Drobo is an external drive enclosure that holds up to four drives (SATA I or II) and connects to the computer via FireWire 800 (two ports included) or USB 2.0. Drive sizes can be mixed and matched in the enclosure per the user's needs, with both half and full-height 3.5 inch drives supported (the vendor states that the drives can be from any manufacturer, with any spindle speed or cache amount). Drives can be installed/swapped as needed dynamically; with the vendor stating that usage/management of the enclosure is "automatic," requiring no software interactions or drivers (a management utility, the Drobo Dashboard, is included with "advanced functionality" for those who need it; including pop-up and E-mail alerting). Drive installations are plug and play, requiring no tools.

Primary interactions with the device are via color coded light descriptors on the front panel, a separate light is provided for each of the four drive bays and additional lights indicate overall used capacity and drive activity. The vendor notes that the enclosure can theoretically support a total native capacity of up to 16 TB (when future drives are manufactured to meet that capacity).

Key features of the drives are centered around the vendor's proprietary, RAID-like technology that provides redundancy and protection for drive data. Called "BeyondRAID" by the vendor, the technology works at the block level and is able to simultaneously utilize both striping and mirroring methodologies; which it can apply dynamically based on the current capacity of the system (such as when disks are added). The drive capacities are combined, virtualized, and presented to the host platform as a single storage pool. Like RAID platforms, the total available capacity of the pool will be less than the native capacity of the drives themselves. (For example, in a Drobo populated with four 1 TB drives, you can expect 2.7 TB to be available for data.) Self-healing features enable the device to automatically rebuild data around a failed drive.

Other features of the platform include thin provisioning (volumes exposed to the host can be presented at up to 16 TB of size, depending on the limits of the file system format), and support for drive re-ordering (drives can be replaced in the unit in any order). Multiple file systems are supported on the drives, including NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3, and FAT32. Note that Linux support is listed by the vendor as "in Beta" as of this writing.

Also available from the vendor is DroboShare, which connects to the network (Gig Ethernet) and provides network-based access to up to two Drobo enclosures. The vendor states that the DroboShare device is also plug-n-play in operation (based on SMB), and allows Windows, Mac, and Linux computers to share the data on the Drobos regardless of the format of the file system on the Drobos themselves.

The new versions of the Drobos are available now, with pricing starting at $499 (no drives included). Visit the Data Robotics Web site for further information.