Digital Home Thoughts: Totally Awesome: Drobo, the Smart Robot PC Storage Solution

"Simply put, Drobo is the most impressive multi-drive storage solution for PCs I've seen to date. Drobo is geared to the consumer market, but differentiates itself from the competition by providing an intelligent drive management application (aka Drobo Robot). Some of the notable features include: the ability to auto-repair corrupted data, the ability to detect when a drive is about to fail, the ability to let users add storage drives (of any size) or pull out dead drives while working with files, RAID-like redundancy, and drive status + capacity notifications via front-panel alert lights. Currently, Drobo only supports being formated in Windows NTFS or Mac HFS+ file systems; however, the company is constantly rolling out software updates to improve the product. Be sure to checkout Drobo's video demo to see it work in its full glory."



Very interesting. Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. One can add drives to Drobo at any time and the best part is that you can mix 'n match capacities, brands or speeds. It is completely hot-swappable (gathering that from all the marketing speak) and promises no downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. I would definitely recommend watching the product demo. I think I have to buy one of these suckers.