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The Drobo "storage robot"

by Mat Lu Apr 11th 2007 at 11:00AM

There's been a lot of buzz the last few days about Drobo, the "storage robot" from Data Robotics. The best way to get a sense of what it can do is to watch this promotional video. Basically, the Drobo, which has four SATA drive bays, plugs into your Mac via USB and looks to the Mac just like a large USB mass storage device. According to our blog compadres over at Engadget (who have the full skinny), it "uses pooled virtualized storage" (not RAID) to create what looks to your Mac like a single drive, but which has data protection and redundancy features. Best of all, the hard drives are hot swappable. You can add and remove hard drives on the fly without corrupting your data either because of hard drive failure or merely to add more storage space. All of this is transparent to the host computer, which never notices anything has happened.

All of this storage robotics coolness is expensive, however. The Drobo sells for $699 without any drives. You'll need to install at least two SATA hard drives in the Drobo and it handles all the rest.

[Via UNEASYsilence]

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There's been a lot of buzz the last few days about Drobo, the "storage robot" from Data Robotics. The best way to get a sense of what it...
 

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danaldonova

Yup - price is now $499, and the coupon code REFDANA will now give you another $25 off!!

May 05 2007 at 7:08 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
eric gadfly

the url for that announcement is:

http://www.drobospace.com/blog/5/10382/Drobo-Price-Reduced-to--499--Gives-Difference-Back-to-Previous-Buyers/

May 03 2007 at 1:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
eric gadfly

Lots of folks said that the Drobo is too expensive for them.

Well that just changed. Data Robotics dropped the price by $200. It is announced on their Drobospace.com website.

They even promise to send a check to any pre-order customers who paied above $500.

May 03 2007 at 1:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
P Nelson

Price DROP!

http://www.pcnelson.com/2007/05/02/shout-out-to-drobo/

May 03 2007 at 1:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
danaldonova

If you really wanna try this out, here’s a discount code that will get you $100 off at the drobo store: REFDANA

(good thru may 31)

April 20 2007 at 8:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rod

#8, the Drobolator is telling you how much of your hard disk space is being used for protection, not how much is protected. In your example of 4TiB with 900GiB for protection it's telling that the cost of keeping all your data protected is that 900GiB, not that only 900GiB is protected. In other words, if you put 4TiB in you get to use 3.1TiB.

April 12 2007 at 4:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tom Parker

Check out the Drobo user-group at http://www.drobospace.com

April 12 2007 at 3:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
xdaniel99

Yea, this looks a LOT like a hardware version of ZFS.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp

April 12 2007 at 12:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SubGenius

I would love to see Apple come out with an entry level RAID solution to compliment it's wildly successful XRAID storage solution. Something like this but runs a slimmed down, embedded version of OSX server(like Apple TV and Airport base station).

April 12 2007 at 1:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Lee

If it is transparent to the host computer and archives by itself, what security measures are in place so I don't just go and hook it up to somebody's system and mirrir it?

April 11 2007 at 6:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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