Drobo Doubles Disks in Data Robot
Posted in: storage, Today's Chili
The Drobo, Data Robotics’ curiously cool storage device, has been fed some steroids and gotten pumped. The RAID-alike redundant storage array has double its drive bays, meaning you can now slot in eight hard drives for a maximum theoretical size of 64TB.
The big difference between a RAID and the Drobo is that you can drop any mixture of drives into the Drobo and it just works. RAID takes the smallest drive and makes all the others the same size. You can also pull a drive from the Drobo while it is running and suffer no ill effects — all the data is doubled up on the other drives.
So what’s new in the Drobo Pro? As you can see in the picture, it’s bigger. Aside from the extra four drive bays, you also get an integrated power supply (the extra space means no external power brick). You also gain a new backup method. While you can pile in the drives and be sure that everything inside is safe, there’s a new option for the paranoid called “Dual Disk Redundancy”. This effectively turns the Drobo Pro into two, four-disk arrays, each carrying the same data. The only thing that could kill your data would be a fire or a flood.
You can connect with USB 2.0, FireWire 800 or the new option of iSCSI, which hooks up via the Ethernet port.
The Drobo Pro is $1,300 empty. You can buy your own disks or Data Robotics will supply them, maxing out at 4TB with eight 500GB drives included for $1850.
Product page
[Data Robotics]
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