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 - if one were to use this device to back up a 10 TB drive, five different manufacturers/designs could be used - 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 Sahana installations.
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I've used the a similar device from Netgear for a few years now. It has 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration.
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