Drobo external storage devices

Via GDGT: This is one of a family of devices from DROBO – (DROBO page on gdgt.com) external

Data Robotics DROBO 2nd gen

storage arrays. The DROBO 2nd Gen, pictured at right, has four hot-swappable drive bays with a maximum capacity of 16TB (In/out ports include Firewire 800 and USB 2.0). Current street price about $200 USD.

The DROBO S, has five swappable drive bays, with capacity of up to 10 TB  total. FireWire 800, USB2.0 or eSATA connections. According to the
Data Robotics Drobo S specs page,

Accommodates from one to five 3.5” SATA I / SATA II hard drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache. No carriers or tools required.

In other words – this can be used to back up a 10 TB volume. It can accomodate five different drives, and drives from different manufacturers, reducing the risk of simultaneous failure due to design flaw (you may be chuckling – but there’s more than one church that’s had multiple light-van rollovers with same models, and we had dual contemporaneous Seagate external drive failures – same modeland design, and same power circuitry problem). Redundancy for risk reduction can require more than additional layers of the same material. At about $800 street – it’s a bit pricey at the moment – plus the drives themselves (e.g. this Western Digital Caviar 1 TB for $99 or a Western Digital Caviar Green for $299.

We’ll continue to look around – but the general trend of cheaper, hot-swappable, redundant devices is good news for organizations involved in disaster preparation and management – it means that with a little planning and a decreasing financial outlay – we can keep necessary information at hand – for instance, to restore or maintain installations.