Charpie

Yesterday I made the data storage switch and put my worries in the hands of a robot, Drobo. For those of you that don’t know, Drobo is similar to a RAID setup only it makes RAID look like it was designed by the Bush campaign. Oh slam! No really, Drobo is smart. Basically, it’s an enclosure that accepts any SATA I or SATA II drive. You just snap your drives in from the front and Drobo handles everything else. There’s literally zero configuration beyond that, unless you’d like to get into more advanced features with the included Drobo Dashboard software.

This is not the coolest part of the device, though. What is? The fact that your data is redundant and space is expandable. Let’s say you stock it with two 1TB drives. That effectively gives you 1TB of usable storage, because the other terabyte is used to backup data. It’s not a 50-50 deal, however. To figure out how much space will be used for backup purposes, you subtract the largest drive. So, if you have three 1TB drives that gives you 2TB of usable space and leaves 1TB for redundancy. If you have two 250GB drives and one 500GB drive, you get 500GB of storage. Get it?

Let’s say you need to add more space? Just pop in another drive in one of the empty bays, or replace one of the drives with a higher capacity one. You can do it on the fly, while it’s on, and even while your computer is reading data from Drobo! It will reconfigure everything for you, transparently. You can even configure Drobo to email you alerts should a it reach capacity or sense a drive failure.

How does it do all this? Probably magic. That’s my guess.