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

Mac compatible Hive desktop mini-RAID system launched in uk

I guess we can always hope that this product hits the US as well.  Or if this technology seems to be getting old, check out the holographic scene.

Hive Tech, an off-shoot of UK storage specialist United Digital, has launched a new Mac compatible desktop mini-RAID system aimed at creative freelancers and studios, including designers, film-makers and photographers.

The Hive 4-disk desktop mini-RAID systems utilises energy-saving disk drives from Western Digital and holds up to 6TB of data and includes an eSATA connection option for fast data transfer. 

Fully pre-configured, the Hive can seamlessly rebuild 1TB of data within just three hours if one disk fails; ensuring that zero data is lost and no downtime occurs says Hive Tech.

The Hive comes with a 2-year onsite warranty; with local UK support a phone call away and onsite repairs carried out for free.

“No professional can afford to lose their work, so we developed the Hive to offer desktop RAID customers the same heavy-duty, ultra-reliable protection that we supply for multi-national companies, without the big-company price-tag,” said Hans-Henrik Enoksen, CEO of United Digital and Hive Tech.

The Hive comes with USB 2.0, eSATA and FireWire 400 and 800 connectors. Available in 2TB, 4TB and 6TB configurations, the Hive will be available from selected resellers from 1 May. Introduction prices are £585($859), £825($1210) and £1095($1607) respectively. All prices exclude VAT.

source:macworlduk

OWC ANNOUNCES MERCURY ELITE-AL PRO Qx2 raid solution

Other World Computing (macsales.com), a leading PC and Mac technology company, announced today the new Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 for the ultimate in flexibility and convenience in a Plug and Play desktop hardware RAID storage solution. Featuring a Quad Interface of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA ports; 4 Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive bays; and 4 user selectable hardware RAID settings, the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 offers up to 8TB of total storage capacity and data transfer speeds up to 300MB/s for the ultimate professional grade RAID storage solution.

Professional Performance With User Conveniences

Built for performance-intensive applications, such as A/V, HD-video, digital photography, professional music, graphics, and redundant backup, the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is beautifully designed for both Mac and PC with a shock resistant, heat dissipating aircraft-grade brushed aluminum housing preconfigured with up to 8TB of storage capacity. Its front panel LEDs gives quick, at-a-glance system status, while the removable key lock ensures the installed hard drives remain secure.

Selectable Hardware RAID Flexibility

An easy to access front panel selector switch provides simple configuration of the 4 Hardware RAID settings: 0, 1, 5, 10, as well as a Span (NRAID) setting, for the best level of speed, capacity, or redundancy; or any desired combination of the three operations.

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is Available in 7 Configurations:

Click to read more ...

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

Lusting After Hardware. CalDigitVR External Drive.

If there is one external raid drive that I lust after, it’s gotta be the CalDigitVR. Not only has it got the performance, but the looks too. You can see a performance comparison here to the G-Raid3.

The CalDigit VR can reach speeds up to 220MB/s in RAID 0, and over 110MB/s with RAID 1 protection. These high speeds allow for the most demanding tasks, like video editing. In fact the CalDigit VR is so fast that it can play back high definition video with ease.

It is not sold as an empty case, so you have to buy it as it comes in sizes from 500GB to 3TB. Of course with the 2TB drive already out, it won’t be long till it’s available with 4TB. The price of the 2TB size is around $595. This was an online price I found from a reputable dealer on the net.

Size and weight

• Height: 3.6 inches (92 cm)
• Width: 5.3 inches (134 cm)
• Depth: 8.5 inches (216 cm)
• Weight: 6.6 lb (3 kg)

Host Interface

• eSATA x 1
• Firewire 800 X 2
• Firewire 400 X 1
• USB 2.0 x 1