The Drobo: Finally, Personal Data Backup Done Right!

Ars Technica has a review of the Drobo, a device which I’ve been following for quite some time. It is essentially a personal backup system that allows you to easily plug in four separate SATA hard drives and take advantage of their combined storage. The kicker is that the Drobo does this while also reserving some space for data protection purposes. So if for some reason one of your drives happen to fail you can just yank out the faulty drive and replace it with a new one. The Drobo, through its automagic processes, will then restore the lost data to the new drive. Even better, the device still allows you access to data on the other drives during the restoration process!

To computer support folks like myself, this is the holy grail of personal data storage. It offers all of the benefits (and then some) of RAID, the typical go-to backup technology for technophiles, while remaining much more flexible and user friendly.

Despite all of it’s great features, the Drobo is still very much a first generation device. It only supports USB 2.0, which many (myself among them), consider inferior to Firewire 400 in terms of speed and efficiency. I also can’t imagine how fast this device would be if it supported the newer Firewire 800 standard.

Since it lacks an ethernet port, the Drobo also falls short of becoming the perfect NAS (network-attached storage) solution. These devices plug into your home network and are accessible to any computer within it. This deficiency could be minimized if you share the Drobo over your network through a computer, or attach it to one of those rare routers that support external hard drives, but it’s in no way a replacement for having the networking feature built in.

If you need any of the features that the Drobo lacks, then it may be worth waiting for version 2.0 of the device. For most others though, the Drobo will probably suit their needs.

At $499, it isn’t a cheap device, but for people who deal with tons of data every day it’s a life saver. It’s also a much better option than those exceedingly large external hard drives I’ve written about previously, which just offer a load of storage space but no backup mechanisms.

Note: Engadget also reviewed the Drobo in June.