Updated information regarding the new 1.5Tb drives and Drobo.

Please see review below on Drobo.

Video demo is also available. Have a look at the 2TB bundle I have listed to see web address.

From my own experience, I purchased one to test before recomending and selling the item as I try to do with all products.

The unit came with 2 x 1Tb Western digital HDD's and I added a further 2 drives I already had. These were older SATA 1 drives. It was initally connected to the main business PC running Vista Business. Within a very short time the unit was up and running and I was busy adding as much data as I could and pulling the drives out during write wih no issues at all. I also did the test shown on Drobo.com where a movie is playing from the Drobo and drives are taken out. The movie kept playing with no issue and the Drobo rearranged the data on the fly so that the data was spead over the remaining drives and secure. Once this ha taken place I removed another drive. As the volume of data did not exceed the remaining drives capacity I still had no data loss.

Vista uers may need to install the latest service pack as Vista had some issues wih external drives. Mac users are also supported.

My overall view on Drobois that it's a great unit that looks good, is very quiet when operating and is interchangable between systems via USB. Also the Drobo share converts the Drobe to a NAS unit and two Drobo's can be attached to each DroboShare giving up to 8TB raw capacity. As drives come to market with more capacity these can also be used so Drobo will support up to 32TB drives allowing.

Drobo also powers down when the system does and when not in use you can put it in sleep mode to save on power costs.

There are other External drive options on the market but none that in my opinion offer the data security, capacity, and ease of use that Drobo offer. All comments are welcomed.

Rgds,
Paul.

eBay listing for Drobo

Drobo employs its own disk and storage virtualisation algorithms to give users many of the data redundancy benefits of RAID without RAID's complexity. With its own operating system, CPU and memory to power data handling smarts, the appliance allows you to swap failing drives in and out even as you continue working on your files.

Plug Drobo into your system, and it's recognised as a USB mass storage device - no host software is required on your PC to read the drive. It's a direct-attached USB 2.0 unit with four Serial ATA drive bays that can handle drives with capacities of up to 1 terabyte each. Each bay has its own pop-out lever for easily removing a drive.

Drobo is what the company refers to as a "DataAware" device. It knows where each of block of data is stored on a disk, and its algorithms are more flexible than the RAID standards in wide use today. Together, these factors make it easier to manage a data device as one large "pool" of data, and for Drobo to monitor itself for data corruption and other issues that cause disk failure.

LED status lights use a simple, colour-coded green, yellow and red approach to informing you of Drobo's status - and more precisely, of the health of the individual drives inside Drobo. Drobo can interact with the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) capabilities integrated on many hard drives.

You can easily replace a drive by removing it. Drobo will let you continue working on your files even as you insert a new drive (no formatting required) into the drive bay, and wait for it to integrate with the system (a process that takes very little time compared to waiting for a drive to rebuild itself on a RAID system).

While Drobo will offer the data redundancy necessary to protect you against hardware failure, it won't protect against theft or catastrophic disaster. You may still want to keep a second copy of your data elsewhere, as a true backup.

This is taken from

Techworld