| As a photographer I constantly struggle with the huge | | | | Drobo unit and recommended that I format the drives. I |
| issue of data storage capacity. With digital shooting I | | | | did and a few minutes later I had 3 terabytes of disk |
| shoot lots of raw images and I shoot mostly in RAW | | | | added to my system for use as primary storage or |
| format. These photos take up a lot of disk space. | | | | backup. |
| I recently had the opportunity to purchase a Drobo. | | | | You might ask why I had 3 terabytes of storage from |
| What the heck is a Drobo? It is a Drobo Storage | | | | 4 one terabyte drives. This is the protocol (or system) |
| Robot which is a huge (in capacity, not footprint) | | | | called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). In |
| desktop storage unit with the capacity to house up to | | | | its most basic explanation this is a data protection |
| four hard disks. It is configured with something the | | | | system that takes your data and writes it to the disk in |
| Drobo people call "BeyondRAID" storage technology | | | | a way that enables the information to be restored in |
| which protects against a hard disk failure. This little unit | | | | case one of the disk drives fails. |
| is expandable up to 16 terabytes of raw storage | | | | The ease of installation belies its features and |
| space for you documents and photos. | | | | technology. The RAID-like internal software lets you |
| I purchased the unit through a third party Amazon | | | | mix and match drive sizes and is hot swappable (not |
| partner. I bought the unit with four Western Digital 1 TB | | | | possible with larger, more traditional RAID technology). |
| Caviar Green SATA drives. With the proprietary RAID | | | | You can upgrade by adding a larger capacity drive |
| configuration it gave me 3 TB of usable disk directly | | | | and it will self rebuild the drive while adding capacity. I |
| attached to my PC with a USB cable. The total cost | | | | am impressed. It works just like they said it would. It is |
| was under $800. | | | | very easy to manage and looks like regular disk |
| It arrived with all the proper padding expected, and as | | | | storage to my Vista 64 operating system. |
| expected had no damage during shipping. The | | | | The company has other products that increase the |
| instructions were amazingly simple: place the SATA | | | | capacity from my four drive bays up to 8 rack |
| drives in a drive bay, attach the power cable and USB | | | | mounted drive bays in their Drobo Elite unit. I foresee |
| cable and install the software from the supplied CD. No | | | | the possibility of using one of these units as part of our |
| tools were required. | | | | business continuity process to place near real time |
| The drives slipped in the bays with no trouble at all | | | | data backups at a remote location using VMWare. |
| (well I did have to figure out which side was up). I then | | | | See more information at the Data Robotics, Inc web |
| proceeded to attach the unit to my PC and ran the | | | | site. |
| Drobo Dashboard software. It quickly detected the | | | | |