Drobo Firewire 800 Review

They say you never back up until you have lost something and in our case that couldn't be more true. Years ago we lost a server hard drive (RAID mind you) that blew up six months of work and made us shed more than one tear. Since then we have been religious, if not a little crazed about backups. On site, off site, daily, weekly, monthly we want it all. There is no such thing as "Too much backing up.".

Enter The Drobo

Once your iPhoto library goes over 110GB or your iTunes library gets so big that it takes up over 50% of your main hard drive, you start to look at options. Sure, you can always go buy another drive, hook it up in an external case, copy everything over, swap it with your internal and pray that it boots up, but eventually, just like living in a studio apartment in New York City, you need room to grow.

The Drobo gives you room to grow and then some. It is like living in that studio apartment but when you need the next room, just pay the bill and open the door and there is your bedroom. Drobo is an external device that hooks up to your Mac or PC via USB 2 or new Firewire 800. It has four drive bays and beyond that does all the work for you.

Have a few SATA drives sitting around? throw them into the Drobo. It will instantly build them into a single, redundant, storage device that looks like one drive on your desktop. Need more room? Drop in a bigger drive or replace one of the smaller ones. You don't need to turn it off or worry about the data, Drobo just does it. While it isn't RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) it is RAID done right. The drives don't have to be the same size, make or model. Drobo just knows and keeps your data safe.

Redundant Power

The beauty in the Drobo is the redundancy since all you data is written, ever so smartly, over all the drives. If one drive dies, no worries, just replace it with a new one without even having to reboot.

For our tests we picked up the newest Drobo which comes with a pair of Firewire 800 ports to hook up to our 24" iMac. Sure, the 500GB internal drive in the iMac has been nice but it has filled up like all good drives will. We just keep buying and downloading and it just keeps filling up. To give us a little breathing room we decided to drop three Western Digital "green" 1TB drives into the Drobo giving us over 2TB of usable storage (see screen shot).

Installation was a snap, literally just snapping in each drive down the row. Drobo just started to convert them into its massive drive on the desktop. Just for kicks we also dropped in a much older 250GB drive in the last lost. Drobo picked up on that action and added it to the total.

Since Drobo is a smart device, you will never have to think about your hard drive again. It will let you know when a drive goes bad or when it needs more space, it can even email you.

To put the Drobo through its paces we first set up two logical partitions, each "2TB" but separate on the Drobo. The first we used as our Time Machine back up drive and did a full backup of the iMac. It sped along over the Firewire 800 and took only about 8 hours. Next we moved both our huge iTunes and iPhoto library over to the Drobo giving us almost unlimited space for photos, movies and music. It worked like a dream.

Disk access is fast and furious and while the Drobo does make some noise and produce some heat it is pretty minimal especially if you use the Western Digital Green Drives.

Conclusion

Overall we were very impressed with the Drobo. The ease of use, the speed and the flexibility make it an amazing device that should start to find its way into every home. The only drawback we can see for now is the price which starts to get up there when you start with a $500 device and add $150 drives. What you have to ask yourself though, is what is the price of the loss of you data?

• Easy to set up
• Pretty quiet
• Redundant and expandable

• No off site solution
• A little pricey

Where to Buy

• The Drobo is available for $495 from Amazon.com and Data Robotics
• The Western Digital 1TB GreenPower SATA drive is also available a Amazon.com