07 Apr 2010, Posted by David Torcivia in Articles,General,Tech, 0 Comments

Drobo FS brings built-in Gigabit to Drobo Line

Data Robotics Inc., maker of the popular and beloved (by most) beyond RAID enclosures have added a new member to their line today: the Drobo FS. One of the major complaints of the earlier drobos was their lack of network connectivity. While they possessed FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, there was no initial option offered with gigabit ethernet. To remedy this, Data Robotics introduced a price dock accessory that, when coupled with your Drobo drive, would turn the system into a network attached storage unit (NAS). Still, users complained that this should be a standard option on their drives. With the Drobo FS, a built-in gigabit Ethernet plug, the Drobo becomes a NAS and capapble of all the tricks of a network attached drive in addition to acting double duty as a BitTorrent and itunes server among other apps.

Beyond the addition of a network port, the refreshed drives sport a brand new dual-core processor, a bump in RAM, and a new software core to give a 4x speed increase over the previous dock solution. The enclosures have room for 5 drives of up to 2TB for a total possible storage of 10TB in a beyond RAID setup which provides 2 disk failure protection with 5 drives and dual duplication enabled.

Data Robotics Inc. highlights these important points:

• Plug-In and Share – The Drobo FS connects directly to any Gigabit Ethernet network for a true plug in and share set-up experience. Supports standard data transfer protocols including Apple File Protocol (AFP) and Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS).
• 5-Drive Capacity and Instant Expansion to 10TB and Beyond – Customers with growing storage requirements can easily add data capacity by simply inserting a new hard drive or replacing the smallest drive with a larger one, even when all five drive bays are full. With Drobo FS, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.
• Single- and Dual-Drive Redundancy – The Drobo FS dual drive redundancy option protects against the simultaneous failure of up to two hard drives. Customers can engage this option with a single click without ever losing access to their data.
• Self-Healing Technology – With BeyondRAID, the Drobo FS continually examines data blocks and sectors on each drive to flag potential issues. The preemptive “scrubbing” helps ensure data is being written only to healthy drive areas and automatically keeps data in the safest state possible – even when a drive fails.
• Customizable Storage – Utilizing the growing library of DroboApps, including media and web applications, users can customize the Drobo FS to further enhance their sharing experience.

The Drobo FS is currently available and starts at$699 MSRP for just the enclosure, with multiple configurations reaching up to $1,449 for a 10TB (5x 2TB drives) bundle.