There’s a naming convention change, too, with numbers and everything, something I never thought I’d see Drobo do. The new B1200i denotes the 12 bays it has and the iSCSI interface. What was wrong with “DroboDozen”?

Naming aside, the new Drobo actually does have some new tricks. It’s got three iSCSI ports on the back and a new priority on actual fileserver duty and virtualization. It’s got support for thin provisioning too, and of course all that off-site backup jazz and data optimization magic that makes Drobo Drobo. It’ll be shipping in Q2; you can get one kitted out with 12 2TB drives (24TB total) for under ten thousand, it seems, which definitely isn’t home user territory. Unless you’re rich and addicted to high-definition —entertainment.

The 8-drive Drobos have also gotten a facelift, literally with the new design, but also in the form of new names and capabilities. The 8-drive versions come in the B800i and B800FS varieties, sporting iSCSI and traditional Ethernet ports respectively.

Here’s the full press release, which goes into a little more detail, but if you’re really thinking about using one or two of these for your business, it’s probably best to get specifics from IT before setting your heart on them.

DroboSync basically causes your Drobo to be backed up to another off-site Drobo in case of fire, flood, or theft. As long as the second Drobo has as much space as the first, it’ll maintain a byte-for-byte copy and update as often as you like, and will only transfer shared bits — so if you change the metadata on a four-gigabyte movie file, it’ll only modify the metadata portion. It’s a bit like DropBox. They claim it’s super easy to set up, and I believe them since “easy to set up” has kind of been the modus operandi for Drobo since the beginning.

Aside from that, it’s the same old Drobo. This one in particular, however, isn’t intended for off-site backups of your anime collection. No, this is for the big boys. The basic naked model costs $1999, and they’ll load it up with drives if you like — add $700 for 8TB, $1300 for 16TB. Check your favorite distributor for Drobo stuff. B&H sells them, among others. More info at Drobo.

The files are accessible from Mac, PC, or [enter recent OS here], and the guts are similar to other Drobos. You’ve got five slots for hard drives and Drobo pulls the same old magic of swapping and backing up and making sure you’re safe even if one of your hard drives croaks. They know how much those old IRC Evangelion rips matter to you, and with their tools for remote access, now you’ll never have to be without videos of your ferns to show that girl at the bar so she’ll know you’re totally not weird and are capable of taking care of something and loving even though you’ve been going off on the historical significance of Fist of the North Star for the last hour. But I digress.

What cloud capabilities, you say? They’ve partnered with Oxygen to put together a Drobo App called Oxygen Cloud, which creates a nice, secure cloud access protocol. It lets you tunnel securely to your data no matter where you are, and you can set up all the permissions and logins that you might have with a more expensive file server solution. Plus you know you’ve got the data right where you can find it — or destroy it, depending on what circumstances call for. There are plenty of other apps available, too; run a Bittorrent client on there and you can say it was the robot that downloaded those Oscar-winning films, the robot, you villains, unhand me this moment!

Here’s their little graphic for that. You can set it up to back up in other cloud storage too, if you don’t trust your office mates to leave the Drobo alone. I like how they used the iPad mockup there.

I can see this as being really handy for media professionals, who don’t care to carry their entire terabyte video or photo portfolio with them, but dare not rely on Flickr or Vimeo either. As for myself, I like my media the way I like my coffee: local. What can I say? I’m just old-fashioned. The FS looks handy, though.

It’s available nowish at your favorite e-tailer. Naked it’s $700, but you can get it pre-loaded with drives as well, including a 10TB trim level for $1450.

Drobo is putting a $100 instant rebate on units in its own stores, though it’s a little more complicated with the partner sellers. But whether you buy from Amazon, B&H, or NewEgg, you’ll be paying a little above $350. Actually, at B&H the deal appears to bring the price down to $325, but Drobo tells me that the second, mail-in rebate should in fact be $50, not $75. That little devil on my shoulder says to get the $75 while it’s up on the site, I’m sure it’ll be honored.

This is a good enough deal that I might just snap one up. I have more hard drives than I can fit in my big-ass case.

The biggest change aside from the form factor is probably the interface. While it’ll support dual Firewire 800 as before, plus USB 2.0, it now has something I’d never even heard of until today: iSCSI. Essentially it’s running file storage info over Ethernet, and it promises nice speedy transfers (~100MB/s) and super-easy setup. I was concerned that non-tech-savvy users might not have the chops to install a crazy network/serial hybrid driver, and indeed they won’t have to. It’s already in Vista, it’s optional on XP (Drobo Dashboard will install it), and it costs $200 on OS X. Wait, what? Yeah, the driver costs two bills on Macs — so Data Robotics decided they’d make their own, and they did. Comes with the software and should let you plug and play just like it was made to be.

Because of its new wide-load form factor, it’s also rack-mountable for those of you running servers or just with a sweet rack-mounted setup for your home network.

Now try not to get too excited, because this all comes at a cost. A naked Drobo Pro will start at $1300, which puts it out of reach for most home users. Maybe you just won the lottery and you want to drop four grand for the 16TB all-inclusive version, but I tend to upgrade my storage about $100 at a time. For a business or data-producing pro (video and photo guys), though, it may be worth the cost to know your data can survive two simultaneous drive failures, and that upgrading is as easy as switching out the lowest capacity drive with bigger one. They had deals with Western Digital before on getting a bunch of drives, but if you’re buying more than three or four drives at a time you’ve probably already got a hookup.

You can check it out at the Drobo site.

Just in time for the economic downturn and holidays, Drobo has announced they’ve slashed prices on their 2TB and 4TB packages. Many thanks to Western Digital for providing the Drobo folks with 1TB GreenPower drives on the cheap. The price of the driveless Drobo remains the same, but the 2TB bundle is now $749 while the 4TB giant is $999. But, Drobo didn’t think that was good enough, so beginning today they’re offering a $50 MIR until December 1. That brings the cost of the driveless Drobo to $449 and I think you can do the math for the bigger bundles.

Drobo for the holidays

Because the Drobo exercises complete control over the layout of your data and, with the DroboShare, can be connected directly or via router to any PC in your house, it’s a real swiss army knife for developers. While other NAS setups also offer some of the apps that are now available for Drobo, the Drobo guys are focusing on making it easy and fast to set up the applications. The frontend they’ve created makes it simple for the most inexperienced user to install an iTunes server, or Remote Access for their iPhone. Essentially what they’ve got here is a sort of My First Server (batteries not included!), which, given the increasingly nomadic nature of our data, is a really good idea to get familiar with.

Well, Data Robotics heard that criticism and is coming out with the Drobo 2nd generation. It’s more of an evolutionary step but that step makes a big difference to who will buy this thing. The major difference is the addition of two FireWire 800 ports. This means you’ll be able to run data on and off this thing at twice the speed you could before (about 50MB/s read and 35MB/s write, comparable to those high-end flash drives). They’ve also done a few more under-the-hood changes, optimizations, and upgraded its processor as well as giving its little butt a new look. It was competitive with the other products at its price range before, but now they’re eating Drobo’s dust. It’s a direct replacement for the old Drobo so the price will be the same. Hit the link for more info and a bigger pic.

2nd gen Drobos should be available immediately, or pretty soon.
The new Drobos will retail for $499, with a 2TB package for $899 and a 4TB package for $1299.

The old Drobos are on their way out, but as long as supplies last you’ll be able to pick one up for $349, or $749 with 2TB and $1075 for 4TB.

There are already a few things up there, including: UPnP capability for streaming to your 360, media center, or whatever, and a couple utilities to make Drobo more usable on Linux or tweak its behavior in Windows or OS X. A nice, dedicated ftp or private http server running off your DroboShare unit would be nice, for accessing your media from work and all that. Take a look and see what there is to see — or develop what there is to develop.

No, it doesn’t really look like the picture. Obviously.

1TB drives are going for between $200 and $250 these days, so you’re actually coming out quite a bit ahead with this deal — that is, if you’re willing to lay down the cash for the whole bundle. 4 terabytes of storage and a Drobo for $1100 is a pretty sweet deal.

Big HDDaddy
Let’s have a brief overview of the Drobo just in case you haven’t read up on it. Essentially, it’s a completely self-contained system that takes whatever hard drives you give it (up to 4) and makes the data pretty much indestructible. If you have two drives in it, it will mirror the data one to the other, and if you have three or more it will stripe the data across them with parity. It’s aware of the organization of the data and when things change, it reshuffles the blocks to make sure they’re both safe and accessible. The downside, of course, is that you lose actual space to put things in; two 500 gig drives, for instance, will result in a total of 500 gigs of useable space. Drives are so cheap these days that that’s hardly an issue, but no one likes their gigabytes per dollar to be messed with too much.


I installed a 160GB and two 500GB HDDs, which predictably gave me about 600GB of space to work with once it had formatted, which took a few minutes. I copied over my RAW photo backups, mp3s, torrents, collection of smaller internet videos (Leeroy Jenkins and such), and all my old DV footage of friends and family and dogs. Now all this, about 400GB, took quite a while to transfer over. Since the Drobo is limited by the speed of its USB2.0 connection, this intial stage can be rather long, but hopefully you’ll only have to do it once. After that, it was slow at first when going into folders I hadn’t opened yet, but that was only the first time in, so it was probably just indexing. Loading a gallery of my RAW images was not fast, but not slow enough to be a problem.

If there is any trouble, the Drobo Dashboard software will inform you. I normally don’t like extra stuff hanging about in my taskbar, but it was nice to have a straightforward measure of space available in case I need to check in one second whethere there’s enough room available to transfer my footage or download a torrent. It speaks in the first person (“I cannot protect your data…”) which is a little fanciful, but whatever. It’s not kidding when it says you can rip out any hard drive at any time, or however many it says it’s protected against. I opened it up and unceremoniously ejected one and it detected it and took countermeasures without missing a beat. It’ll take a little while to reconfigure itself but your data should be all right.

Little Sharester
The speed limitation is something that is shared with its new accessory, the DroboShare. After trying out the Drobo for a while in its original form, I went over to set it up at my parents’ house as a little media server (and they like it when I stop by.) Setup is a breeze; the Drobo and DroboShare fit together like puzzle pieces, and then a 3-inch USB cable connects them. Thoughtfully, instead of having DroboShare plug in separately, a Y-jack for the power cord is included. Anything that reduces cord clutter gets a thumbs-up from me. So I turned it on, plugged the ethernet cable into the back of our wired/wireless router, and went to see if it worked.

The increased need to wire our homes is contributing to the need for network-enabled storage. People don’t want a bunch of hardware cluttering up their desk, and they want to access their stuff from anywhere in the house. The problem with most network attached storage systems is that they’re not consumer oriented. Apple’s Time Capsule is the closest thing on the market I can think of that’s a true plug-and-play networked storage device apart from DroboShare. It, however, is even more in the background; Drobo and DroboShare are something people have to interact with, and as such should be as simple as possible. On my PC it was easy as pie to make it show, and on OSX the default settings were exactly what were needed when it asked to configure it. After that, it was just there.

Drive Lust
Not that you’d want to hide the Drobo and DroboShare away in your basement; it’s a very good-looking device to begin with and the new accessory is just as shiny. It’s a bit big, but it’s mostly quiet and the little lights saying things are as they should be are very reassuring when it’s your data on the line.

First of all, it was really a 21st-century moment that I had when I realized I was sitting there with a laptop on my lap, with access to hundreds of gigs of my own media, literally flying through the air at me. However, at this point I was bothered by the same thing that bothered me above: bandwidth. Would this router provide the fatness of pipe necessary to do what I needed? Turns out: pretty much, yeah. When wired in, it’s golden. When using the wireless, it depends a lot. I played a 720p movie file while wired in and it worked fine, but when I switched to wireless it stuttered and skipped, and had trouble seeking. I could see by my bandwidth monitor that I was maxing out my router’s wireless transmission speed – around 450-500KB/s. Your mileage may vary, but remember that you will be limited by your bandwidth, and with the size of files increasing constantly, that may actually be more of a problem than you think if you’re planning on having this be your main backup.

The nearly $1000 question
The price will always be a sticking point, of course. For the price of a Drobo, a DroboShare, and enough hard drives to make them worth having, you could buy twice as much space for your PC if you feel like cracking open the case. However, then you don’t have the feeling of security that comes with the little green LEDs, that seem to say “It’s okay. Whatever else is wrong with your life, your data is safe.” Furthermore, if you’re in any kind of media sharing situation and have a little scratch to spare, a Drobo set up with DroboShare is absolutely a worthwhile buy.

CrunchGear’s Recommendation
So who is this for? Well, as Drobo’s focus is security and usability and not speed, who this is not a good match for is people who are often transferring extremely large chunks of data, such as video professionals; my friend shoots on a RED and the USB interface of the Drobo takes it out of consideration. However:People with a fair amount of data, who have a little money to spend are great candidates for a Drobo. A Drobo setup is easy and powerful enough to be an excellent gift for someone like my parents (if they didn’t already have one) or non-tech-savvy person who may be downloading a lot of HDTV episodes from iTunes or the like. Installing new drives is so easy they may go bargain hunting for OEM hardware – how often do you hear of a non-nerd doing that? It may even function as a gateway device. People with laptops as their main machines who want to centralize their storage instead of spreading it out over several externals are the perfect users for this thing. Finally, I can see this setup working perfectly for a small business that needs to share common files between employees and needs to have each user’s machine backed up automatically to prevent data loss.

Drobo, our favorite storage robot, now has a sidekick, the DroboShare. Couldn’t you have come up with a fancier name then that? Well, whatever. If you have a Drobo and need to share that content with others in your LAN then the DroboShare is the ideal accruement. It works with all operating systems including Home Media Centers and is the first NAS to support all major file systems, such as NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, and FAT32. The system currently supports up to 8TB today, but can easily accommodate 32TB when the time comes. It’s available now for $199.

Product Page

Drobo is being marketed as the world’s first “storage robot”. Call it a buzzword, but it does act like a robot. It’ll keep your data in tact, it detects read and write errors before they become critical issues, and it has four hard drive bays. Drobo itself is just merely a long, black square with LED indicator lights, hard drive bays, and USB cable. Add your drives, plug it in, connect it and you’re done. Drobo relies on no software, making it an excellent choice for both Mac and PC users.

The guys at Drobo were kind enough to hook me up with 2TB in hot-swappable hard drives, which was very kind of them. Just shove ‘em in and partition them and you have yourself a big chunk of storage on your desktop. I used Disk Utility in OS X no problem and decided to create two 1TB partitions in case I needed to keep certain data separate.

Drobo contains four drive bays

One of the cooler features about Drobo, is that it’s automatically redundant. For instance, say you’re watching a video that is stored on Drive 1. You can pull Drive 1 out while it’s being used and your video playback will be uninterrupted. Very nice. This could be useful if you’re in a rush to get data into Drobo and have to yank out a drive right away.

Having 2TB of storage is nice though, especially when it’s being run via an SATA II connection. Filling it up has truly been a challenge. I’ve copied 400GB from my external drives and downloaded about 100GB so far, but I’m not even close to filling up Drobo. Having all this storage via one, single USB cable is really a treat. It keeps my other ports free and takes up less space than multiple enclosures. That’s the beauty of Drobo. I can add however much storage I need. If I only need 500GB, I’ll add in a few older drives and be done with it. If I need 2TB, I have that option available to me.

However, Drobo isn’t for everyone – especially poor people. Drobo costs $499 and that’s without hard disks. You figure maybe $250 for a hot-swap 500GB drive multiplied by four and look what you’ve spent. Nearly $1500 on an external storage solution. Pricey, yes, but Drobo does come with a space for a Kensington lock so no one can walk off with your terabytes of pornography data.

Drobo got back!

Read and write times are pretty good on Drobo. It’s probably thanks to the SATA + USB 2.0 connection and I’m pleased it responds fast. Sure there’s bound to be a little bit of a lag when Drobo comes out of idle mode, but when it’s up and running, you’ll forget you’re using an external device half the time. Gone are the problems of clunking and booting up that have plagued external enclosures for years.

So is Drobo worth it? Should you buy it? If you need a lot of storage or want to keep it managed and you have the cash, absolutely. Drobo keeps your USB ports free, which is a godsend when I go to hook up a peripheral or two. The hard drive indicator lights are simple and let you know what’s going on with your drives. Furthermore, the ability to add drives as needed is always a plus in my book. Drobo is a home run by all means. And though some people may miss out on the chance due to pricing, the rest of us can enjoy having massive amounts of data available without fear of losing it.

Drobo

Meet Drobo. He’s a robot and although he doesn’t look like one, he certainly can do plenty of robot-like things. The device comes with four separate drive bays and can intelligently control the data managed on them. Watching a movie on drive 1 but need to swap out the drive it’s on? No problem. Drobo will automatically swap the movie to another disk inside. There’s also warning lights that let you know when your drives are empty or full. Drobo’s design looks decent, but if you threw some wheels on the bottom, glued some googly eyes to the front, and put some rubber funny arms on the sides, Drobo would be the most fantastic robot ever.

Although Drobo is pretty rad and seems like a decent accessory most people would consider, it’s also an expensive product. The device comes with no drives, no Ethernet support, and costs $699, which is out of the common electronics consumer’s range. If you take a look at this video on the Drobo website, you’ll get a much better idea of how this little box works and what makes it so special.

Drobo, the Smart Robot PC Storage Solution [eHome Upgrade]