Drobo expands line with Drobo S

I know that both the Drobo S and Drobo Elite were released, but the Elite is way too expensive for the average user.  So this post only discusses the Drobo S. The price without drives is $799.

The new Drobo S offers huge capacity and speed upgrades over the current Drobo model. The Drobo S sports an additional drive bay over the current Drobo, offering five drive bays for up to 10TB of storage (using five 2TB drives). Additionally, the Drobo S has eSATA connectivity to supplement the two FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 port.

Data Robotics claims that the Drobo S is 50 percent faster than the current four drive Drobo while offering 90 percent of the performance of the Drobo Pro, the high-end Drobo model launched last April. Data Robotics claims that during tests, the new Drobo S achieved speeds averaging around 80 megabytes per second—blazing speeds if proven accurate.

Meet the new primary and backup storage solution that’s perfect for creative professionals and small businesses with “set it and forget it” storage needs. The safe, expandable Drobo® S offers blazingly fast eSATA, and the best data storage experience ever. In addition to eSATA, Drobo S features enhanced FireWire 800 performance and USB 2.0 connectivity. It is a self-managing, self-healing solution ideal for safely storing large files and rapidly growing data.

Built on award-winning BeyondRAID™ technology with single or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo S protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. It can hold up to five hot-swappable drives, for on-the-fly drive capacity expansion with zero downtime.

Up to 5 Drives of Instant Expansion to 10TB and Beyond
Grow your storage to meet with your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all five drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found in Drobo S enables you to mix and match capacities, drive brands, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as drive capacities grow and larger drives become available. With Drobo S, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.

Protection from Two Drive Failures
Enable the dual-drive redundancy option to protect your data from failure of up to TWO hard drives. It’s all done with a single click, and without ever losing access to your data. Running out of space? Switch back to single-drive redundancy. Unlike moving between traditional RAID 5 and RAID 6, there’s no need to reformat or migrate data off of Drobo, potentially saving you hours or days.

Self-Healing Technology
With the self-healing technology now incorporated into Drobo S, your data is safer than ever. Even when sitting idle, the Drobo will continually examine the blocks and sectors on every disk, flagging questionable areas. This preemptive “scrubbing” helps ensure your data is being written only to the healthy areas of your drives, and that your data is always safe. And if a drive fails, Drobo S will strive to keep your data in the safest state possible, utilizing the available space on the remaining healthy drives.

Windows, Mac, or Linux
Drobo S connects to Windows, Mac and Linux¹ systems and supports NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3, and FAT32 file formats. Regardless of operating system, everyone can take advantage of simple, powerful, complete Drobo data protection.

Host Interface:
eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 compatible) and USB 2.0

Drives:
Accommodates from one to five 3.5” SATA I / SATA II hard drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache¹. No carriers or tools required.

Power:
Idle system (standby, drives off) = 12 watts
Typical busy system (four drives) = 56 watts

Accoustics:
Normal operation: 31.8 dB²

Box Contents:

• Drobo S
• External power supply (100v-240v) with U.S. 110v power cord
• eSATA cable
  
• FireWire 800 cable
  
• USB 2.0 cable
  
• User Guide and Quick Start Card (printed)
 
• Drobo Resource CD with Drobo Dashboard application, help files, and electronic documentation

Data Robotics rolls out 8-bay DroboPro

Data Robotics this morning chased after more than just individual users with the DroboPro. The external array now has 8 SATA bays and can carry as much as 16TB of storage using current hard drive technology. It also expands Drobo’s well-known automatic data redundancy by supporting the failure of as many as two disks at once and dynamically shuffling information as disks are added, removed or partitioned into new volumes. The DroboPro is also the first Drobo to have Ethernet built-in and serve as network-attached storage, though it keeps both the single USB and dual FireWire 800 jacks of the more recent 4-bay Drobo. New to the pro version is support for iSCSI over the Ethernet connection that reportedly requires no configuration in Mac OS X or Windows and which is fast enough to be used for important applications.

Prices start at $1,299 for an empty model and scale up to as much as $3,999 for a fully-loaded 16TB edition. Data Robotics says its new enclosure should be available immediately in multiple countries.

source:electronista

Desktop RAID buying guide

This article is from Macworld, but serves as a good starting point if you are looking at RAID drives. I’m personally ready to purchase a new RAID enclosure, and the Drobo has definitely peaked my interest.

“If you have heavy-duty storage needs, a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the most cost-effective, mind-easing solution, though it can be a major pain to set up. A RAID is two or more hard drives linked together to function as a single storage device, providing greater capacity, better performance, and automated backups (depending on how it’s configured). You can build a RAID yourself or buy a pre- configured one.

RAIDs come in different levels. In a striped array (RAID level 0), multiple drives work in parallel to eke out the best possible performance and provide a combined storage capacity (good for video production); however, this type of RAID provides no backup protection-you’ll lose all your data if one disk fails. A mirrored array (RAID level 1) provides very fast read times (it can read multiple drives at once) and real-time backup; it writes the same data across all disks simultaneously, so if one goes down, nothing is lost. But your total capacity is half the amount of the total capacity of all the drives. (For example, if you have a pair of 500GB drives in a RAID 1, you get only 500GB of total storage.) RAID level 5 uses parity, which provides data redundancy and better storage capabilities than RAID 1’s plain mirroring, splitting data across three or more disks, so if one goes down, your files are re-created from the remaining disks.

Desktop RAID buying advice

Drive Enclosure People who want to configure their own RAIDs will find enclosures that provide anywhere from two empty drive bays to more than eight. When you’re selecting hard-drive mechanisms to fill the bays, use identical capacities and rotation speeds. If you can’t afford a moment of downtime, look for an enclosure that supports hot swapping, which lets you replace a drive without powering down.

You can also choose to buy a configured desktop RAID with pre-installed drives. You’ll find double-drive arrays that offer up to 4TB of storage (they’re generally RAID 0 or RAID 1). The disadvantage to these RAIDs is that they sometimes use cases that don’t allow for convenient drive swaps.

Connectivity Desktop RAIDs offer one or a combination of the usual connectivity options: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. Since performance is usually the motivation for setting up a RAID, steer toward FireWire (FireWire 800 if your Mac supports it); consider getting an eSATA RAID and adding a port to your Mac Pro with an eSATA PCI, PCIe, or PCI-X card; or use an ExpressCard with a MacBook Pro.

Our favorite desktop RAIDs

With the Data Robotics Drobo, you can mix and match up to four 3.5-inch SATA/SATA II hard drives of any capacity and speed. Drobo automatically reconfigures and rebuilds your disks. Read our full review. [$499 without hard drives (Drobo)

What’s unique about the G-Technology G-RAID mini2 SSD is that it’s a portable storage device with a pair of solid-state drives that provide fast read speeds.
Read our full review. [$1,299 for 256GB (Buy direct from G-Technology); G-Technology]”

source:macworld