Hello Drobo!
- Chances are, you get passionate about creating or collecting digital content, not about managing the storage where it lives. For you we’ve created Drobo, the first robotic storage device that takes the pain out of keeping your content safe.
- Drobo guards everything on it.
- Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. Start with two, grow to four, then upsize smaller drives—get Terabytes of protection.
- Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly.
- Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix ‘n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.
- Drobo lets you “pay as you grow”
- Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don’t buy storage capacity until you need it. Buy capacity “just-in-time” possibly saving you hundreds of dollars.
- Drobo manages storage, so you don’t have to
- Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No software required. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you.
- Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don’t have to.
I really like the idea, but $700 (list) and no drives. Ouch. Basically I’m paying all that money for a cabinet and some brains. Brains I got.
Microsoft just released beta 2 of their Home Server product. When it comes to market, it’s supposed to be available two ways: software only, or a turnkey unit that does self discovery. Supposedly it has a similar self-RAID thing much like Drobo. No word on pricing as of yet.
At half the price (for an empty unit) I’d buy one. For $700 it should have at least a pair of 250G drives to start.
Unless I can gang multiple Drobo’s together to make one big mega-Drobo, effectively making one big 8-drive unit, for example.