Hey guys..
(sorry if someone already posted about drobo, i checked quickly and didnt see anything).

If you are looking for a storage solution, check this out. Watch the videos, its amazing!
Im going to purchase it shortly, anyone have it yet?

Its basically a hub that you can put up to 4 harddrives into (i think a max of 2TB), and it creates one large storage unit....Whats amazing is that you will never lose information because of this new way of storing the data! Its not a raid system. If one of the harddrives fails, it doesn't matter, you just replace it with a new drive and all the information is still there because of how the information is stored over the other drives. (i know it doesn't really make sense, based on the other systems we are used to)

Its automated, so it will tell you if your drive is about to fail or if it has.

I am so excited about this! To not be stressed about hard drives failing and losing data, yay!

i am interested to hear what everyone thinks of it!

http://www.drobo.com/

info below quoted from www.drobospace.com

"Robotic Operations

Drobo is programmed to take actions on your behalf; always ensuring it's keeping your data safe and optimized:

* Auto-formatting of added drives*
* Auto-repair of data after drive failure
* Auto-repair of data corruption
* Auto-repair of data redundancy
* Auto-expansion of storage pool (when drives are added or upsized)
* Auto-sense & display of capacity used

Consolidated Capacity

Regardless of how many hard drives are installed, your Mac or PC sees one large drive:

* Consolidation of storage into large pool
* Accessible via High-Speed USB 2.0
* Accepts one to four drives.

Automated Protection

Data on Drobo is automatically protected against drive failure and data corruption:

* Redundant protection of all data
* Protection against drive failure
* Sensing and avoiding data corruption
* Auto-repair of data after drive failure**
* Protection against multiple drive failures**

Flexible Configuration

It's extremely easy to add capacity to Drobo; just like adding ink to a printer:

* Uses standard 3.5" SATA I or II drives
* Accepts any brand, capacity, or speed
* No tools, just insert drives into slots

Infinite Expansion

Expand capacity forever by adding new, or upsizing installed drives without data migration or configuration:

* Insert new drives to any available bay
* Replace installed hard drives with larger drives to increase total capacity
* New capacity is available instantly
* Add drives without downtime or configuration

Intuitive Indicators

Drobo informs you what actions are required with simple to understand indicator lights (no software required)

* Green = healthy, no action necessary
* Yellow = low, add drive here soon
* Red = full, add drive immediately
* Flashing red = failure, replace drive"

Thanks for the info. I'm passing it along to my computer geek husband.

oooo.. shannon...please do share what your CGH says about it.....

Ooooooh looks good. Is this one of those too good to be true kind of things?
Stuart

So what happens if they all get fried at the same time? Data is still gone! This looks cool though. I'm sure it gives more protection than a single HD but I hope people would still be backing up even though they are using one of these.

i hope its not too good to be true!!

so, i learned about it from a computer dude who works for Boeing, he was randomly giving me advise about which hard drives to buy in best buy (actually interrupted the employee and talked to me about hard drives and drobo for at least 30 min!)

i was talking with him about raid...and then he went all nuts over Drobo.

i just asked another computer geeky person about it and he said:

HE SAYS:
i have a computer that actually has a functionality of what drobo does
basically two hard drives
that write the same data at the same time to two hard drives
which is what drobo does essentially
but i have that for a fraction of the cost

MEL:right, ic

HE SAYS: the difference here is that quote from their website
"requires no speical computer knowledge or expertise"

MEL :hahah
right

HE SAYS:now here is the thing
i have a friend who has a masters in psychology
he's smart
BUT
i would consider buying this thing for him for his bday
because computers are not his thing

MEL SAYS:LOL, right
thats what i thought, it seems super easy

HE SAYS: i wish i would've thought of it
there's nothing new to it
just the marketing
----------------
I think its nice because its so easy to use (it seems), of course someone could build something like it,but im pretty sure that wouldn't be as easy to manage, thats what makes drobo so amazing, it seems very user friendly.

i hope someone on OSP has already purchased drobo, talk to us!

mel

I've looked into this. The only drawback I see (besides the high price), is it's USB only interface. If you don't mind another noise creating box of harddrives nearby, it's not too bad.

Another option is the Infrant (Netgear) ReadyNAS or a cheaper solution, Buffalo Teraserver.

I was just at a 2 day seminar with Kevin Kubota in Calgary, Canada. He was highly recommending this product.

Sure will

Here is a really good review of the Drobo.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/05/drobo-review/

I have also been looking at this unit myself.

My background, I've been in the computer field for almost 30 years, a System Administrator for 10 years and now a Technical Project Manager.

I love this system and would not hesitate to purchase one except that I have the same reservation as gtphotog, I am not particularly found of the USB interface. If they would ever come out with an Ethernet port so that I can place the unit in my basement and be able to access it from all my computers, I would be in line for one of them.

There was a poll on their forum a while back about the Ethernet port, so it might be something that they are considering. But overall an impressive product.

Bernard

just FYI, the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ has the same functionality as the drobo if you configure it to use X-RAID. And it's ethernet obviously (NAS = network attached storage).

Here's the youtube on the NV+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sD3BjhOjq8

An eSATA interface would be ideal. It's a great idea, but until they expand past a USB interface it's not really useful for online storage IMO.

if you believe in statistics, this is very unlikely. RAID 1 or 5 gives you the redundancy in case one drive fails. If you respond and replace the failed drive, then you're protected again. The failure occurs if the 2nd drive fails before you replace the first failed drive. Most raid boxes will email you when you have a failed drive. So, if you are not actively paying attention, you'll be notified via email that you need to replace a drive.

Obviously, raid won't protect against fire, so just make sure you have a complete backup solution.

It's unlikely that all the drives would fail at once, but it's not unheard of for the shared power supply in a system to fail and cook all the drives at once. I prefer to have my backup drives in individual cases and offline (unplugged) most of the time for this reason. I have a same size mirror drive for each internal hard drive and all my archive drives are in pairs, and the backup units are only powered on for the time it takes to update them with SuperDuper after a job or when it's time to move stuff to archive.

Like cameras, computers aren't hard to use, but they do take a little learning... ;-)

This is really cool. I just have one question...
What if for some reason it gets a virus? will all your info be lost?
I have a mac and I know they never get viruses...
But you should be prepared for any eventuality, me thinks.

cheers,

Carlos Andres

Hmm..this would be interesting plugged into like an airport extreme for access across the network! I dont understand how its protecting the data - is it compressing it it some way and spreading it across multiple drives?

It would be good to have 1 (or in my case I would need 3 and 12 500gb hard drives to backup my collection) as an additional level of backup and convenience.

This is what my computer geek hubby had to say (Jess, this is for you)...

It looks pretty good. A lot of it is just sales-speak. I guess it might be easier for someone to use this than an external drive. I have everything set up so it is just drag and drop to back up so I don't think I would ever use this but I am sure some people would find it easier. Seems a bit pricey for 500 bucks though (especially since this is just for the enclosure, you still have to fork out the cash for each SATA II hard drive (at least 150 bucks each and you will need 2 or more to get started). I mean, you can get a terrabyte of external storage for about 300 bucks lately and you literally just have to plug it in to a USB port to get it going.

Are people really setting up RAID arrays on their own and hardcore server configurations for data backup? If not, then why would you need this? If so, then ya, this is probably easier than setting up your own RAID array server and storage solution.

The big benefit of this beyond a simple USB external drive is the fact that it mirrors disks so that if one Hard Disk fails, you have another disk to back it up and you are more safe.

And here's what he had to say about my files specifically...In your case, you have your files on both your hard drive locally on your computer and on the external hard drive AND every so often, you are backing up to DVD disk so you already have that redundancy anyway.

Hope that helps any... he said it's not a bad product, by any means, it's just another way to have backup storage.

AFAIK you also need to use the same capacity and branded drives... so you need to buy 4 at a time and have a few as backups.

Drives can be outdated sometimes quickly so you may need to stock up, or make sure you get a good selling brand / model #.

It looks like it is a JBOD configuration - Just a bunch of disks which combines the HD's into really one storage area.

I think id prefer a raid configuration, and as others have said with ethernet. They can also be set up on FTP so you can transfer stuff efficiently to it.

J

PC World has a write-up on the DROBO this month. You do not need to have the same size drives and you only need 2 drives to start...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134339/article.html

I think for folks who worry about losing data and th ease of installation for this unit, they'll sell enough of them for sure...

http://www.datapro.net/products/usb-long-r...tender-hub.html

I have been looking into both the Drobo and other swappable systems for storage. One other system I was looking at was at http://cooldrives.com/usb2-sata-mini-raid-system-sata-raid.html ://http://cooldrives.com/usb2-sata-min...sata-raid.html

The only problem with the Drobo that worried me besides $$$ was I didn't really understand how the copying was going on. I think I would like to pull a harddrive out and have all the data on that drive for storage. I don't think this is how the Drobo works from what I read.

I have drives all over the place and I want swappable.