Drobo 2.0 is out…..

Yeeaaaa, wait long enough and the 2.0 version will give you atleast half of the features you’re looking for. I always thought that Drobo was a great device but I refused to buy one since it was only USB2.0 device. Well, that was yesterday, today Drobo announced the availability of the same great Drobo features, but now with Firewire800 to boot…..woohoo.

For those of you who don’t know Drobo is a external drive housing that has the next generation of raid protection built in and can literally take four different drives of any size and present them as a unified storage disk with raid protection. If you want to find out more info please see this page under technology tab. The barebones Drobo will sell for $499, while a 2TB model is $899 and at 4TB it’s $1299. Now if they could only add E-SATA and Network to this little guy, that would be perfect.

Many Ayromlou

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4 responses to “Drobo 2.0 is out…..”

  2. Hi Anonymous,

    YEP, but I really don’t want to have to buy another piece of hardware just to get network…..I meant built-in network (I guess I wasn’t clear :-)).

    TTYL
    Many

  3. Ever hear of an Airport Extreme? ;-) (For the networking side…as far as eSata I’ve found it to be no appreciable amount faster than FW800…comes down to other factors like head read/write speed, etc anyway.)

  4. Hi Anonymous,

    Yep, Heard of it….own one…..connecting through it right now. Nope…It’s not usable. I’ve had 1TB drives hooked up to it. I’ve also had a Esata external HD hooked to my macbook pro through a express card. I use Aperture to edit/keep track of a 60000 image picture library and I can say for sure drobo beats them handsdown through FW800.

    The Express card slot on the mac is supposed to theoretically pump 2Gb/s (or is that 1.2Gb/s), but just like USB2, it’s all theory. Yes if I transfer a giant 500GB file across the links maybe. But not when I’m trying to access (read/write/modify) 10-20 files everytime I start modifying an image. Firewire beats them all……multiple tasks just work better on FW compared to ESATA and USB2 (USB2 actually sucks really bad) :-).

    Another way of putting this is ESATA is writing to one drive spindle which even at 7200rpm can’t read/write randomly at peak speed. Drobo on the other hand uses raid-5 like stripping which spreads the load across 4 spindles (yes it does need to generate parity and such, but that’s done at HW level). And please don’t talk about Esata port multiplier to do raid……that’s a software hack in my opinion :-).

    I’ll take FW over just about anything else — except maybe fiberchannel or infiniband…..which are super expensive — anyday.

    Thanks for dropping by and commenting…..keep reading the blog :-)

    TTYL
    Many

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