Drobo FS Adds Networking Capability

For us, there's 3 essential parts to a great home office: 1) a decent router, 2) cookies, and 3) a redundant backup solution. Unfortunately, like many unceasing changes in the computing industry, number three tends to get ignored the most. Luckily, Drobo has stepped up to address this problem space by bringing their very popular redundant storage hard drive bays to the networked arena. Simply plug it into your router, load it up with drives, and start backing up those essential files before that dreaded day comes...

Data Robotic's (or Drobo) FS comes drive-less when you first get your hands on it, allowing for the customer to pack any number or combination of hard drives they have laying around to utilize their RAID-like software (called BeyondRAID) that stores data across a group of drives, sacrificing some of the total capacity in favor of better data protection.

The device weighs in at about eight-pounds and can fit up to five standard 3.5-inch hard drives. Fill it up with 2TB and you'll get about 8TB of storage space with an extra drive that will take over if one of them fails. What makes the package even more juicy is the inclusion of the Drobo App store (which actually isn't really a store since everything's pretty much free). Here, you can download iTunes media servers, TimeMachine support, and remote access software from your browser or mobile device.

The Drobo FS costs $699 empty, $999 with three 1.5TB drives, $1,149 with five 1.5TB drives, and $1,449 at its present maximum capacity of five 2TB drives. Future support for larger drives is planned as they come on the market.

[Via Wired]

Comments (3)

I never understood why the original Drobo was DAS only. Then they added the DroboShare which added network connectivity but was a pricey addon for something that should have been included.

Finally they have the complete package with a reasonably decent processor. This will likely be my next NAS.

As a Drobo owner and DroboPro user at work, these things are AWESOME for expandability, and reliability. However, these are not the fastest drives in the world.

Do buy, but just know, you're paying for the hdd mix and match ability, and the ease of use. If they could compete with a Raid0 or Raid5 speedwise, they'd probably be in the $5,000 range.

25 MegaBYTE read and write is normal, in my experience (via FW800 or iSCSI)

Oh, I know. Supposedly these will be in the range of 30-40MB via network, which is pretty good really.

My current NAS, a Qnap TS-409 is slow. I'll be needing to upgrade the drives in the not too distant future so a Drobo that doesn't require I buy 4 new drives of the same size would be ideal. It's just used for backup anyway. Working files are local.