Drobo FS Network Storage Enclosure

Drobo Dashboard 2.0.2 via Firmware Update

You'll be able to install the Drobo Dashboard 2.0.2 via simple firmware update. It offers a variety of features not included in the original Drobo Dashboard, including:

• View of all of your Drobos in one window
• Get capacity and status for each Drobo
• DroboCopy tasks run in the background
• Get e-mail alerts about your Drobo

Drobo PC Backup

Purchasing this item entitles you to a free download of the Drobo PC Backup software. It allows you to:

• Back up your PC to your Drobo with ease
• Supports direct or network connections
• Supports backup over Ethernet

Share your data on a Gigabit Ethernet Network

Drobo FS connects directly to a Gigabit Ethernet network to make sharing your data easy. Just plug it into any switch or wireless router and you are ready to go.

Supports the Computer of Your Choice

Connect to your Drobo FS using any Windows, Mac, or UNIX/Linux computer. Whatever system you have, it's likely you'll be able to connect to it over your network quickly and easily.

Easy Expansion to 16TB

Drobo FS holds up to five drives allowing you to effortlessly grow your storage to meet your data capacity needs. To add more space, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo FS enables you to mix and match drive capacities, brands and speeds. This unprecedented flexibility allows for continuous expansion as available hard drive capacities increase. With Drobo FS, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

Protection from up to Two Drive Failures

Enable the dual-drive redundancy option to protect your data from failure of up to two hard drives. It's all done with a single-click and you never lose access to your data. Running out of space? No problem. Switch back to single-drive redundancy at any time. Unlike moving between traditional RAID levels, there's no need to reformat or migrate data off of the Drobo FS - potentially saving you hours or days of downtime.

Self-Healing Technology

With the self-healing technology incorporated into Drobo FS, your data is safer than ever. When sitting idle, Drobo FS will proactively examine the blocks and sectors on every drive, flagging questionable areas. This preemptive "scrubbing" helps ensure your data is being written only to the healthy areas of your drives. When a drive fails, Drobo FS keeps your data in the safest state possible by moving your data to the available space on the remaining healthy drives.

A Drobo as Unique as you Are

Select from a wide selection of free DroboApps designed to give you the freedom to configure and customize your Drobo FS to meet your own unique set of requirements. The growing library of DroboApps adds amazing functionality like media, web, and more.

Drobo Technology

BeyondRAID Technology

Every Drobo product comes with the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology - the next generation of redundant disk protection. BeyondRAID not only keeps your data safe, but will also increase uptime and availability. BeyondRAID technology offers several improvements over traditional RAID-based storage systems, including the flexibility to replace failed disks and increase capacity all without costly downtime. Key features of BeyondRAID include data protection against hard disk failure, instant capacity expansion without downtime, self-management, and automatic healing.

File and Operating System Agnostic

Drobo and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+, and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.

Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization

Grow storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all five disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

Redundant Safety

Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. You'll feel safer knowing that if disks do fail, Drobo automatically enters a state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the remaining healthy disks and sectors.

Proportional Rebuild Times

The time it takes Drobo to rebuild data after a drive failure or removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool - meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 4TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out every drive block even if it does not contain user data. Since Drobo is "Data Aware", it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure.

Storage Virtualization

BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called "virtualization." Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested by the file system and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a Drobo so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data. Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe, without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to eliminate the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.

Thin Provisioning

Thin provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID communicates with your OS about how much disk space you have, up to 16TB (this varies with older operating and file systems). Specifying a larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity. BeyondRAID automatically also reclaims space as you delete files.

Self-Managing

Drobo is highly automated storage. There are no complex configuration screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box.

Drive Reordering

One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you'd have to replace the drives in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you like.