Drobo - your friendly data storage Robot

Drobo 4-bay 2nd generation

Have you been looking for an easy to use redundant and secure storage solution for your home or small office? Hold on to your butts because we have just what you have been looking for. Introducing Drobo - your personal friendly data storage robot. Designed and built by Data Robotics in Santa Clara, California... Let's cut to the chase. There aren't enough good things we can say about Drobo but when asked to describe it these are the words that come to mind:

- user friendly & easy to use
- redundant & secure storage
- expandable capacity
- mix and match drives
- file & operating system agnostic
- no software or drivers needed

Drobo S 5-bay 2nd generation

Just to give you an idea of how easy it is to use Drobo... First, insert two or more drives of any capacity and speed into any of the bays in your Drobo. It takes two drives to protect your data from a drive failure. Plug-in your Drobo into any computer and the rest is just like using any other external hard drive or flash storage device. Drobo takes care of the rest and automatically protects all your data from drive failure. When you are ready to add more storage to your storage array just insert a new drive or replace an existing drive with a larger capacity one and enjoy the rest of your day because your work is done. Since the drives are hot-swappable you can add or remove a drive on-the-fly at any time. It's that easy!

Of course there are many different Drobo models offered these days(originally there was just one) including an entire line of Enterprise grade units but the following are best suited for home and small offices:

Drobo for home and small office comparison chart

Feel free to check out the entire Drobo lineup at the official product web site.

Technical specifications:
- 4 bay capacity for Drobo, 5 bay capacity for Drobo S and Drobo FS
- 4 bay unit protects from one failed drive, 5 bay unit protects from up to two failed drives
- utilizes 3.5" SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
- mix and match drive capacities, disk brands and speeds
- FireWire 800, High Speed USB 2.0 (Drobo, Drobo S)
- eSATA, USB 3.0 (S)
- Seamless Integration with Apple Time Machine (FS)
- 10/100/1000 Ethernet Port (FS)
- supported network data transfer protocols: AFP and CIFS/SMB (FS)
- supports NTFS, HFS+, FAT32, EXT3 file systems
- supports Windows 2003 Server, XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS X 10.4+ operating systems (Drobo)
- supports Windows 2008 Server, 2003 Server, XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS 10.5+, Linux operating systems (S, FS)
- power consumption: idle system = 5 watts, busy system = 40 watts (Drobo)
- power consumption: idle system = 12 watts, busy system = 56 watts (S, FS)
- noise level: normal operation: 20.9 - 24.2 dB (Drobo)
- noise level: normal operation: 31.8 dB (S, FS)

Features at a glance: