Drobo!

I recently purchased a Drobo from Data Robotics. It’s a 4 bay unit which will accept any 3.5″ SATA hard drives. Just insert the hard drives and you’re ready to go. I have 3 500gb Maxtor hard drives and 1 80gb Maxtor drive in mine. I had 4 500gb Maxtor drives but one of them failed already. Performance is not bad at all. It took 2 minutes & 54 seconds to copy a 4.36gb disc image from my internal hard drive over to the Drobo, which is connected via Firewire 800. The Drobo unit uses what they call “BeyondRAID” to protect your data. Managing Your Digital Life has a good post explaining how the Drobo protects your data.
The unit itself looks nice and doesn’t take up a whole lot of room. I have mine sitting on my G5. Here’s what it looks like with its front cover on:

And with the front cover off:

So far, the Drobo has made my life a little bit easier by allowing me to eliminate two very unreliable Maxtor OneTouch III units and consolidating storage into one unit. The Drobo has been plenty fast for my purposes so far. I like the fact that I can go to Wal-Mart at 2am (hey, Fry’s isn’t open 24/7) and buy any SATA drive and the Drobo will happily shuffle data around and use the new drive immediately.

You can purchase a Drobo directly from Data Robotics at the Drobo Store.

Related posts:

1. My Book World Edition review
2. Good customer service still exists!
3. How AT&T can look awesome.
4. Apple Event: January 27th, 2010
5. A few online backup services.

Tags: Technology