Drobo Storage Robot Review

(Review) - Standalone backup solutions are always a great alternative to effortlessly backing up necessary files in case disaster strikes, and it usually strikes at the worst possible time when you forgot to update your backups over the last weekend. However, things aren’t so bad these days. With the rise of online backup services and terabytes worth of storage space in third party devices with complimentary applications, there’s no reason to lose any data now.

Drobo from Data Robotics is a storage robot, according to the company. And there’s a good reason why they call it that. Working with Drobo, which is a cluster of hard drives, is a pure pleasure. In fact, we’ll go as far as to say that it’s quite possibly one of the most user-friendly backup solutions in the market. The concept behind Drobo isn’t all that intuitive, but the Apple-like "it just works" theme is welcome to see in an otherwise dull and complex (for mainstream users) product. Essentially, you can add up to and run 4x SATA hard drives in a RAID array. Thanks to Data Robotics’ onboard technology, the device automatically takes care of creating and managing RAID arrays, making the device a great addition even for the mainstream crowd.

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From the exterior, the black chassis is small and sleek enough to be complimentary to your PC peripherals. It’s integrated with a row of 10 blue LED lights on the front that will alert you about the storage capacity. The more LED lights that light up, the less storage you have left on the device. Each LED light is equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the overall storage capacity. Then there are four additional status lights (one for each drive) with yellow, red and green LEDs that blink in combination to alert you about drive failure and the like. The included manual and the front plate lists the lighting patterns to make it easy for you to decipher them in case of drive failures.

Once you have the drives inserted, it’s just a matter of plug-and-play with USB 2.0 to get it going. Although you can get the device to work with a single drive, Data Robotics recommends you work with a minimum of two drives and create a RAID array. Naturally, that’s a good idea. In addition to being limited to USB 2.0, the storage amount is limited to the lowest common size. For instance, if you were to add 2x 100GB and 1x 250GB drives, the maximum amount of data you will be able to store is set to 200GB. That’s to make sure there’s enough storage on all drives to backup and copy the right amount of data in case one drive malfunctions and another one has to kick in. That’s a drawback, albeit a minor one, since you’ll always have to limit your storage size to a particular capacity.

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