Drobo Your Storage

January 26, 2008 by Isaac

I've been out of the country for about a week now and have been so busy with work that I have been unable to do any posts. While here I have been able to catch up on GeekBrief podcasts during taxi rides or whatnot. Something that is mentioned over and over on GeekBrief is the Drobo.

I finally watched the promo video on Data Robotics web site and I must say that I see why. I've been wanting to get some external storage for my computer for quite some time and I must say now that all other solutions pale in comparison to the Drobo. I am totally sold.

In a traditional external storage setup you have an enclosure with one disk. When that disk fills up you need to by another disk and either transfer your files to the new disk or use the two in parallel. Spreading your files across different volumes. If a disk fails you are out of luck and your files are gone. There are external RAID enclosures that will protect you against drive failures, but upgrading their size is a huge problem. All the disks in a RAID array need to be the same size. So, if you have a four disk array and you want to upgrade the size then you need to buy four new disks. Expensive.

In contrast, the Drobo has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of both single disk and RAID enclosures. With the Drobo you can stick up to four drives in the enclosure, but they appear as one disk. As the Drobo runs out of space you can add in another disk, of a differing size, and it will automatically distribute the data between disks. You can hotswap disks in and out and things just work. The demo video on their web site is really the best way to explain how it works. Essentially, this means that as drive prices come down and you want to swap an older smaller drive out for a larger drive that you need not worry about copying data. Just pull the old one out and stick the new one in. It is a hotswap operation and takes literally seconds. The new drive will be configured and the space will instantly become available to your computer.

Posted in Fun Stuff, Technology