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On the applications front, there are none, other than Drobo Dashboard, which is a monitoring application that lets you monitor the storage device from your desktop. Currently, Drobo is limited to NTFS format for Windows and HFS+ for Mac. Since there’s no support for FAT32, Drobo isn’t cross platform compatible. Although power users may dislike this setback, mainstream users probably won’t have to worry about cross platform compatibility.

Formatting the drives is easy (either use Dashboard or Windows/Mac built-in utilities), and replacing them is even easier as they are hot swappable. In fact, after you have initially setup the drive, all of the drives automatically format and work together painlessly.

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All in all, Drobo, the storage robot, is an easy to work with backup solution with a few caveats. The connectivity limited to USB 2.0 with distinct lack of Firewire and Ethernet support is a hurdle, but you could twist that around to say that this makes the unit portable enough to get connected to any computer in your household. While we may be willing to let that slide by, a good backup application was missing from the package. What’s up with that? The least you would expect from such an expensive alternative is a good backup application to automate the mundane, yet important, task of backing up. If nothing proprietary, they could’ve just partnered with a software company to include a copy of a robust backup app. It’s not too late, though. The company could still offer a full version of an application on its site for free to its current and future users. Oh, and did we mention that Drobo does not come with pre-bundled hard drives either? That’s a separate expense you will have to endure. For the initial price of $495.00, that’s already asking for too much, and without a robust backup application and at least a single hard drive for an out-of-the-box-ready experience, it’s asking for a little too much.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Drobo, and it’s an amazing device to have in your arsenal, but the price has got to come down and the amount of features have to go up for Drobo to take off. If you don’t mind paying for a robust backup solution, however, give Drobo a go. You will not be disappointed.

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