My friend John told me about this neat external drive unit a few months ago called the Drobo. I took a look at the web page and was instantly curious. My only issues were the price and how they actually got RAID like data protection. After some reading I was comfortable with the units functionality but the cost was still a factor. The dam thing is $499 for just an empty chassis. My problem is the Drobo could solve many of my storage issues. I currently have no less than 8 external drives in my home computer setup. This doesn’t count my portable drive I have VM’s on that i shuttle back and forth to work, and the external units (that are mine) at work. Most of them are 250 gig drives. I have slowly been consolidating when I buy newer bigger drives. The problem is I am getting more and more drive space but I have no good backup for all this data. The really important stuff is replicated to a backup drive, but the stuff that would be a pain in the ass to replace but too costly to replicate is still a problem.
That was until Tuesday. I finally broke down and spent some of my tax return money and got a Drobo and some drives. Even with its cost, the benefit of having some true disaster recovery ability at home was too much to pass up. So far I am very happy with the unit. I will slowly add 2 additional 1TB drives over the next few months. I started out with 2 1TB drives in the unit. That gives me 1TB of usable space. What is good about the Drobo is that it gives you RAID1 or 5 like protection but allows you more flexibility when upgrading drives.
