Speed Digital Limited Drobo DRO4DU10 USB 2.0 Hard Drive

NOTE: This review is for the DROBO DRO4DU10 regardless of how many drives you put in it.

Drobo presents a new spin on storage -finally reliable storage media for the masses without either the high price cost or maintenance overhead of RAID.

For a number of years I have been struggling with the problem of disk capacity on my home systems. As technology has progressed the problem has become greater and greater. We have become a multi-media industry and no matter how far down the technological road we progress two things are still lacking. First, is reliable mass storage capacity at consumer prices and second is backup solutions.

I like digital photography. Between my wife and myself we have two number of small pocket cameras capable of 7 megapixel shots and video. Now that doesn't seem to bad does it? Add in two DSLRs capable of in excess of 10 megapixels and it isn't too long before you need lots of storage. Heck, toss out the DSLRs and just start shooting and exchanging pictures with your friends and it isn't long before that 250GB drive you thought would be enough is just overwhelmed.

Thank goodness for USB and Firewire - especially since you can connect so many external drives on that USB chain right? Wrong. Try it. While the specifications SAY that you can connect 64 or 128 devices I personally have never been able to get more than 3 external disks working at once. So, as time moved on, I kept buying bigger and bigger disks.

Now - for some reason at my house our disks keep dying. They last about a year. I have burned out 3 drives in the last six months. My current drive is a Maxtor external 1.5TB.

What does all this have to do with DROBO you ask? Well DROBO has solved this problem for me.

DROBO is a USB box that can hold up to 4 SATA disks. Wait - it gets better. DROBO treats all the disks in the box as a single big disk. Still better DROBO doesn't care if the disks are the same size or not. Better yet - there is NO, I say again NO RAID configuration that you have to manage!

DROBO is a single smart unit. You open the face plate, slide in a drive and DROBO makes the space immediately available. DROBO takes care of the disk management all by itself. DROBO also takes care of data redundancy - all by itself.

How does it do all this? I don't know - and what's more I don't care. I shouldn't have to care. Isn't this they kind of user goods that technology was suppose to bring us?

What happens if one of the disks fails you ask? DROBO is a hot-swapable storage array. What this means is that when there is a problem - you do not have to shut down your computer to fix it.

DROBO presents you with a warning telling you that one of the disks has failed. It automatically moves your redundant data to a useable safe location and you haven't lost anything! Nothing! When you get a replacement drive (from your local computer store) you simply pull the bad drive out of DROBO and put in the new one. No internal cables to mess with, no drive sleeves to mount - nothing. It just slides right in and DROBO does the rest. It recovers your data back to the new drive all in the background and all without even having to shut down your computer!

So what does all this mean? Well, you don't have to purchase a RAID Card, or an eSATA card and a RAID tower. You don't have to configure and manage a RAID unit. Your drives don't have to be the same size or utilize expensive and hard to locate SCSI interfaces. You can even replace older small drives with larger drivers - DROBO doesn't care - it just makes the new space available.

What does it cost? I paid $499 for the DROBO box from Mac Connection - I also purchased 2 750GB SATA drives to put in it.

What does it come with? A simple to understand 20 page user guide, a 3 step installation poster, USB cable and the box itself.

How long did it take to install? 10 minutes including the format of both 750GB drives.

What is the downside? Well, it does use a USB interface. This means limited throughput speed - I get about 20GB per hour so if you are going to be transfering a large amount of data to your DROBO once you install it, expect it to take a while. Also, the unit has an internal limit of 4 disks. What does that mean? Well, with the current maximum SATA disk size of 1TB you are limited to 4TB of space per DROBO, which results in just under 3TB of useable data storage. But thats the beauty of DROBO. As new, larger SATA drives are manufactured, you can pull smaller drives out of DROBO and replace them with the larger ones.

For video demonstration of the DROBO, head on over to the DROBO site (www.drobo.com). The video is on the home page. This thing is simply amazing.

The only question I have at this point is - what happens if the DROBO box itself goes bad? Do the drives inside die? Can I just buy a new DROBO box and slide my old drives into it? These questions will be answered in time, perhaps I can post a querry on their tech support page.

UPDATE:

So after having the Drobo for a while I know a bit more about it. And, in response to the previous paragraph - you simply replace the Drobo unit with a new one, pull out your drives from the old box and put them in the new one. How do I know this? Well I decided to add a fourth drive to my existing Drobo. When I attempted to insert the drive unit, the disk drive slot faceplate broke off. It's not a huge deal - mostly cosmetic. When I contacted the folks over at Drobo to inform them about it - the simply responded that a replacement unit was being shipped out.

Within a couple days I had a new Drobo Unit. I shut down my computer, disconnected the old Drobo, connected the new one and moved the drives over. I powered up the computer and as far as I could tell - it didn't know about the switch.

This thing works, it works well and it's one of the greatest hardware products to come along in years.

But for now - this thing seems to be the answer I have been seeking for a number of years now.
UPDATE 20 January 2009
I have had this thing for quite a long time now, as far as disk drive age goes and have had little problems with it.  Drobo has released their new Firewire model and I will probably be purchasing one of those soon to add to the mix.
However, recently I did begin experiencing a problem with Drobo simply disconnecting from my computer.  A check of the Drobo website reveals that they are aware of the problem and downloading their latest firmware update should resolve the issue.  
It didn't.  But, the problem is beginning to look more and more like a USB issue and not a Drobo issue.  That is the good news.  The even better news is that it gave me the opportunity to do some more hardware testing.  Quite frankly this thing never ceases to amaze me.  
One of the first troubleshooting steps was to identify if one of the drives might be spinning up too slowly thus causeing the Drobo to reboot.  The process invovled shutting down the Drobo, pulling out all the drives and re-ordering them.
When I rebooted the system you couldn't tell the drives had been moved around.  For those of us in the technical industry this is pretty amazing.  A device that doesn't care if you re-order the storage devices?  WOW!
The next step, if the previous step identified the problem drive, was to replace the problem drive.  Well, I am going to go one step further and perform a live upgrade of all 4 drobo disks.  In oder to do this I purchased a new External Western Digital 2Tb disk drive and 4 Segate Sata 1Tb internal drives. 
Step 1 is to copy all the data to the Western Digital.  Just in case.  I do have to say that this step is the depressing one.  The Drobo is reading data at speeds of over 2GB/sec but the Western Digital is only writing at an average of about 800KB/sec.  The transfer (copy) of data has been going on for a week now and is only about 1/2 way done.
Step 2 will be to swap out one drive at a time on the Drobo.  The current configuration is 3 x 750Gb disks and 1 x 500Gb disk.  Ill put up stats on how long that took once completed.