Hands on: Data Robotics Drobo

Data Robotics Drobo

Our addiction to movie clips, photos, songs and whatever else grabs our fantasy is the primary reason for a data deluge that doesn’t affect only corporations but is creeping also in our homes and home offices.

In my own backyard, the amount of data that two people and three pets have created from their home computers is simply ridiculous considering that our pets rarely touch the keyboard.

Keeping that data organized and protected is becoming one of the most taxing house chores because even the most capacious USB drive will fill up sooner or later, adding yet another island of data to the household archipelago.

For geeks like me that scenario is just an opportunity to stuff a PC with drives, add a RAID card and tie up all those loose ends into one bunch. However, a normal, non-geek person will resort to buying yet another, soon to become full drive, which in the long term adds to, rather than solving the problem.

Enter Drobo, a 4 bay box from Data Robotics that can host 3.5″ SATA drives of any size and promises easy capacity updates with seamless, in place data migration.

Data Robotics rounds the deal with built-in automatic data protection that can survive the failure of one drive without data loss.

Drobo connects to a single Apple or Windows machine via a USB cable. It doesn’t require an agent on the client machine, but before using Drobo for the first time you need to install a management application, the Dashboard, and run a one time formatting operation.

After doing that first step, I had a Drobo drive of 2 TB in my Windows XP machine, although the actual capacity of my drives was much less.

In enterprise storage lingo that capability is called thin provisioning, a feature that has many marketing folks thumping their chest in pride. For home and SOHO users that capability simply means that adding more drives will automatically expand their playground up to that 2 TB capacity.

Obviously, Drobo is not a dumb box and runs its own OS that can be automatically updated downloading new versions via Dashboard. In fact, during my evaluation I saw quick downloads of new versions of both the Dashboard and the OS.

You can start with just two drives and add more later to increase capacity. The Dashboard will let you know when Drobo is getting short on space and will also suggest which drive should be replaced with a larger one.

You don’t need to worry about moving data, because Drobo will do that automatically in the background. Another nice touch: Clicking the “Show me how” button will start a movie clip that explains how to do that action in great detail, a boon for the less experienced users.

Drobo’s automatic space management takes away some of the pain from the user but it’s important to understand that the actual space available will be somewhat less than the raw capacity of the drives you mount, because the Drobo OS will reserve part of that space to ensure data integrity.

Figuring out how much space will be ultimately available is not so intuitive. For example, when I loaded Drobo with three 74 GB drives plus a 160 GB unit the Dashboard showed only 202 GB available.

Where did the rest of my capacity, about 180 gigs, go? Clicking on a link on the Dashboard I got my answer, well sort of.

However, you don’t need to figure out by hand how much space a certain combination of drives will amount to because Data Robotics has an online calculator that will do the math.

Bear in mind that a more balanced combination of drives will translate in less space set aside unused. Regardless, that difference between nominal and actual capacity is the price to pay to keep data safe, something that Drobo does very well.

For example, to simulate a failure I replaced one of the Drobo drives with a bad one, a faulty unit that I can’t even format.

Drobo went immediately into red alert mode and began rebuilding the unreachable data from the failed drive, making also very clear that another broken drive would spell disaster.

Replacing the faulty drive brought everything back to normal after a while, but I never lost access to my files, even when Drobo was busy redistributing data across drives.

Data Robotics Drobo

Availability: Shipping

Pricing: MSRP $500 plus drives

Verdict:

I have mostly praise for Drobo at the end of my evaluation. The unit has robust management features and failsafe data protection logic that I hope Data Robotics will extend in the future also to larger units.

However, I never noticed any delay accessing files on the Drobo volume, and my movie clips ran without hiccups.

Drobo is noisy. It may depend on what drives I was using and on the weather, but in the hot Texan climate the Drobo cooling fan was annoyingly loud. Luckily it turns off occasionally, but I had to move the unit as far as possible away from me.

At $500 plus the cost of the drives, Drobo is not exactly cheap, but makes for an easy to use, dependable solution that you can let your mom use with confidence, even if she is not a geek.