We love Drobo. We like all those other NASes as well, but we still think Drobo is the best looking and probably the most capable. The recently released DroboPro took it into crazy town with its spacious eight-drive capability, but the original flavor Drobo (or rather, Drobo V2) is still the one to get for your home storage and backup needs.
Of course, the $500 price tag has always put off people looking for a cheaper solution, but now’s you chance to get it for $150 off the original price — that comes to about $350, with free shippping.
In the wide world of NASes, the Drobo is still my sweetheart. It’s foolproof, sexy, and there are even cool apps for it now. They refreshed it a while ago but I knew they had to have something more up their collective sleeve. Indeed they did, and it’s the Drobo Pro. Now, just so we’re clear, it’s pretty much exactly what it looks like: a Drobo that holds 8 drives. That in itself is pretty hot, but it’s got a couple other power-ups as well.
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Just in time for the economic downturn and holidays, Drobo has announced they’ve slashed prices on their 2TB and 4TB packages. Many thanks to Western Digital for providing the Drobo folks with 1TB GreenPower drives on the cheap. The price of the driveless Drobo remains the same, but the 2TB bundle is now $749 while the 4TB giant is $999. But, Drobo didn’t think that was good enough, so beginning today they’re offering a $50 MIR until December 1. That brings the cost of the driveless Drobo to $449 and I think you can do the math for the bigger bundles.
Drobo for the holidays
So you got yourself a Drobo. It’s great, right? But, you think, I’ve got this little robot storing things for me. It reorganizes my data, it does intelligent backup. Why can’t we teach it a few new tricks? They’re way ahead of you over at Drobo HQ, where they’re launching DroboApps, a collection of applications that run on Drobo which have been cooked up by the community since they launched the SDK a couple months ago.
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We’ve been over the Drobo a few times, as well a couple of alternatives (I like this one), and I’ve always considered it a good product with one major drawback: it’s only USB 2.0. For people doing video editing or frequently copying super-big files, this meant unacceptable wait times, although for everyone else it was a jolly good backup system.
Well, Data Robotics heard that criticism and is coming out with the Drobo 2nd generation. It’s more of an evolutionary step but that step makes a big difference to who will buy this thing. The major difference is the addition of two FireWire 800 ports. This means you’ll be able to run data on and off this thing at twice the speed you could before (about 50MB/s read and 35MB/s write, comparable to those high-end flash drives). They’ve also done a few more under-the-hood changes, optimizations, and upgraded its processor as well as giving its little butt a new look. It was competitive with the other products at its price range before, but now they’re eating Drobo’s dust. It’s a direct replacement for the old Drobo so the price will be the same. Hit the link for more info and a bigger pic.
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In case the charms of the Drobo aren’t enough for you, Data Robotics has started up a development community for creating apps and extensions for everyone’s favorite RAID-bot.
There are already a few things up there, including: UPnP capability for streaming to your 360, media center, or whatever, and a couple utilities to make Drobo more usable on Linux or tweak its behavior in Windows or OS X. A nice, dedicated ftp or private http server running off your DroboShare unit would be nice, for accessing your media from work and all that. Take a look and see what there is to see — or develop what there is to develop.
No, it doesn’t really look like the picture. Obviously.
In case you missed our recent review of the Drobo and Droboshare, they come highly recommended, and if you’re looking to take the plunge, now is probably the best time ever. Data Robotics has teamed up with Western Digital and they’re bundling up to four terabytes of WD’s new GreenPower storage with new Drobo systems for pretty solid prices.
1TB drives are going for between $200 and $250 these days, so you’re actually coming out quite a bit ahead with this deal — that is, if you’re willing to lay down the cash for the whole bundle. 4 terabytes of storage and a Drobo for $1100 is a pretty sweet deal.
Drobo phone home
Most of you have probably heard of Drobo, the data storage robot/system from Data Robotics. We’ve done a review of the original Drobo here on CrunchGear, but recently Drobo was updated with a little brother named DroboShare, which painlessly converts Drobo into a Network Attached Storage device. I’ve had one hanging out with me for several weeks now, and I’ve formed an opinion: It’s sweet.
Big HDDaddy
Let’s have a brief overview of the Drobo just in case you haven’t read up on it. Essentially, it’s a completely self-contained system that takes whatever hard drives you give it (up to 4) and makes the data pretty much indestructible. If you have two drives in it, it will mirror the data one to the other, and if you have three or more it will stripe the data across them with parity. It’s aware of the organization of the data and when things change, it reshuffles the blocks to make sure they’re both safe and accessible. The downside, of course, is that you lose actual space to put things in; two 500 gig drives, for instance, will result in a total of 500 gigs of useable space. Drives are so cheap these days that that’s hardly an issue, but no one likes their gigabytes per dollar to be messed with too much.
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Drobo, our favorite storage robot, now has a sidekick, the DroboShare. Couldn’t you have come up with a fancier name then that? Well, whatever. If you have a Drobo and need to share that content with others in your LAN then the DroboShare is the ideal accruement. It works with all operating systems including Home Media Centers and is the first NAS to support all major file systems, such as NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, and FAT32. The system currently supports up to 8TB today, but can easily accommodate 32TB when the time comes. It’s available now for $199.
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Meet Drobo. He’s a robot and although he doesn’t look like one, he certainly can do plenty of robot-like things. The device comes with four separate drive bays and can intelligently control the data managed on them. Watching a movie on drive 1 but need to swap out the drive it’s on? No problem. Drobo will automatically swap the movie to another disk inside. There’s also warning lights that let you know when your drives are empty or full. Drobo’s design looks decent, but if you threw some wheels on the bottom, glued some googly eyes to the front, and put some rubber funny arms on the sides, Drobo would be the most fantastic robot ever.
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