike RAID 5, which requires 3+ drives of the same size, users can add disparate SATA (I or II) drives of any size. The storage pooling impact is estimated as the size of the largest drive. So if your largest drive is 500GB, that will be the maximum amount of space lost from the storage pool for redundancy. With four 1TB drives you would get 3TB addressable storage, and ~2.7TB after formatting. The device can address an infinite amount of storage, limited only by file systems and drive capacities. All drives are hot swappable; new drives are instantaneously available. The device is block-aware and makes use of a "virtual hot spare", meaning that if a drive is pulled or lost and there's enough free space on the drives, data will be double-copied and made redundant again. Data has corruption protection as well; if data is corrupt on one drive, the device will intelligently find another copy of the data which is not corrupt. For lack of necessity, the device does not support FireWire 400 / 800 or eSATA; its internal data speeds are not fast enough that those interfaces would benefit performance. The device will only format NTFS and HFS (PC and Mac); it may be updated to support other file systems. It features NVRAM and a battery backup so even non-journaled file systems will be protected against corruption during loss of power. It will monitor drive health by its own system of metrics, and pre-emptively predict drive failures. Data Robotics plans to launch higher capacity Drobos with more drive bays. There will also be an open API for interfacing with the Drobo. Hopefully that should answer a few questions about this thing -- got any more? We'll and find out. So, kinda high price aside, you as stoked about this thing as we are?%Gallery-2507%
Drobo, the "world's first storage robot"
Managing all of your data can be a little intimidating, especially if you need to keep adding more and more storage capacity without breaking the bank or running into technical snags. Well the engineers over at Data Robotics figure the solution to all of your storage needs is, of course, a storage robot. Affectionately named Drobo, the four drive array connects via USB and employs "intelligent" software to handle all of the data management and disk swapping: one drive goes down? No problem, Drobo's already on it. Wanna swap out drives while you listen to music? Drobo keeps the tunes going even when you're down to one disk. At $700 it is a little steep -- especially considering the lack of any "starter" drives bundled in -- but we suppose that in the long run, that's a small price to pay if it truly does deliver the data management nirvana we've been seeking[Via eHomeUpgrade]
