The Amazing Drobo

As a photographer I constantly struggle with the huge issue of data storage capacity.  With digital shooting I shoot lots of raw images and I shoot mostly in RAW format.  These photos take up a lot of disk space.

I recently had the opportunity to purchase a Drobo. What the heck is a Drobo? It is a Drobo Storage Robot which is a huge (in capacity, not footprint) desktop storage unit with the capacity to house up to four hard disks. It is configured with something the Drobo people call "BeyondRAID" storage technology which protects against a hard disk failure. This little unit is expandable up to 16 terabytes of raw storage space for you documents and photos.

I purchased the unit through a third party Amazon partner J & R Music and Computer World. I bought the unit with four Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA drives. With the proprietary RAID configuration it gave me 3 TB of usable disk directly attached to my PC with a USB cable. The total cost was under $800.

The box arrived shortly after our order and I started the put it all together.

It arrived with all the proper padding expected.  The instruction were amazingly simple: place the SATA drives in a drive bay, attach the power cable and USB cable and install the software from the supplied CD.  No tools were required.

This picture shows all the parts assembled on my table (one drive is propping up the box with the instructions).  Yes, it really is that small.  Those are 3 1/2" SATA drives in the green boxes.

 The drives slipped in the bays with no trouble at all (well I did have to figure out which side was up).  I then proceeded to attach the unit to my PC and ran the Drobo Dashboard software.  It quickly detected the Drobo unit and recommended that I format the drives.  I did and a few minutes later I had 3 terabytes of disk added to my system for use as primary storage or backup.

The ease of installation belies its features and technology.  The RAID-like internal software lets you mix and match drive sizes and is hot swappable (not possible with traditional RAID technology).  You can upgrade by adding a larger capacity drive and it will self rebuild the drive while adding capacity.  I am impressed.  It works just like they said it would.  It is very easy to manage and looks like regular disk storage to my Vista 64 operating system.

The company has other products that increase the capacity from my four drive bays up to 8 rack mounted drive bays in their Drobo Elite unit.  I foresee the possibility of using one of these units as part of our business continuity process to place near real time data backups at a remote location using VMWare.  See more information at the Data Robotics, Inc. web site.

This post was orginally made in my sister blog "Random Thoughts of a CIO".