Drobo The Storage Robot

by Dave Altavilla — Saturday, April 28, 2007, 07:32 PM EDT

This little device could be easily dismissed, at first glance, as simple external USB hard drive. Though it's nothing more than a multi-drive external storage device that runs a multi-drive RAID array (RAID level not indicated in the spec), its auto-formatting, auto-repair, auto-expansion and capacity sensing capabilities are pretty impressive.

Drobo The Storage Robot

Robotic Operations
Drobo is programmed to take actions on your behalf; always ensuring it's keeping your data safe and optimized:

Auto-formatting of added drives
Auto-repair of data after drive failure
Auto-repair of data corruption
Auto-repair of data redundancy
Auto-expansion of storage pool (when drives are added or upsized)
Auto-sense & display of capacity used

Consolidated Capacity
Regardless of how many hard drives are installed, your Mac or PC sees one large drive:

Consolidation of storage into large pool
Accessible via High-Speed USB 2.0
Accepts one to four drives.

Hmm... Seems like something we ought to evaluate I do believe. Watch the demo here. It's a rather impressive little fella actually.

Tags: Storage, Robot, Drobo, Stora, storag, rage, AG, bot, Tor

Dave Altavilla

Dave Altavilla is the founder, Editor In Chief and Publisher of HotHardware.com. With decades of experience as a semiconductor sales engineer, Dave Altavilla founded HotHardware.com over 25 years ago. Dave is also a published contributor to various technology-based publications and is a featured Tech Analyst expert on various network media shows.