Digital Home Thoughts: Data Robotics Offers Easy NAS Management With DroboPro

"Built on the company’s award-winning BeyondRAID™ virtualized storage platform, DroboPro provides enterprise-level business continuity features—including protection against multiple concurrent drive failures and no-downtime capacity expansion with thin provisioning—while eliminating the lock-in of traditional RAID configurations."

Data Robotics has announced the launch of their DroboPro line of NAS devices. The most important feature that will interest IT guys and tech enthusiasts is the simplified data redundancy handling. Traditionally, when someone wants data redundancy, there's backup solutions, or RAID. While everyone should have a backup solution, they usually do not work in real time and using RAID can mean a lot of technical work and if you run out of space, data swapping which can take a lot of time. DroboPro claims to solve this problem with a one-click solution that allows you to switch from mirrored data to extra space without doing any data swapping. I'm honestly not sure how much use this feature will get, as if the data is important enough to require a mirrored solution, would you want to switch it away from that because of lack of space? The other features are nice though, such as support for 16TB of storage and virtualized volumes. Starting at a $1299 MSRP, the DroboPro is definately targeted towards businesses. For home use, I'm not convinced the extra features are worth the the price.