Drobo is putting a $100 instant rebate on units in its own stores, though it’s a little more complicated with the partner sellers. But whether you buy from Amazon, B&H, or NewEgg, you’ll be paying a little above $350. Actually, at B&H the deal appears to bring the price down to $325, but Drobo tells me that the second, mail-in rebate should in fact be $50, not $75. That little devil on my shoulder says to get the $75 while it’s up on the site, I’m sure it’ll be honored.

This is a good enough deal that I might just snap one up. I have more hard drives than I can fit in my big-ass case.

The biggest change aside from the form factor is probably the interface. While it’ll support dual Firewire 800 as before, plus USB 2.0, it now has something I’d never even heard of until today: iSCSI. Essentially it’s running file storage info over Ethernet, and it promises nice speedy transfers (~100MB/s) and super-easy setup. I was concerned that non-tech-savvy users might not have the chops to install a crazy network/serial hybrid driver, and indeed they won’t have to. It’s already in Vista, it’s optional on XP (Drobo Dashboard will install it), and it costs $200 on OS X. Wait, what? Yeah, the driver costs two bills on Macs — so Data Robotics decided they’d make their own, and they did. Comes with the software and should let you plug and play just like it was made to be.

Because of its new wide-load form factor, it’s also rack-mountable for those of you running servers or just with a sweet rack-mounted setup for your home network.

Now try not to get too excited, because this all comes at a cost. A naked Drobo Pro will start at $1300, which puts it out of reach for most home users. Maybe you just won the lottery and you want to drop four grand for the 16TB all-inclusive version, but I tend to upgrade my storage about $100 at a time. For a business or data-producing pro (video and photo guys), though, it may be worth the cost to know your data can survive two simultaneous drive failures, and that upgrading is as easy as switching out the lowest capacity drive with bigger one. They had deals with Western Digital before on getting a bunch of drives, but if you’re buying more than three or four drives at a time you’ve probably already got a hookup.

You can check it out at the Drobo site.

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

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.

2nd gen Drobos should be available immediately, or pretty soon.
The new Drobos will retail for $499, with a 2TB package for $899 and a 4TB package for $1299.

The old Drobos are on their way out, but as long as supplies last you’ll be able to pick one up for $349, or $749 with 2TB and $1075 for 4TB.

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.

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.

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.


I installed a 160GB and two 500GB HDDs, which predictably gave me about 600GB of space to work with once it had formatted, which took a few minutes. I copied over my RAW photo backups, mp3s, torrents, collection of smaller internet videos (Leeroy Jenkins and such), and all my old DV footage of friends and family and dogs. Now all this, about 400GB, took quite a while to transfer over. Since the Drobo is limited by the speed of its USB2.0 connection, this intial stage can be rather long, but hopefully you’ll only have to do it once. After that, it was slow at first when going into folders I hadn’t opened yet, but that was only the first time in, so it was probably just indexing. Loading a gallery of my RAW images was not fast, but not slow enough to be a problem.

If there is any trouble, the Drobo Dashboard software will inform you. I normally don’t like extra stuff hanging about in my taskbar, but it was nice to have a straightforward measure of space available in case I need to check in one second whethere there’s enough room available to transfer my footage or download a torrent. It speaks in the first person (”I cannot protect your data…”) which is a little fanciful, but whatever. It’s not kidding when it says you can rip out any hard drive at any time, or however many it says it’s protected against. I opened it up and unceremoniously ejected one and it detected it and took countermeasures without missing a beat. It’ll take a little while to reconfigure itself but your data should be all right.

Little Sharester
The speed limitation is something that is shared with its new accessory, the DroboShare. After trying out the Drobo for a while in its original form, I went over to set it up at my parents’ house as a little media server (and they like it when I stop by.) Setup is a breeze; the Drobo and DroboShare fit together like puzzle pieces, and then a 3-inch USB cable connects them. Thoughtfully, instead of having DroboShare plug in separately, a Y-jack for the power cord is included. Anything that reduces cord clutter gets a thumbs-up from me. So I turned it on, plugged the ethernet cable into the back of our wired/wireless router, and went to see if it worked.

The increased need to wire our homes is contributing to the need for network-enabled storage. People don’t want a bunch of hardware cluttering up their desk, and they want to access their stuff from anywhere in the house. The problem with most network attached storage systems is that they’re not consumer oriented. Apple’s Time Capsule is the closest thing on the market I can think of that’s a true plug-and-play networked storage device apart from DroboShare. It, however, is even more in the background; Drobo and DroboShare are something people have to interact with, and as such should be as simple as possible. On my PC it was easy as pie to make it show, and on OSX the default settings were exactly what were needed when it asked to configure it. After that, it was just there.

Drive Lust
Not that you’d want to hide the Drobo and DroboShare away in your basement; it’s a very good-looking device to begin with and the new accessory is just as shiny. It’s a bit big, but it’s mostly quiet and the little lights saying things are as they should be are very reassuring when it’s your data on the line.

First of all, it was really a 21st-century moment that I had when I realized I was sitting there with a laptop on my lap, with access to hundreds of gigs of my own media, literally flying through the air at me. However, at this point I was bothered by the same thing that bothered me above: bandwidth. Would this router provide the fatness of pipe necessary to do what I needed? Turns out: pretty much, yeah. When wired in, it’s golden. When using the wireless, it depends a lot. I played a 720p movie file while wired in and it worked fine, but when I switched to wireless it stuttered and skipped, and had trouble seeking. I could see by my bandwidth monitor that I was maxing out my router’s wireless transmission speed – around 450-500KB/s. Your mileage may vary, but remember that you will be limited by your bandwidth, and with the size of files increasing constantly, that may actually be more of a problem than you think if you’re planning on having this be your main backup.

The nearly $1000 question
The price will always be a sticking point, of course. For the price of a Drobo, a DroboShare, and enough hard drives to make them worth having, you could buy twice as much space for your PC if you feel like cracking open the case. However, then you don’t have the feeling of security that comes with the little green LEDs, that seem to say “It’s okay. Whatever else is wrong with your life, your data is safe.” Furthermore, if you’re in any kind of media sharing situation and have a little scratch to spare, a Drobo set up with DroboShare is absolutely a worthwhile buy.

CrunchGear’s Recommendation
So who is this for? Well, as Drobo’s focus is security and usability and not speed, who this is not a good match for is people who are often transferring extremely large chunks of data, such as video professionals; my friend shoots on a RED and the USB interface of the Drobo takes it out of consideration. However:People with a fair amount of data, who have a little money to spend are great candidates for a Drobo. A Drobo setup is easy and powerful enough to be an excellent gift for someone like my parents (if they didn’t already have one) or non-tech-savvy person who may be downloading a lot of HDTV episodes from iTunes or the like. Installing new drives is so easy they may go bargain hunting for OEM hardware – how often do you hear of a non-nerd doing that? It may even function as a gateway device. People with laptops as their main machines who want to centralize their storage instead of spreading it out over several externals are the perfect users for this thing. Finally, I can see this setup working perfectly for a small business that needs to share common files between employees and needs to have each user’s machine backed up automatically to prevent data loss.

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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