Drobo

Overview:

Meet your new primary storage, the safe, expandable Drobo™ storage robot. It’s so simple anyone can use it, yet powerful enough for business. Drobo plugs into Mac and PC systems for redundant data protection without the complexities of RAID.

Inside every Drobo is the revolutionary BeyondRAID™ storage technology that protects data against a hard disk crash, yet is simple enough for anyone to use. As long as you have more than a single disk in Drobo, all data on Drobo is safe no matter which hard disk fails. There's no need to worry about anything else.

Dynamically expand storage any time; Drobo holds up to 16TB in four drive bays using any combination of 3.5” SATA drives¹. It comes with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, so you get the data protection you need with the speed and interface you want.

	Incomparable Expandability Your library of data grows every moment and now your storage solution expands in seconds too. Drobo holds up to four hard drives, can expand at any time, and supports up to 16TB on a single volume as disk sizes increase. Choose how big you want your Drobo today with any combination of drives capacities. Yes, you can mix and match drive sizes. Check out the Drobo Capacity Calculator to try it out for yourself.
	Protection from a Drive Failures Protecting your data from a hard drive failure can be a challenging task. Not with Drobo. As long as Drobo has two hard drives, it protects you from a drive failure. If a drive happens to fail, you do not lose access to data, which means that you can keep on working. Just swap out the failed hard drive and replace it with a new SATA drive of any size.
	Plug in peace of mind Just plug in Drobo and your data protection is all set up. Add disks at any time for additional protected capacity. Drobo can even solve problems by itself. Lights on the front tell you what’s happening – if you can read a traffic light, you’re already a Drobo expert.
	Speed demon: FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 Why compromise? Safety and accessibility now go hand in hand. Experience Drobo with both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. It's the data protection and peace of mind you need with the performance and interfaces you want.
	Windows, Mac Drobo connects to Windows and Mac systems and supports NTFS, HFS+, and FAT32 file formats. Everyone can take advantage of simple, powerful, complete BeyondRAID data protection.

Hard Drives a la carte
Unlike other storage solutions, Drobo allows you to purchase as much or as little storage as you like up front. Since you can expand at any time, Drobo is the right solution for your budget.

Consolidate Your Storage
Avoid the danger, mess, and hassle of multiple external storage "solutions" and upgrade to Drobo, with the world's easiest to use, safe, and expandable storage technology.

Drobo PC Backup
Backing up your PC to your Drobo is as easy as using Drobo with Drobo PC Backup, now bundled with Drobo - 1 license. PC Backup automatically detects and backs up incremental file changes, ensuring that your data is always protected. Learn more about Drobo PC Backup.

What’s Stored on Drobo?
Drobo is perfect for both primary and backup storage of large media and productivity files such as video, photos, music, audio, documents, and spreadsheets.

It’s ideal for small business owners, creative professionals, graphic designers, photographers, video editors, educators, and home storage.

¹ Tests performed with OS X Leopard on a Mac Pro using a 7200 RPM internal hard drive and a Drobo using two 7200 RPM drives over FireWire 800. Large file transfers performed with 1GB of video files via drag & drop. Small file transfers performed with 1GB of mp3 files via drag & drop. Kona video benchmarking test performed using the Disk Read/Write test with the following settings: 1GB file size, DVCProHD1080i60 video frame size, and disable file system cache enabled. Performance will vary significantly according to many factors such as file size, number of files, software drivers, operating system, hardware support, and other factors. Drobo, Inc. cannot guarantee all host systems will achieve similar results.

Features:

Greatest Feature? Plug it in and automatically upgrade your peace of mind.

Go Faster with FireWire 800. Hi-Speed USB 2.0.
With FireWire 800 alongside USB 2.0 and an upgraded core processor, Drobo is now the fastest product in its class. It is the perfect solution for both primary and backup storage of large media and productivity files such as video, photos, music, audio, and troves of documents and spreadsheets. In fact, even if you're now using USB 2.0, the new Drobo is up to three times as fast its predecessor in typical usage.

Consumer Mindset, Enterprise Feature Set.
Drobo was designed to meet a stringent design requirement: Anyone should be able to use Drobo regardless of technical experience. It is ready to go out of the box and will always stay that way. Drobo does all the work of managing an enterprise-grade your storage system for you.

No Software or Drivers are Needed!
The Drobo magic comes from the software that's built into the hardware called BeyondRAID—an advanced storage technology. Drobo does everything for you from expanding capacity when you add a drive, to self-healing around drive failures and data errors. Drobo also includes a powerful desktop software utility called Drobo Dashboard that shows you what Drobo is up to and adds important functionality including firmware updates, formatting options and email alerts.

Additional Features:

BeyondRAID:

What's BeyondRAID? Storage without limitations.

BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, delivers all of the benefits of traditional RAID, while providing much more and leaving many of the limitations behind. This next-generation of redundant storage technology brings together enhanced protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.

Drobos, based on BeyondRAID, interact with computing systems in the same manner as storage arrays using traditional RAID, so installing a Drobo allows you to maintain your current operating system and file system. This eliminates the challenges and costs when moving to a new storage technology.

Problems with Traditional RAID
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) was developed in the 1980s to pool disk drives for increased capacity and reliability for data storage. Since then, RAID has been a huge success, preventing single disk drive failures from causing data loss, and has been used in almost every enterprise data center.

Unfortunately, the complexity of RAID has made it challenging for small businesses and consumers to effectively use the technology. RAID has a high learning curve with many options. There's RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 along with unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.

Aside from complexity, these are the primary challenges with traditional RAID:

• Lock-in of RAID levels. To change RAID levels, most storage arrays require the data to be moved off of it, reconfigured, and then moved back on. If you want to move to RAID 6 from RAID 5 for protection against two drive failures, it's a reinitialize and start over.
• Lack of expandability. Once drives are configured into a RAID pool, that is it. If you want to add more storage capacity, the solution is to create a new RAID pool, leaving you with another chunk of storage to manage - or you can just reinitialize and start over.
• Debilitated state after a drive failure. When a drive fails, most RAID implementations enter a state where data loss will occur if another drive falters before the user replaces the failed drive. Also, performance is hampered when in this debilitated state.

Moving Beyond RAID
Drobo's BeyondRAID technology solves these fundamental issues with traditional RAID while delivering much more. Built on an advanced virtualization platform, BeyondRAID chooses the correct protection algorithm based on data availability needs at any given moment.Since the technology works at the block level, it can write blocks of data that alternate between data protection approaches.

If you need to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones - no need to change RAID levels, purchase a new storage array or go through the complex administration of pooling RAID groups. The BeyondRAID feature even allows IT managers to switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click, thereby ensuring enterprise-level dual parity data protection if required. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to return to a protected state without any user interaction.

¹ Available with 5-bay or Larger Drobos
² Available with iSCSI-capable Drobos

Thin Provisioning is a fundamental capability of BeyondRAID, allowing for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one.

Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service.

Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool, preventing free space from being tied up by any particular server.

Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator.

Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted, without any user configuration. There is no need to learn about RAID levels or what mirroring or striping is.

Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures in a short period of time. Even if two drives fail, BeyondRAID will attempt to use the remaining drives to return to a protected state.

Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time with no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail. With some traditional RAID systems, a drive can be marked as a "hot spare", waiting on standby for a drive failure so it can take over. That's just a unutilized drive that you have to pay for taking up a valuable drive bay.

Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management. Being Data Aware allows the Drobo to have a capacity gauge on the front, quickly recover in the event of a drive failure, enable intelligent tiering of data, and much more.

Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID.

How BeyondRAID Works
Now that we've looked at how BeyondRAID compares with traditional RAID and the value that it brings, let's see how BeyondRAID works.

The sections of the RAID stack are drastically reinvented in a Drobo—and it all has to
do with how drives are pooled (disk pack) and the way data is stored (BeyondRAID virtualization).

Technology:

BeyondRAID™ Technology
Most modern storage arrays aggregate disks and prevent against single drive failures using a 20-year-old technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). While RAID has served many businesses well, it requires up-front knowledge of its functionality and has many shortcomings. BeyondRAID technology built into every Drobo addresses these shortcomings and makes virtualizing disk drives usable by everyone. BeyondRAID provides these enhancements over traditional RAID:

• Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
• Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
• Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
• Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
• Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
• Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
• Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
• Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID

Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is the single tool to centrally manage all of your Drobos. Drobo Dashboard gives you status as if all of your Drobos were right in front of you by providing you the same status lights and capacity guage that are on the front panel. All adminitration tasks are a single click away and there’s even a built-in data protection tool called Drobo Copy to easily copy data to and from your Drobo. Simply, it’s the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage.

Learn more about Drobo Dashboard.

File and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows and Mac platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+ and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.

Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization
Grow storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all four disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

To find out exactly how much free capacity you'll have with your choice of disk capacities, try out our interactive Capacity Calculator on tab.

Redundantly Safe
Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. You’ll feel safer knowing that if disks do fail, Drobo automatically enters a state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the remaining healthy disks and sectors.

Proportional Rebuild Times
The time it takes Drobo to rebuild data after a drive failure or removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool—meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 2TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out every bit even if it does not contain user data.

Since Drobo is “Data Aware”, it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure. In short, your data is safer on a Drobo.

Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a "bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does next is exceptional. Entering a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or disk, Drobo will work until it returns to the safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures — that's the power of self-healing.

Smart Volume Technology
The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume technology integrated into Drobo allows a single virtual volume to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. Increasing the available pool of storage on Drobo is as simple adding or upsizing drives. Thus, there’s no need to reformat your file system or repartition.

Storage Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called “virtualization.” Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested by the file system and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a Drobo so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data.

Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe, say, without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to remove the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.

Thin Provisioning
Thin Provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID communicates with your OS about how much disk space you have, up to 16TB (this varies with older operating and file systems). Specifying a larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity. BeyondRAID automatically also reclaims space as you delete files.

Self-Managing
Drobo is highly automated storage. There are no complex configuration screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box.

Drive Reordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you’d have to replace the drives in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you like.

Specifications:

Technical Specifications
Connectivity	1 x FireWire 800 port (FireWire 400 compatible) 1 x USB 2.0 port
Capacity	4 drive bays 3.5" SATA 1 / SATA II / SATA III drives Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use the Capacity Calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.
BeyondRAID Features	Thin Provisioning Instant Expansion Mixed Drive Size Utilization Automatic Protection Levels Virtual Hot Spare Data Aware Drive Re-ordering
Additional Software Features	Drive Spin Down Drobo Copy
Hardware Features	Carrier-less Drive Bays Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)
Operating System Support	Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (Intel Only) Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later (Intel Only) Mac OS X 10.7.0 or later (Intel Only) Windows 7 SP1 32 and 64 bit Windows Vista SP1 32 and 64 bit Windows XP SP3 32 and 64 bit
File System Support	Windows: NTFS Mac OS X: HFS+ Cross-Platform: FAT32
Management	Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights Drobo Dashboard version 2.0 or later
Dimensions	Width: 6.0 in (152.4 mm) Height: 6.3 in (160.0 mm) Depth: 10.7 in (271.8 mm) Desktop Form Factor
Weight	6 lbs. 11.3 ozs. (without power supply, hard drives or packaging)
Power and Cooling	External Power Supply: AC Input - 100-240VAC~2.5A, 50-60Hz DC Output - 12-17VDC 6.6A & 80W Max Power Consumption: Idle System (standby, drives off): 12 watts Typical Busy System (four drives): 40 watts Single, fixed cooling fan
Environmentals	Operating Temperature: 10°C – 35°C (50° – 95°F) Non-Operating Temperature (storage): -10° – 60°C (14° – 140°F) Operating Humidity: 5% – 80%
Acoustics	Normal Operation: 24.2 dB
Certifications	Environmental: RoHS, WEEE, REACH Regulatory: FCC Part 15 Class B; Canada ICES-003 Class B; CE Mark; CISPR22:19973rd Edition Class B; MIC Mark; VCCI Approval to V.3; BSMI Approval to CNS13438; ACA Approval to AS/NZS 3548 Safety: UL, cUL, TUV, CB
Warranty	One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU or two (2) year warranty in the EU (as provided by EU law)

Box Contents Drobo 6 ft USB 2.0 cable 6 ft FireWire 800 cable 6 ft power cord with power supply (100 – 240V AC, 50/60 Hz) Quick Start Card Getting Started Guide (printed) Drobo PC Backup CD Resource CD includes: Drobo Dashboard application Help files Electronic Documentation

Diagram:

Sample Light Indicators Diagram

Showcase:

360° View

Capacity Calculator:

Use these interactive tools to estimate the amount of data storage available to fit your needs.

Drag drives and place them into the slots. To remove one from a slot just click on it.

This tool is for approximating the space utilization with various mixed disk configurations. Actual disk sizes can vary between vendors, and values calculated may differ slightly from actual results. Please refer to Drobo Dashboard for precise data calculations for storage installed in your Drobo.

Documentation:

Drobo Datasheet (.PDF)