Summary:
This ~1000 word positive review discusses the Drobo Storage Robot, which offers users a seamless and transparent RAID-like data protection platform in a four-disk external enclosure.

Details or Sample:
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and it may be as true in computer data protection as it is in healthcare. The Drobo Storage Robot is an attempt to bring that ounce of prevention to the computing public. The Drobo, a product from Data Robotics, Inc., is a storage system that takes all the guesswork and end-user configuration out of establishing data protection.

Enterprises and business have long known the benefits of RAID storage -- a RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks -- where instead of using just one hard drive to store data, 2, 3, or more hard drives are bundled together in a group and the data stored on all of them in such a way that if one disk were to fail, the system could recover that data based on what was still available on the others. Unfortunately, RAID has always been an expensive option. Modern operating systems such as Windows XP or Mac OS X make it possible to create "software-based´ RAIDs out of several disks but always at the expense of speed and always requiring end-user expertise to configure, manage, and eventually recover the array.

The Drobo takes the RAID concept and puts it in an accessible black box. The end-user need know nothing about RAID or how it works. This $500 disk enclosure, which attaches to a Windows or Mac computer over USB 2.0 like many other external hard drives, accepts up to four hard drives, which are not included with the Drobo itself. Users can mix and match hard drive sizes in any combination, as long as they´re all standard 3.5-inch SATA hard drives.

The Drobo works as though by magic: you put up to four hard disks into the box and attach it to your PC. Your PC sees not four drives, but one drive, with all the hard work of combining and protecting hidden from both the user and the computer, deep in the brains of the Drobo.

The Drobo protects the data by keeping copies of it spread across all the drives in the Drobo. If you put just one drive in, you don´t realize any data protection, and if the disk fails you´re toast. If you put two drives in the Drobo, your data is protected but your effective disk space is equal to the size of the smaller of the two drives: a 250GB and a 500GB drive in the Drobo means your computer sees a 250GB volume, but that´s a 250GB volume that can survive the catastrophic loss of one of the disks in the Drobo.

A fully-loaded Drobo -- outfitted with four identical drives -- yields an amount of space equal to the aggregate of three of those drives, with the space equivalent of one drive being reserved for the data protection overhead, which is how traditional RAID level 5 operates: no matter how many disks you have in a set, one of those disks is reserved for "parity" information, which is what is used to recover the data lost when one disk bites the dust. In the Drobo, with only four disks supported, one of those disks (always the largest) is "lost" to hold the parity information that allows the Drobo to recreate data if a disk fails. The Drobo does not use RAID but a proprietary data protection technology. RAID is mentioned here only as an analogy and comparison to existing technology.

In addition to seamless and transparent data protection, the Drobo offers seamless and transparent data expansion. Out of disk space on your Drobo? Pull out one disk and put a larger one in its place. The Drobo will automatically rebuild the existing data onto this new disk. Replace a second disk with a larger one, and not only does Drobo rebuild the existing data onto the new disk, but the Drobo also expands the storage pool to include the additional space, which is available to your computer for immediate use -- no formatting, no reconfiguring, it just happens. You don´t even need to turn anything off to replace a disk in the Drobo.

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Written by: rljudge
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Words: 971