![]() We particularly liked the bundled power adaptor cable, which lets you drive the Drobo and the DroboShare off a single Drobo AC brick - nice space conservation, that. There's a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back and two USB ports to let you plug in two Drobos. It's styled not only to match the Drobo's looks but also to form a stand for it. What's missing from this picture? Network connectivity. What we have here is not a RAID system in the true sense, but an expandable external drive with proprietary, RAID-like data protection. In any case, hard drives are relatively cheap, so if you want more storage space, fit some bigger drives. Drobo's for people who value data safety more than raw capacity. The purist will complain that there's no option to grab the whole 456.4GB of formatted storage capacity for data, but that's not the point, Data Robotics would say. It looks like Data Robotics has at least attempted to cram as much data on the drive as it can in a bid to cater for unattended copies and back-up runs that take the unit over its storage limit. We slipped in a 160GB disk - which was formatted by the unit and made available to use in seconds - at which point the time to completion began falling again and the tally of bytes copied over to the drive began to increase at the rate we'd expect it to run at. Now, we got tired of waiting for something to happen and decided to put the Drobo out of its misery. A slowdown in the remaining time for the copy process feels like the Drobo's trying to compress as much of the incoming data as it can pending the insertion of a fresh HDD. Interestingly, at this point, while data was apparently still being copied, the system was barely registering increases in the total amount of information sent to the drive. As the spare capacity dwindled, the Drobo flashed an orange LED at us which shortly went red to indicate it needs a new drive urgently. Later, we went back to two 80GB drives and tried to fill them. ![]() Drobo's redundancy only goes so far, but it's within the tolerance of almost all desktop-storage users. So keep the drive sizes close, OK?Īnd you'll note that that's "single-drive failure" not "multi-drive failure". Bung in a 100GB unit and 18GB are lost replace the 100GB drive with a 160GB model and you lose 77GB. Insert two 80GB hard drives and there's almost no reserved space. The reserved area is essentially the difference between the biggest hard drive and the next one down. because there is not enough capacity to protect data in this space from a single-drive failure". If they're not, the result is "unusable space. Drobo likes its drives to be of a similar capacity. The "reserved for expansion" space is effectively dead. But your OS will still show an available capacity of 2TB minus whatever you've put on the Drobo. Tot that lot up and you'll get the 456.4GB of formatted storage capacity provided by the three drives. With the 80GB, 160GB and 250GB drives in and ready, we got an actual storage capacity of 219.3GB, with 8.36GB reserved "for expansion", 151.2GB used to store the information Drobo uses to reconstruct your files if a drive fails, and 2.2GB of other "overhead" data. Or are you? No, because the Drobo ensures there's room for the data if the largest drive fails. The auto-configuration of a new drive is reasonably fast.Īnd clearly, if your remaining disk space is less than that needed to hold all your data, you're in trouble. But you can slot in a fresh disk in due course, and reconfiguration will take the new drive's capacity into account. ![]() However, you're data's not protected until the process is complete. The adjustment process does take some time, so it's just as well that you can continue to use Drobo in the meantime. And we were able to trigger a Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine back-up update while the Drobo was busy adjusting itself to the loss of those 80 gigabytes. We were playing an H.264 video file when we yanked the 80GB drive, but playback continued uninterrupted. Taking out old drives and/or adding new ones can be done while Drobo's running, and your data remains fully available to you. Likewise, if you pull out a unit - as we did to simulate a drive failure - it instantly reconfigures itself accordingly, re-alloting the available space for data and for the codes it uses to recreate data that would otherwise be lost when a drive fails. Add a third drive - in our case, a 160GB unit - and Drobo immediately updates its internal map of the data you've stored on the system.
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