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Killer hardware?
By Adam Bell | April 11, 2007
I don’t know of anyone theses days who doesn’t use some kind of external storage. It doesn’t matter if it’s for backing up data, storing media, or just the convenience of some mobile hard drive space between machines. We all seem to have a building collection of external disks.
I stumbled across a new toy today which for the first time in a long time got the geek in me excited. It’s called the Drobo, and it has a few features that I think have the ability to make it a piece of killer hardware. Now I don’t mean that in that it’s going to go on some kind of psychotic killing spree. I mean that in the geek sense of the Killer Application genre.
So what qualifies this for the potential status of “killer hardware”?
Okay, bearing in mind that I’ve not actually seen one in the flesh, and to be clear I have no affiliation with the folks who makes these:
1) It looks so simple I can give one to my mom.
The pretty lights on the side would make talking a non-technical person through identifying any problems a breeze over the phone.
2) Upgrading a full (4 drive) unit to larger disks on the fly
So you’ve got 4x 250GB drives loaded, and you’re out of space, but you have 4x 500GB disks fresh out of the box ready to upgrade. It looks like a simple case of swapping the old disks out for new ones, one at a time until the unit’s had chance to migrate the data. All apparently without any real messing around!
3) You don’t need the disks to all be the same size!
Now I’ve not seen the numbers on this, but the claim is that the Drobo can utilize disks of varying sizes without the effect seen on RAID solutions where the available space is dictated by the size of the smallest disk. As the Drobo doesn’t use traditional RAID to “protect” your data across the disks I would be very interested to see specifics here!
So what about the downside?
Again, this is speculative on my behalf. My initial thoughts on limitations on this unit are:
1) The technology is new, and unknown to the masses.
This puts people outside of their comfort zone. This can be overcome, but it will take time, and for people to come to grasps with the techniques used to protect their data. It’s not RAID 5, so what is it? How does it work? How can you calculate expected disk space from the disks you install?
2) USB connection
Now this is typical of all external USB drives, but I mention it here for completeness. In practice though this type of unit isn’t really going to compete with an internal RAID card.
3) Cost.
I haven’t seen a UK £’s cost yet, but the Drobo website advertises the unit for $699. Now there’s varying models available that support room for two drives, and the US price for these is under $120 ($80 for the Netgear sc101). So the question really is whether the Drobo is worth the extra money?
4) OS support
Drobo support Windows(NTFS) and Mac OS X (HFS+), which is really great to see, but what about the Linux (Ext3) market? Now this can be tackled with NTFS 3G, and Linux distro’s can handle HFS+ partitions – though I personally haven’t used them. I do wonder if there’s a part of the market here being overlooked?
Overall, on paper, I think the Drobo looks like a quality piece of kit, and would fit in nicely in any small office, and geek collection. Interestingly I think this unit would sit just as well at your parents house due to the built in smarts and easy diagnose lights.
I’d be very interested to hear from people that may have a unit, or are planning on buying a unit (as I believe it hasn’t shipped in the US yet?).
Does anyone else have, or know of a piece of hardware they’d consider a killer piece of kit?
- None Found
Topics: Tech | 2 Comments »
April 30th, 2007 at 23:22
Thanks for the kind comments on Drobo. For more information, you might also want to browse the independent community of Drobo users at http://www.drobospace.com
Peter Radsliff, VP Marketing, Data Robotics, Inc. — maker of the Drobo storage robot
May 2nd, 2007 at 14:43
[...] making a recent post musing whether Drobo could have a killer piece of hardware entering the market soon, I’ve exchanged a few emails with Peter Radsliff, Drobo’s VP [...]