No Headache Data Redundancy
Drobo utilizes the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology that protects data against a hard disk crash, yet is simple enough for anyone to use. As long as you have more than a single disk in Drobo, all data on Drobo is safe no matter which hard disk fails. There's no need to worry about anything else.
Incomparable Expandability
Your library of data grows every moment. Now, your storage solution expands in seconds, too. Drobo holds up to four hard drives, can expand at any time and supports up to 16TB on a single volume as disk sizes increase. Choose how big you want your Drobo today with any combination of drives capacities.
FireWire 800 & USB 2.0
Why compromise? Safety and accessibility now go hand in hand. Experience Drobo with both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. It's the data protection and peace of mind you need with the performance and interfaces you want.
Windows, Mac, Linux
Drobo works with all three major operating system platforms and their native file systems².
Hard Drives a la carte
Unlike other storage solutions, Drobo allows you to purchase as much or as little storage as you like up front. Since you can expand at any time, Drobo is the right solution for your budget.
Consolidate Your Storage
Avoid the danger, mess, and hassle of multiple external storage "solutions" and upgrade to Drobo, with the world's easiest to use, safe, and expandable storage technology.
¹ Tests performed with OS X Leopard on a Mac Pro using a 7200 RPM internal hard drive and a Drobo using two 7200 RPM drives over FireWire 800. Large file transfers performed with 1GB of video files via drag & drop. Small file transfers performed with 1GB of mp3 files via drag & drop. Kona video benchmarking test performed using the Disk Read/Write test with the following settings: 1GB file size, DVCProHD1080i60 video frame size, and disable file system cache enabled. Performance will vary significantly according to many factors such as file size, number of files, software drivers, operating system, hardware support, and other factors. Data Robotics, Inc. cannot guarantee all host systems will achieve similar results.
² Linux support in Beta.
Product Specifications
Host Interface:
10/100/1000 Ethernet Port
Supported data transfer protocols:
AFP and CIFS/SMB
Drives:
Accommodates from one to five 3.5" SATA I / SATA II hard drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache. No carriers or tools required.
Power:
Idle system (standby, drives off) = 12 watts
Typical busy system (four drives) = 56 watts
Box Contents:
- Drobo FS
- External power supply (100v-240v) with U.S. 110v power cord
- Gigabit Ethernet cable
- User Guide and Quick Start Card (printed)
- Drobo Resource CD with Drobo Dashboard application, help files, and electronic documentation
Capacity:
Continuously upgradeable with larger and faster drives.
Dimensions:
| | Width | Height | Length |
| Inches | 5.9 | 7.3 | 10.3 |
| mm | 150.3 | 185.4 | 262.3 |
Weight:
8lbs (without hard drives or packaging)
Operating System Support
Windows 2008 Server
Windows 2003 Server
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Mac OS 10.5 or later
Linux¹
Certification: Emissions
FCC Class B, Underwriters Laboratories
(United States, Canada)
Security:
Kensington lock port (lock not included)
Warranty
One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU, or two (2) year warranty in the EU (as provided by EU law).
¹ UNIX/Linux clients can connect via CIFS/SMB. NFS and Linux Dashboard are available via DroboApps². Please visit www.drobo.com/droboapps for more information.
² DroboApps are community created and community supported applications.
Drobo Technology
BeyondRAID™ Technology
Every Drobo product comes with the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology — the next generation of redundant disk protection. BeyondRAID will not only keep your data safe, but will also increase uptime and availability. BeyondRAID technology offers several improvements over traditional RAID-based storage systems, including the flexibility to replace failed disks and increase capacity all without costly downtime.
Key features of BeyondRAID include:
- Data protection against hard disk failure
- Instant capacity expansion without downtime
- Self-management
- Automatic healing
File System and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows, Mac and Linux¹ platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+, EXT3 and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.
Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization
Grow storage in line with data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, customers can simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all four disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix n' match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.
Redundantly Safe
Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. You'll feel safer knowing that if disks do fail, Drobo automatically enters a state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the remaining healthy disks and sectors.
Proportional Rebuild Times
The time it takes Drobo to rebuild data after a drive failure or removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool — meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 2TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out every bit even if it does not contain user data.
Since Drobo is "Data Aware", it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure. In short, your data is safer on a Drobo.
Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a "bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does next is exceptional. Entering a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or disk, Drobo will work until it returns to the safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures — that's the power of self-healing.
Smart Volume Technology
The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume technology integrated into Drobo allows a single virtual volume to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. Increasing the available pool of storage on Drobo is as simple adding or upsizing drives. Thus, there's no need to reformat your file system or repartition.
Storage Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called "virtualization." Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested by the file system and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a Drobo so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data.
Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe, say, without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to remove the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.
Thin Provisioning
Thin Provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID communicates with your OS about how much disk space you have, up to 16TB (this varies with older operating and file systems). Specifying a larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity. BeyondRAID automatically also reclaims space as you delete files.
Self-Managing
Drobo is highly automated storage. There are no complex configuration screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box.
Drive Reordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you'd have to replace the drives in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you like.
¹ Linux support in Beta.
