Filed under: Hardware, Peripherals
The Drobo "storage robot"
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]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Leonard Nimrod said 11:24AM on 4-11-2007
The price is bit high for me, but I must say that it's definitely cool.
Reply
wils said 11:24AM on 4-11-2007
I want one.
Reply
tim said 11:37AM on 4-11-2007
very cool, but why oh why would they not make it with a firewire option as well?
Reply
olivier Hericord said 12:28PM on 4-11-2007
they said that there is no FW or esata option because the redundancy operations are not that fast and therefore FW bandwidth could not be used....
In fact it has to be considered as a VERY SECURE STORAGE SPACE....NOT A FAST WORKING DRIVE.
i agree that the price is too high but i can't wait to get my hands on one.
Reply
olivier Hericord said 12:30PM on 4-11-2007
if you put a 10Go drive plus a 20Go drive , that's 9,15Go available fro data....the disk will be full for 9,15Go of data.
see http://www.drobo.com/drobolator/
Reply
mark said 1:12PM on 4-11-2007
The biggest problem with this device, and a major deal breaker for me is that it will only work with either Mac or PC. Not both.
The ReadyNAS works with both but the Drobo has to have either NTFS or HFS+ file system. So basically if you have both PC's and macs on your network you're out of luck.
Bummer :-/
Reply
Shai said 1:14PM on 4-11-2007
The Drobolator doesnt make sense. So as you add more drives you get less protection? That doesnt make sense. If you have 4 1tb drives you 4tb total. 3.2 for data and 900gb for protection? So lets say you have 3tb of data and a drive fails, your ok up to 900gb, but lets say 2 drives fail, your screwed and just lost 1tb of data.
Also, for $700 they should have included firewire800 at least and network support to make this a NAS drive.
Reply
Shai said 1:16PM on 4-11-2007
#7, why, a mac will read an ntfs drive.
Reply
Brady J. Frey said 1:27PM on 4-11-2007
The price isn't too bad to me, but if they dropped it to max 499, it would probably move more devices out. Nevertheless, I think this will be my next hardware purchase as an in house backup system. Sweet.
Reply
Fritz Laurel said 2:11PM on 4-11-2007
#8 - hardware compression?
Also, I wonder if it's using hardware management or software.
I like how they seemed to merge aspects of RAIDs and backup systems, but because of that, it doesn't seem like this is either. And therefore, I'm not sure how to use it. It doesn't give you really fast storage, but it gives data "protection," but not data redundancy.
Doesn't seem like it's a daily-use device, but it's too expensive to be just a backup device. Can't. Figure it. Out...
Cheers,
FL
Reply
mark said 2:15PM on 4-11-2007
#9 I know macs can read NTFS drives but they can't write and thus is useless as a backup solution.
Reply
Fritz Laurel said 2:24PM on 4-11-2007
Ah ha. Under 50% capacity, it uses mirroring. Above 50%, parity. Seems to be an "optimized" RAID-like scheme.
Cheers,
FL
Reply
Ian said 2:41PM on 4-11-2007
I have the ReadyNAS NV+ and love it. But, this product is more appealing on a few points:
1) Smaller
2) Presumably quieter (while the NV+ is really quiet, this appears to be fanless)
3) Better support for differing drive sizes.
If you have four drives in your NV+, the protected capacity is the smallest drive size times three. The Drobo apparently will give you a bit more flexibility and give you slightly more space if you have two pairs of drives in different capacities.
The Drobo appears to fall down when it comes to other features. The NV+ costs just a bit more but offers full NAS (AFP, SMB, WebDAV, FTP, rsync and more), media serving, and several layers of security.
I think I'll stick with the NV+, but I'll keep an eye on this company. If they release a full NAS, it might be a worthy competitor to the NV+.
Reply
Mark (UK) said 2:51PM on 4-11-2007
This is very cool. I would like to understand the RAID methodology a bit better. This is better than my 120Tb EMC arrays at work! I am impressed. Drop the price a little and I would have one.
Reply
Gaylord said 2:52PM on 4-11-2007
i have a readynas x6 or whatever the hell its called. loud as can be and also a pain when one of its fans dies and need it replaced. also a pain to install the fan and i can only imagine a drive would be worse (got it preinstalled with drives)
Reply
hmurchison said 3:19PM on 4-11-2007
The Drobo sounds cool but I really would like network access to such a drive. I've never really been a fan of USB as a storage connectivity method. The problem I see with Drobo is this. Other than the Hot Swap drives every feature that it offers will be also done via Sun Micrososystems open source ZFS file system.
Pooled Storage
Compression
Snap Shots
256-bit checksum 128-bit fs
RAID Z with parity (soon there will be dual parity for sustained 2 drive loss)
Apple's testing ZFS in Leopard right now. In a year you could see a relatively mature ZFS implementation that works as an iSCSI target or in a NAS like configuration.
I'm not saying Drobo isn't a cool product but I don't think they'll sustain success against ZFS which is in Solaris, FreeBSD 7, Linux and a bunch of other places being rapidly advanced.
Reply
L. Monahan said 6:41PM on 4-11-2007
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?
Reply
SubGenius said 1:18AM on 4-12-2007
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).
Reply
xdaniel99 said 12:03PM on 4-12-2007
Yea, this looks a LOT like a hardware version of ZFS.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp
Reply
Tom Parker said 3:54PM on 4-12-2007
Check out the Drobo user-group at http://www.drobospace.com
Reply