I don’t throw away anything. I have to find room for old magazines, empty boxes and vintage bills so you can imagine what my photographic collection looks like and how good a client I am to hard disk manufacturers. Lucky I am not involved in video... yet.

Now that Apple discontinued their beautiful Raid system, the shiny, brushed aluminium rack-mounted system I lusted after has become seriously impossible to obtain and I have had to look for a more immediate answer to my forever growing storage needs. I think I have found it.

Data Robotics took the best ideas from the still evolving and not yet prime time Zetabyte File System and integrated them into a Linux-driven smart little enclosure. Those ideas include complete independence between physical and virtual volumes as well as strong, built in, data integrity systems and the Drobo team seem to have built that into their device in a way that is completely transparent to the user.

The nicely designed enclosure front panel is held by magnets and opens to reveal four SATA drive bays. The idea is that you can slip any SATA drive in any of the bays and the device will manage them as a variable size array, providing you with one or several redundantly protected virtual volumes at your convenience. You can take out one drive at a time and replace it with something larger whenever you need more space. This gives a second life to the collection of useless, varied size hard disks we went through when upgrading our systems. As long as they are SATA..

On the other side of the device are an array of USB2 and FireWire 800 ports. This is new and a guarantee that the connection to the computer won’t be the bottleneck.

Back on the front, a series of blue, red and green lights gives you an instantaneous view of the health of the device. One light per hard disk indicates its status: green, all is well, green blinking orange maintenance in progress, do not remove, red, either dead or too small, replace at earliest convenience. A series of blue lights at the bottom is your fuel gauge, indicating what percentage of the whole device is being used. Behind the panel, a power and activity light serve as basic troubleshooting devices. A nice supplied application gives more diagnostic tools and control over the Drobo but, interestingly, it is only optional to use it as setting up the device is completely automated. One nice additional touch is that the Drobo will power up and down automatically when you switch your computer on and off. Finally, the drive can be used as a Network Attached Storage through the dedicated and custom designed Droboshare unit.

All those drives can get pretty hot and the Drobo has a huge built-in variable speed fan which is very quiet and seems quite efficient since it seldom has to run fast.

The rest of the story gets more complicated. Ah, life on the cutting edge...

As I really needed a lot of space, instead of using my collection of old disks, I bought a matching series of four Seagate 1.5TB drives. As soon as they arrived I just stuck them in the Drobo which they quickly managed to kill. It seems Data Robotics hadn’t anticipated the power requirements of the new drives. Their after sales service was rather efficient and I soon received a brand new device. In the meantime, I learned of newly discovered problems with the 1.5TB drives which would need a firmware update, a drastic operation on a drive. They were no longer approved to use on the Drobo but while I waited to hear from Seagate’s support services, I thought it would be a good test of the Drobo to use them anyway.

The result is very positive. Despite the 1.5TB drives blanking out randomly, the Drobo has performed flawlessly. You can take a drive out and the light will tell you to put something back in but the Drobo will still serve your data. If you take two drives out, it asks you to put one back but doesn’t loose data. If you take all the drives out, shuffle them and put them back in, the Drobo still works and your data is still there. Pretty cool. I understand rebuilding a drive takes some time, like in any other RAID system, but all other operations like formatting or adding drives are very quick. Because of the weird way the PowerMac G5 manages its Firewire ports, I connected the Drobo to an USB port so the throughput is probably limited by the port’s capabilities. It took a about a day to get 2TB worth of data on it but it never stopped or missed a file. It has been the repository for my 140,000 RAW files since then and just disappeared into the background, which is exactly how you would want it.

Eventually, I found a way to flash new firmware into my hard drives, effectively stopping the intermittent problems.

For its price, considering the endless upgradeability and the convenience of a completely automated system, the Drobo is very good value for money. I’d feel safer if it was better built with a bit more metal involved but only time will tell how resilient it really is so while secondary backup does remain compulsory, primary storage has just become much more fun.

Data Robotics Inc.

www.drobo.com

Pictures © Data Robotics Inc.