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.
It’s possible the logs are “encrypted” by XOR’ing every byte with 0xC3.
It was eye-opening to hear about all the software hackery needed to support various versions of consumer operating systems like Windows.
Drobo is $499 without any hard drives.
Sourceforge drobo-utils project (GPL3)
2009 Update:
drobo.com: Linux Support FAQ
drobo.com: supported hard drives FAQ
Daniel Krook: One week with the Drobo on Linux
Andy Grover’s Blog: Drobo and Linux
Bart’s Drobo blog post
theregister.co.uk: Drobo restrings boxes to double-up product range (Drobo S with 5 slots, and Drobo Elite with 8 slots, iSCSI, SAN-like features, and faster Marvell processor)
StorageMojo: DroboPro at SNW
StorageMojo: A data robot is eating the low end
arstechnica: The Drobo FS in-depth, Part 1: what it is, how it works (March, 2011)
arstechnica: The Drobo FS in-depth, Part 2: day-to-day use (April, 2011)
macperformanceguide.com: Data Robotics Drobo
macperformanceguide.com: OWC Mercury Elite Al-PRO QX2
Synology Storage Products
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?
Hi Charles.
Please see the 2009 Update section of my blog post for news about Linux support.
At this time, it looks like Drobo is focusing on the consumer mass market, and linux will remain a perpetual “beta” for mgmt. tools and filesystem support like ext3.
The Open Source drobo-utils lets you manage drobos from linux (GUI, command-line and python), and reportedly works well with firmware 1.1.1 and higher.
However, if you use a supported filesystem like NTFS or HDFS on the Drobo, then you can connect via iSCSI or LAN with the DroboShare option.