Drobo

So many photographers talk in glorious way about the Drobo from Data Robotics.

It's an external box that plugs in to the USB port and can contain up to 4 hard drives of different capacity. On a live system, you can pull 1 of the drive and replace it with another one and no lose any data.

That's the theory.

What's right

1. Great look
2. Simple
3. Easy to use

What's wrong

1. Proprietary format
2. Price
3. Reviewers that don't know any better
4. Will keep on working only as long as the company stays in business

Proprietary format

What makes Drobo attractive and is one of its major selling point is that you can place up to 4 different drives of different size and still have the raid redundancy

RAID which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (as named by the inventor) or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (a name which later developed within the computing industry) is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance, reliability, and/or larger data volume sizes.

The phrase "RAID" is an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives.

For standard/"regular" raid to work, all the drives must exactly the same size. Drobo created its own format to allow for the disparate disk size. So when (it's not an if, but a when) the Drobo will crash, you will only be able to recover the data with another Drobo and of course you bought a second Drobo for when it crashes.

With "regular" raid, many operating systems support it out of the box, or almost all raid hardware is compatible with one another, so you are not locked in a company that you hope will not go out of business or will not be bought out by somebody else.

This reminds me of the Iomega is the 1990 with their zip drives. Many, many people thought they had good backups until the famous Click of Death