External drives either run out of disk space, or they fail — and hopefully not at the same time!
Drobo has solved this problem for me. The Drobo is a external box that you connect to your computer via a USB or Firewire cable and then fill with hard disk drives. The Drobo magically turns all of the disks into one giant disk that you can use to store your documents, photos, music, etc. If a disk inside the Drobo ever dies, the Drobo will let you know via a red light next to the disk. At that point, go online and order a cheap hard disk and when it arrives just eject the dead disk and insert the new disk. The Drobo will auto-magically heal itself, and all the while you can continue to use the disk to your heart’s content.
If you run low on disk space, you do the same thing. Say your Drobo has four 500 gig drives in it, giving you about 1.5 terabytes of storage. If that turns out to be not enough (and it never is), when you start to run low, just order one larger disk and eject the smallest disk from your Drobo and add the new larger one. The Drobo will auto-magically make itself bigger. Repeat as necessary.
I don’t know how I’d survive without my Drobo.
Here’s some news from the company about a new product from Drobo after the jump:
Drobo, a storage company that made its mark selling easy-to-use arrays to consumers, today announced a new line of products aimed at small- and medium-size businesses. The new products offer up to 36TB of capacity in a single unit.
Unlike its past products, Drobo has added additional capacity with an eight-bay and 12-bay storage box and has also increased the sophistication of its software with tools such as thin provisioning, automated tiering and data deduplication.
The products, however, continue to have hot-swappable drives, LED lights indicating how full disk drives are and simple dashboard interfaces indicating performance levels.