Totally Awesome: Drobo, the Smart Robot PC Storage Solution

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/3756/drobo_the_smart' target='_blank'>http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/3756/drobo_the_smart</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Simply put, Drobo is the most impressive multi-drive storage solution for PCs I've seen to date. Drobo is geared to the consumer market, but differentiates itself from the competition by providing an intelligent drive management application (aka Drobo Robot). Some of the notable features include: the ability to auto-repair corrupted data, the ability to detect when a drive is about to fail, the ability to let users add storage drives (of any size) or pull out dead drives while working with files, RAID-like redundancy, and drive status + capacity notifications via front-panel alert lights. Currently, Drobo only supports being formated in Windows NTFS or Mac HFS+ file systems; however, the company is constantly rolling out software updates to improve the product. Be sure to checkout Drobo's video demo to see it work in its full glory."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/3943.jpg" /><br /><br />Very interesting. Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. One can add drives to Drobo at any time and the best part is that you can mix 'n match capacities, brands or speeds. It is completely hot-swappable (gathering that from all the marketing speak) and promises no downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. I would definitely recommend watching the <a href="http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx">product demo</a>. I think I have to buy one of these suckers.

[Tim Williamson]

It sounds like a really great product, but MSRP $699 is RIDUNKULOUS!!! 8O

[Jason Dunn]

This sounds similar to the way that Windows Home Server works, only perhaps a bit smarter with regards to how it uses the drives.

[Jason Dunn]

Wow. I watched the demo it's it's DAMN COOL. Very slick!

[jeffd]

meh...

1. NTFS is the "automaticly repairing file system", my computers been doing it since win2k.

2. SMART is the fail sensing system, and from the newest information i read, it's not to good. many drives have died before smart alerted to it, and at the same time smart has given questionable results. One of my drives keeps getting rated 24 hours before failure. Also smart's variable values it reports is not quite standerdized. I have many values that my smart reading tool has no idea what they are for. only that they are changing.

3. while hot swapping different sized drives is fine, you cant RAID different sized drives unless you combining 2 drives into one drive letter. Mirroring and striping require the same sized drive.

[Jason Dunn]

3. while hot swapping different sized drives is fine, you cant RAID different sized drives unless you combining 2 drives into one drive letter. Mirroring and striping require the same sized drive.

Are you sure that's what they're doing though? Their system seems a lot smarter than just plain old RAID.

[jeffd]

jason, well there are plenty of expensive raid solutions (a card that hooks into hot swap bays). This definetly beats your standered motherboard raid solution. But, unless you capped off drives so partition sizes matched, bad things would happen if you tried to mirror/stripe and one drive filled up first. ;)

[Suhit Gupta]

Yeah, but you do that to admit that all the features working together in the way that they are, with the ease in which the video makes them appear to operate, really does seem like a pretty nifty solution.

And they do maintain that you can have different sized drives. Yes, I was always under the impression that bad things happen when you match different sized drives and if one of them fails or if you want to add one. But maybe they have figured out some way around it?

Suhit

[Suhit Gupta]

It sounds like a really great product, but MSRP $699 is RIDUNKULOUS!!! 8O
Yeah, I know, it is high. :( I think that is the main thing that will stop this device in its tracks.

Suhit

[Jason Dunn]

Yes, I was always under the impression that bad things happen when you match different sized drives and if one of them fails or if you want to add one. But maybe they have figured out some way around it?

I think that's exactly what they've done, but Jeff doesn't want to admit it. :lol:

[jeffd]

By gosh your right, Drobo can twist the fabric of time and matter and make it so that even when you pair a 60 gig drive with an 80 in mirror mode, when the 60 fills up, it will continue to write up to 80 gigs to safely backup all your data in realtime!