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The new Data Robotics Drobo is a very tempting new offering to the expandable storage market; a segment appealing both to home users and small business.

For $699, this desktop redundant storage box offers four hot-swappable SATA drive slots that are automatically managed by the device. Simply plug it into your computer’s USB 2.0 port and it appears as one large storage device. There is no need for management or hassle. Lights on the front of the box indicate device capacity and when its time to add or replace drives.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is arguably a different beast, but priced at $649 and covering a lot of the same territory as the Drobo, it is a valid competitor.

Infrant’s ReadyNas NV+ offers most of the basic features of the Drobo, with the huge added benefit of NAS (network attached storage) capabilities. However, the Drobo has one killer feature not offered by the NV+:

Both devices offer hot-swappable drive support, but the Drobo offers much more flexibility when dealing with drives of different sizes. If you have four drives in your NV+, the protected capacity is essentially the smallest drive size times three. The Drobo employs a more intelligent redundancy system that employs a dynamic combination of mirroring and parity to deliver more usable space when working with drives of different sizes.

This means that where 2×250GB + 2×500GB in the NV+ would yield about 750GB of protected storage whereas the Drobo would get you about 929 GB, according to their interactive capacity tester.

A bit of fact checking revealed that the Drobo is in fact slightly larger than the NV+ and does indeed employ a cooling fan. However, like the NV+, the fan is temperature controlled. No word yet on the noise level.

The Drobo appears to fall down when it comes to other features. The NV+ costs just a bit more but offers full NAS (AFP, SMB, WebDAV, FTP, rsync and more), media serving, and several modes of security.

Drobo’s 100% hands-free management can be a boon, but the added flexibility afforded by the NV+ web-based control panel is very useful if you need any features beyond USB storage.

Conclusion
Data Robotics’ Drobo offers great value if your goal is to eek out as much usable space as possible from an array of drives varying in size. It is also ideal if all you need is a USB backup solution and you don’t want to spend any time configuring it.

However, its lower cost and much wider feature set make the NV+ a more attractive option for power users and networked environments.

If the Drobo isn’t your cup of tea right now, I’d suggest keeping your eye on Data Robotics. If their first product is any indication, their inevitable NAS product ought to be a formidable contender for the home & small office storage crown.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Hardware, Misc, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.