Hasta La Gadget!

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]

Considering just how cheap Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 gets on occasion, there’s practically no doubt that the SSD portion of this mod will run you more than the computer itself. For those wild and wacky DIYers who couldn’t honestly care less, jkkmobile has put together a video (along with a gallery of images) showing exactly how the process works. For what it’s worth, we’re told that the whole ordeal was a simple matter, but you can judge for yourself after jumping past the break and mashing play.

Continue reading Video: 128GB SSD slotted into Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9

Filed under: Laptops

Video: 128GB SSD slotted into Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, the consolidation efforts are really heating up. Just days after Cisco forked out a small fortune to acquire Pure Digital, HDD mainstay Western Digital has penned a check for $65 million in cold, hard cash in order to acquire SiliconSystems, Inc. Said outfit is an Aliso Viejo, California-based supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market, and rather than wasting any more time falling behind in the SSD realm, WD figured it prudent to just buy the technology it needed to position itself as a legitimate competitor. WD has already made clear that it hopes to sell SSDs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, and given that integration will begin “immediately,” we’re hoping to see some shipping products sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital enters SSD market via $65m SiliconSystems acquisition originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s hard to say just how legitimate these claims are at the moment, but A-DATA seems pretty jazzed about its newest SSD. While not nearly as capacious as the outfit’s recently unveiled 512GB XPG SSD, the next-generation SATAII SSD 300 Plus supposedly increases performance of read speeds by up to 40 percent while boosting write speeds by around 60 percent when compared to a “regular SSD.” According to A-DATA, this here drive utilizes a special mobile SDRAM module to hit a sustained read rate of 250MB/sec and write rate of 160MB/sec, and all this high-flying performance comes to you in 32, 64, 128 and 256GB flavors. Pricing, however, remains a thick, convoluted mystery.

Filed under: Storage

A-DATA’s SATAII SSD 300 Plus promises quicker reads, writes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a little something OCZ Technology cooked up just for CeBIT: a PCIe enclosure that’ll contain 1TB worth of SSD storage with maximum read rates of up to 600MB/sec and maximum write speeds of up to 500MB/sec. Oh, and the sustained write speeds are right around 400MB/sec. Essentially, this device will contain four 256GB MLC-based OCZ SSDs along with 256MB of ECC DDR2 RAM; when slapped in one’s desktop, they can choose to set it up as the boot disk or a slave. OCZ is also hoping to offer a 4TB edition by the end of the year, which is totally plausible given that 1TB SSDs are already a reality. The on-hand demo was just a mockup shell, but the finalized version shouldn’t look much different than what’s pictured in the gallery below. As for pricing and availability? It should hit the US of A in around six weeks for somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000. It’s high-end, y’all.

Filed under: Storage

OCZ’s Z Drive puts 1TB of blazing SSD capacity in your PCIe slot: eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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