drobo
so, if you have a pulse, and are online, you’ve surely heard about drobo by now. what is it? at it’s core - it’s an external hard drive - that backs up your data - twice. drobo requires at least two hard drives to leverage it’s beyondRAID technology. i like to refer to it as RAID for lazy people. for example, if one of your drobo HD’s craps out, your data will be safe, because drobo backed up that same data, automagically, on the second HD as well.
watch @CaliLewis demo drobo here.
drobo can take any type or size or brand of HD’s too. which is perfect for those of us who’ve accumulated different flavors of HD’s over the years. the only catch is, they have to be SATA HD’s. drobo is expandable to 16TB’s of storage - use the drobolator to calculate the number and size of HD’s that fit your needs.
oh yeah, another slick thing that drobo supports is being able to add extra HD’s at any time. so when drobo starts filling up, and you have one of it’s 4 bays empty, you can just slide in another HD, and drobo will consume that extra space, which is available to use in a matter of seconds.
drobo’s also got some nice I/O options; with firewire 800 and usb 2.0 interfaces. you can also add a droboshare to drobo which turns drobo into a NAS over gigabit ethernet. yay.
yeah, drobo’s a little expensive (which could be an understatement to some), especially when comparing similar devices that actually come with hard drives. just think of it as the last external hard drive you’ll ever have to buy! it does have some downsides, as said earlier $349 without any drives, no eSATA, no ethernet port out of the box - all might turn some to look for other alternatives.
buy: amazon, newegg, or directly from data robotics. it’s compatible with windows, mac, and linux (beta support).
you could even win one of these suckers - follow @ScottBourne on twitter - he loves giving these things away. mydl.me is also giving away a drobo this moth, read up how to win here. good luck!
have a question? as always, leave me a comment below.
