Data Robotics’ first Drobo model surprised a fair few people; the company billed their external storage array as an “intelligent data robot”, making RAID-style redundancy if not glamorous then at least appealing. When wereviewed the first-gen model all the way back on October 2008, we felt a few qualms at its relatively high price tag but had little doubt over the security of our data. Now, with their range much enlarged, we’ve one of Data Robotics newest ‘bots on the testbench, the Drobo S. Adding an extra drive bay to the original model, plus a few less obvious tweaks, is the Drobo S the droid you’re looking for?
Overview and Features
The original Drobo had four 3.5-inch drive bays and a single USB 2.0 port, and was subsequently updated to add a FireWire 800 port. In comparison, the Drobo S gets five 3.5-inch SATA I/II drive bays – which still don’t require any sort of drive caddy or rails – and throws in an eSATA port as well. Data Robotics have also changed the underlying ARM-based processor, to one reportedly 50-percent faster than in the first-gen Drobo.
In the box you get the Drobo S itself – a shiny black plastic box measuring 5.9 x 7.3 x 10.3 inches – together with an external PSU, all three connection cables (USB 2.0, FireWire 800 and eSATA), printed user guide and quick-start card, and a CD with the Drobo Dashboard application together with electronic versions of the documentation. In its standard form, Data Robotics supply the Drobo S drive-free, which means you’ll also need to factor in the cost of adding storage. Up to 10TB can be accommodated, made up of five 2TB drives.
The Drobo S enters a market filled with significantly more aware consumers than its predecessor did. The Network Attached Storage (NAS) segment has flourished, particularly with one- and two-drive devices that promise plug-and-play shared storage without the headaches of system maintenance a server might demand. While consumers may know them better as media servers, the end result is the same: the ability to share documents, iTunes and other music libraries, video and photo galleries from a central point to multiple PCs, netbooks, consoles and phones, locally or – with a little setup – remotely.
In comparison, the Drobo S lacks any sort of networking functionality out of the box. There’s no gigabit ethernet port for setting it up as a media server or checking on documents you left at the office while you’re at home. Instead, it’s intended to provide data security for a single connected machine (you can’t hook up all three of the ports to different computers simultaneously, only one at a time). Rather than RAID, the various levels of which provide different degrees of duplication across a number of identically-sized drives, Data Robotics use their own “BeyondRAID” technology which has a number of advantages.
The headline feature – and one which makes the Drobo range perhaps so appealing to overworked system admins or out-of-depth prosumer users – is the self-management. Slot in two or more drives of any capacity, speed or brand (you can run the Drobo S with a single drive, but of course you won’t see any data security) and BeyondRAID automatically formats them, works out the maximum amount of storage that can be protected (e.g. if a drive fails, you won’t lose any data) and does everything necessary so that you can merely plug in via USB, eSATA or FireWire and begin copying over files. Start with two 1TB drives, for instance, and the Drobo S will end up offering you around 2TB of potential storage (e.g. the data on one drive is mirrored on the second, so if one should fail you’ll still have a safe copy); add a third 1TB drive – which you could do six months down the line, with the Drobo S already part-full of files – and the available storage leaps to just over 1.8TB. BeyondRAID automatically works out the maximum potential safe capacity, can do so without entirely rebuilding the array, and does so faster than a regular RAID setup since the Drobo S only copies actual data rather than every drive block.
So far, so Drobo, but the Drobo S adds in protection from two potential drive failures. That means, even if two discs in your array decide to break down, the Drobo S has still secured copies of your files. It’s worth noting that there’s a capacity trade-off for this extra protection – you have to manually activate it, with single-drive protection being standard – but unlike traditional RAID if you later decide to go prioritise space over double disc security, you can flip between the two without having to completely rebuild the array. Drives, meanwhile, are hot-swappable, you can continue to access data while a new or replacement disc is being prepared and, even while it’s sitting idle, the Drobo S is checking disc blocks and sectors to pre-emptively spot potential bad areas.