Drobo…hmmm.
It looks cool. It sounds like it’s cool. It even has the support of super-uber-cool Cali Lewis. But I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. It’s the Drobo, essentially a external USB storage array. What makes the Drobo different from other external USB drives is the fact that it can use anywhere between 1-4 SATA drives of any different type (speed, size, 150/300, brand, etc) and protect your data by using combinations of mirroring, striping, and other RAID-esque type techniques. It has intelligence built in. You can add drives on-the-fly when space is getting low. Or you can pull drives out to replace them with larger drives. Drobo will automatically rebuild the array and spread data across all drives it’s aware of creating redundancy so you can lose drives without losing data.
I guess what’s holding me up buying one is a few picky things. Originally I was disappointed that it’s USB-only. But with all the pizza-box servers I have at home, really I could slap an OS on one of em and then just share out the drive on the network and create my own NAS solution.
The price is still pretty steep. It retails for $500 (although if you use promo code “CALI” at checkout you can drop that to $450). It doesn’t come with any drives, so you’re basically paying for the enclosure and the “brains” it has inside to determine how to best protect your data and utilize all the drives you feed it.
Originally I was bummed that it only had 4 slots. For $500 you’d think they’d give you a 6 or an 8-slot version. Maybe charge like $300 for the 4-sloter. But I guess if you load it up with 1TB drives you get a decent amount of storage (a little over 3TB I think). Supposedly, Drobo will also support future larger drives as well, so if a 2 or a 4TB drive comes out on the market, you can juice this thing up with 4 of em. So maybe slots isn’t a concern provided you give it large enough drives. I guess I’d rather have more drives at smaller amounts so when you lose one drive, it’s not nearly as big of a loss. That’s why I’d prefer more slots.
It’s USB, so basically you can plug this thing into any modern PC and it’ll work. No drivers required. This leads you to believe there’s a “portability” factor to this devices. But, alas, they didn’t put a fancy, convenient carrying handle on the top of it! Grrr!
I was also worried about speed on this thing. USB 2.0 has a raw data rate of up to 480Mbps (approx 60 MB/s), while a gigabit ethernet NAS device has a theoretical raw data transfer rate of up to 125 MB/s t. GigE is obviously much faster…but here’s what most people overlook. Even though SATA 3.0 is able to handle 300MB/s transfer rate on the bus, most drives can’t even barely manage to saturate the bus of the SATA/150 speed. The physical limitations of the internal hardware of the drive are the bottleneck.
So I guess after I read over all my concerns, really I still think the one factor holding me back is still the price. I understand there’s a lot of “magic” going on as far as logic to organize your data under the hood. It just seems that it’s still overpriced by about $200. Maybe the Drobo is worth it for you at the current price. I know there’s other external storage enclosures and arrays that are far more expensive and don’t offer the kind of intelligence that Drobo brings to the table. I wouldn’t buy those either honestly. I don’t see a point to buying something I could create out of an old PC running Linux and a SATA RAID card. I’ll probably still hold out for one more price drop, or maybe Drobo 2.0!
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