In celebration of my new Drobo I just picked up I figured I would edit and publish an email I had written for drive assistance that was the deciding factor in my eventual purchase

If you’re looking to save files locally, having a storage solution without backup is a bad idea. Hard drives fail ALL the time so redundancy is key. There are many solutions for storage but none are as easy as the “Drobo” the main advantages between it and just a plan old external are as follows:

1. Multibay and upgradeable – the basic “Drobo” has 4 slots for drives (upgrade models have between 5-8), start with three and add/replace as needed. It will reformat the new drives and expand storage automatically, (if you go with a RAID setup instead the entire set of drives need to be reformatted and erased to add more storage and all drives must be matched in size in addition to needing a machine to handle the RAID array).

2. Redundant storage – all your data is protected if a hard drive fails just replace it with a new drive of equal or larger size and the missing data will be rebuilt with the new drive. Unlike with a regular drive, if it fails it’s gone or you have to pay for data recovery which will alone cost more than a drobo. It also self heals itself while idle searching for bad sectors and repairing them.

3. Additional hardware is available to support it, the base unit supports an add-on called “Droboshare” that allows the device to function as network attached storage that could be mapped to computers across the network or you could just buy the “Drobo Fs” model that has just the network attachment and everyone can access it that way from the get go (and it has 5 drive bays).

The base unit retails for around $425 normally without drives. 3 X 1TB drives should cost about $170 with shipping. which should give you about 1.8TB of storage (1800 gigs) after formatting and full redundancy. The “Droboshare” add-on is $195. (all prices relative to the time of writing)

The storage drive total – to – available storage total ratio, increases with multiple drives (I recommend starting with three). A full storage calculator can be seen on drobo.com.

It sounds a bit expensive at first but for fully expandable, redundant, networked attached storage the literally is NO other easy option that I am aware of. If you want network accessibility I would probably just go with the FS model it’s more expensive (at least while the base unit is on sale on amazon otherwise it’s the same cost and you get an extra bay and upgraded internals) but it has built in networking and an option for dual drive backup in case for some reason two hard drives fail at literally the same time it can still recover fully.

That is my opinion on the matter