drobo

Nigel Tufnel's amp goes up to 11, but Drobo's newest storage system outdoes the Spinal Tap guitarist with a new 12-drive model.

The new Drobo Elite B1200i, geared for small businesses, is a central storage system that connects to people's computers via the iSCSI technology for building a storage area network. It's matched by a similar 8-bay iSCSI model, the B800i, and a related network-attached file storage model, the B800fs.

The models are a new high-water mark for Drobo, a company that got its start with much smaller desktop storage systems that attached to personal computers … Read more

Two constants endure despite the unceasing change in the computing industry: our need for backing up data and our persistent failure to actually do it.

One company hoping to profit from the situation is Data Robotics, which on Tuesday launched the new Drobo FS model of its multi-drive storage system family. It's geared specifically for backing up multiple computers over a local network and for sharing files among those computers.

The eight-pound, five-drive device is the latest generation from a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company whose claim to fame is a novel method of storing data on multiple hard … Read more

Finally, it looks like the Drobo storage system I've been waiting for has arrived.

I've been struggling with the right way to deal with data as I move from a desktop machine with abundant internal storage to a laptop that can't fit my burgeoning photo library. Earlier four-drive Drobo models, with FireWire and USB ports, looked better at backup than storing live files I'd be using constantly.

But Monday, Data Robotics announced the Drobo S, a five-bay, $799 storage system that adds an eSATA connection to the mix.

Drobo systems use technology called BeyondRAID that stores data across a mixture of different drives. It offers redundancy and automatically rebuilds your files when you replace an older drive or add a new one that's more capacious. Drobos don't come cheap, but they offer longevity, and right now Amazon is selling 1.5-terabyte drives for $99.

So why should the prospect of dropping $1,000 on a storage system excite me? Because of eSATA.… Read more

I reviewed the Drobo awhile ago and was very impressed with Data Robotics' proprietary BeyondRAID technology used in the device.

Basically, it lets you mix hard drives of any capacity together into a volume that's well-balanced between the largest possible amount of storage and maximum data redundancy. While the Drobo's performance didn't meet our expectations, its technology offers a lot of potential.

Data Robotics on Tuesday expanded that potential into an all new product for the business environment, the DroboPro.

This is the company's first foray into the business sector, and it calls the DroboPro the "business class storage array that manages itself."

Much like the Drobo, the DroboPro also allows for mixing hard drives of different capacities, and you can hot-swap any of them without having to restart or interrupt the data access. This translates into no-downtime expansion of the storage volume. Moreover, unlike the Drobo, the DroboPro now includes protection against multiple concurrent drive failures.

While the Drobo is a pure external direct attach storage (DAS) device with USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 connections, the DroboPro also includes the iSCSI interface (via a Gigabit Ethernet connection). This makes the DroboPro one of a few hybrid devices that support both network attached storage and DAS. As you need to buy the DroboShare to make the Drobo work with a network, personally, I think the addition of the network port is the most welcome feature of the DroboPro.… Read more

We're trying to be more timely with our episode releases, but we'll see if it hold up.

This week I geek out on The Dark Knight and the Watchmen trailer. Seriously though, I want to have each of these thing's babies and I am not ashamed in saying that.

Also, Dong tries to make talking about the second-generation Drobo interesting. You can check to see if he succeeds (I help him).

Check out previous episodes here.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Eric is Batsh*t over The Dark Knight and the Watchmen trailer. Dong however has heard enough. Also, we do not do commercials here! Finally, a commercial...or is it?

Dong's Blog on the Drobo

One year after the first release of the first Drobo that won our Editors' Choice award, and a few days after the release of the beta SDK, Drobo Robotics today announced its second revision of the product.

For those of you who don't know, Drobo is the world's first, and for now still the only, solution for external storage that automatically and intelligently takes care of your data with minimal input from you. All you have to do is install the hard drives, which is as easy as inserting a CD into the CD-ROM drive. The Drobo protects … Read more

In an effort to keep up (and possibly even surpass) other feature-rich NAS devices, such as the Synology DS107+ or the HP MV2120, Drobo Robotics today released to the Drobo Developer Community (DDC) the beta SDK for its ever popular Drobo products including Drobo, the external hard drive, and DroboShare, the network storage add-on.

The 18MB SDK includes a special firmware version for DroboShare that provides support for installing third-party applications and a sample application, which is an open-source UPnP Media Server. This means once installed, the DroboShare will allow UPnP-enabled devices, like Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, to access … Read more

I'm hooked on network attached storage and need a fix. You see, I've been testing out DroboShare this week, and I quickly grew accustomed to having a simple, always connected backup device and a stash of mixed media freely available on my home network. As I boxed up my Drobo and DroboShare loaners this morning to send back to Data Robotics, I began debating whether I could justify dropping $700 for a networked storage device, which would also involve me purchasing at least two high-capacity hard drives.

My current backup situation is not what you would call elegant. … Read more