Drobo Specifications
* Four Bay Disk Interface – 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives, full or half-height, no carriers required. Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs
* Capacity – continuously upgradeable with larger and faster drives.
* Host Interface – High Speed USB 2.0
* Max Sustained Transfer Rate – Up to read 22MB/s write 20MB/s
* Size – Inches : 6.3 (w) 6.3 (h) 10.7 (l). Milimetres: 152.4 160.02 271.78
* Power – Idle system (standby, drives off) = 5 watts
Typical idle system – idle, drive spin down mode (one drive) = 12 watts
Typical busy system (four drives) = 40 watts
Input – 100-240V AC, 50/60 Hz
Price $499.00/£349.00
Fully automated storage you don’t have to manage. As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, we’ve created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.
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Very nice, but really only suitable for home users. Corect me if I am wrong but I could not not see any options for RAID, which is very important in terms of speed and redundancy for business.
On top of that capacity is quite small in my opinion.
Paul, the whole point of this box is redundancy but done more efficiently than RAID. The capacity is determined by the size of the disks you use, so if you have 4 x 1TB drives in the slots you will get 2.7 TB of useable space (the rest being for the mirroring of the data etc). See this forum post for more information.
Dang that’s pretty nifty, I’ve been looking for something similar for our place. The only problem I see is that’s only has a USB interface and can only be used if the PC is connected. I wonder if they’ll do a NAS version?
Although the laptop hang that you had seems to indicate that it will kick on regardless of whether a PC is attached or not, you just need the PC to access the files.
Red,
Thanks for your comment.
I do realise that the whole point of the box is redundancy, but my point was that having no option to change the RAID type is not great.
For example, some people may want to do striping as well as mirroring, or RAID 0+1 (see http://www.acnc.com/04_01_0_1.html ) . As it is , this product cannot do that as 5 discs would be required for this setup.
In addition, a network connection ideally gigabit , would have been nice. I see from the spec that it is USB…
I have a feeling that Drobo is designed for people who don’t want to worry about RAID configurations and just want a simple backup/storage device, Paul. Different target markets? :-)
Hi Red,
Yeah I do agree that it is designed for a different target market. But still it would have been nice for the manufactor to include a basic interface as well as an expert interface for the clients that would want this functionality.
Have you also heard of a free open source solution for people who would like to make their own NAS (provided they have a spare computer and a few hard drives)
Here is one : http://www.freenas.org/
Now that is one great machine! I loved the thing. But tis a tad bit too expensive for me. Les c what happens in the near future.
Get the DROBO Share if you want to use it as NAS. You are not limited to USB or FW-A.