The Data Robotics Drobo S
The latest version of Data Robotics' directly attached storage array, the Drobo S, speeds up connections by adding USB 3.0 support, and the ability to have up to 10TB of storage in five drive bays (7.3TB of protected data). You can switch between single or dual drive redundancy on the fly and all drives are hot-swappable, so you can recover from a disk failure or upgrade storage capacity without any down time. While dropping back to single disk redundancy from dual gives you extra space, you can also chain Drobo arrays together for additional storage capacity, up to a total of 32TB.
One useful feature is described by Data Robotics as "self-healing". When it's idle, the Drobo will inspect drives, marking problem areas to ensure data is only stored on reliable blocks and sectors. This approach works alongside the Drobo S's redundant storage, reducing the risks to your data even further.
USB 3.0 isn’t the only connection option: the Drobo S also supports eSATA and FireWire 800 connections, with the array's USB 3.0 port backward compatible with USB 2.0. The USB 3.0 option gives you additional speed, with transfer speeds up to 50% higher than FireWire 800, making it suitable for working with the largest files and as a high speed backup device. There's also support for most of the common filesystems in use, so you can connect the Drobo S to a Mac OS X device using HFS+, to a Windows PC or Server using NTFS or FAT32, and to a Linux machine using Ext3.
Increased business regulation means a need for increased storage, and the ever-expanding amount of data in our businesses means that storage demands are only going to increase (Molly Rector of tape array company SpectraLogic used the recent Storage Visions conference to point out massive growth in the storage requirements for unstructured data, from 161 Exabytes created in 2009 to 1.2 Zetabytes in 2011). Reliable, easy to manage storage is increasingly important, and devices like the Drobo S are going to become essential business tools very quickly.
Simon Bisson
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All well and Good, but let the buyer beware, DROBO have ZERO (None) Nill Customer support in the UK. After no response to Drobo, I had to source a replacement PSU myself. If the unit fails, the unusual formatting is unrecoverable except in another drobo enclosure. I have the original USB unit and it's data access makes it only viable as a backup storage unit - don't try to stream data off it.
@Seoirse - have you tried the UK support number? (+44) 2030 249580
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