I’m a huge fan of the massive (but slow) bulk storage devices made by Drobo. I own two of the Data Robotics Drobos. They’ll save you from losing data if a single drive fails, and a single enclosure can hold 4 drives for up to 8TB of storage. Sure, they’re relatively slow compared to a single drive, RAID, or an SSD, but they’re perfect for an external hard drive for home storage.
And now they’ve upped the ante with the Drobo Pro, an 8-bay enterprise version of the Drobo.
There’s a new “Dual Disk Redundancy” option will spread the data out such that the Drobo Pro array can suffer two simultaneous drive failures without any loss of data or interrupted service. You can even toggle this option on and off without having to rebuild the array. There’s also new connectivity via gigabit ethernet (iSCSI) as well as the older FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Linux, Windows, and Mac are supported, on NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3 and FAT32. For more details, check out the data sheet.
You can buy one now for $1,300 from the Drobo store, or $900 if you exchange two old drobos for the new shiny model, something I’m horribly tempted to do right now.
