SVLUG: Drobo Data Robot
Tonite at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group, Richard Sharpe, from Data Robotics, Inc. gave a talk on Drobo, the World’s First Data Robot.
It’s a black, easy-to-use USB storage device with 4 hot-swappable SATA bays about the size of a small toaster. The interesting part is that it intelligently does RAID as you insert and remove hard drives, which can be of varying sizes.
It was carefully designed to have a pleasing consumer appearance with informative LEDs for drive capacity and health. Now anybody can manage and upgrade a high-capacity RAID device.
It has a microcontroller running VxWorks, but no file system. It just presents disk blocks as LUNs using SCSI over USB. Currently it has Windows, Mac and Linux support. What’s interesting is that you can remove a drive from a 2-drive setup as a snapshot backup for later.
They are adding more and more functionality to Drobo to do things that are better done on the storage device. For example, Windows can only create 32 GB FAT32 partitions, but can mount 2 TB partitions. So it’s better to do the configuration on the device. Bad block checking or defragmentation may also be better done on the storage device.
It does not run Linux or function as a stand-alone NAS unit.
4x 1-terabyte drives would result in a RAID of about 3 TB. That sounds useful as a backup device for photography or digital artists. It’s not going to be terribly fast with USB or while rebalancing RAID, so is not really made for video editing.
Their belief is that a consumer, 4 bay device is the sweet spot for their market.
Drobo is $499 without any hard drives.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:32 am
It has linux support? I’ve been looking around for this, thinking they would have linux support rolled out by now. Do you have any link to information company about linux support?