Drobo FS

You told us what you wanted, and we listened. The revolutionary Drobo FS was designed with one purpose in mind: to deliver the best file sharing experience ever. From the moment you plug it in and see it instantly appear on your desktop, youll know theres nothing like it. The all-in-one DroboFS is perfect for any connected home, home office, or small office environment needing a simple, safe device for sharing and backing up files over the network.

Like all Drobo storage products, DroboFS provides redundant data protection without the complexities of RAID. Just plug in your DroboFS, and your data protection is all set up with no configuration required. We call this BeyondRAID technology. Youll call it peace of mind.

May 20, 2010

"...For those concerned about potential Time Capsule reliability, or those in need of something more scalable or more redundant, the Drobo FS is hard to overlook for Mac users. It's a pricey piece of equipment, sure, but the execution of Time Machine integration is downright flawless."

Engadget - Darren Murph

Share your data on a Gigabit Ethernet Network
DroboFS 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 DroboFS 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 10TB and Beyond
DroboFS 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.

And unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in DroboFS 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 DroboFS, 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. Its 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, theres no need to reformat or migrate data off of the DroboFS? potentially saving you hours or days of downtime.

Self-Healing Technology
With the self-healing technology incorporated into DroboFS, your data is safer than ever. When sitting idle, DroboFS 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, DroboFS 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 DroboFS to meet your own unique set of requirements. Our growing library of DroboApps adds amazing functionality like media, web, and more!

Drobo FS supports DroboApps, an entire world of community-created and community-supported applications that can be run on the Linux-based operating system embedded in Drobo FS. What you do with them is up to you. Drobo FS is a computing platform that allows you to install the DroboApps you need. The available applications range from the simple and lightweight, to the complex and powerful.

With DroboApps, the world is your server.

To Serve and Protect
Download Music, Photos and Video, and more. Enjoy DroboApps at home with FireFly, an iTunes-compatible media server, CTorrent a BitTorrent client, and Fuppes, a UPnP/ DLNA server.

Remote Access
Access your files remotely using secure remote access, FTP server, or web server applications.

Are you a Linux Developer
If you'd like to develop DroboApps, just visit the Drobo Developer Community (DDC) on DroboSpace.com.

DroboApps are community-created and community-supported, which means they were not created by Data Robotics. For support and questions, contact the application developer directly. Contact info for each developer is located on each applications page.

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
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 four 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.

To find out exactly how much free capacity you'll have with your choice of disk capacities, try out our interactive capacity calculator.

Redundant Safety
Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. Youll 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 2TB 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. In short, your data is safer on a Drobo.

Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a "bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does next is exceptional. It enters a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or disk, and will work until it returns to the safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures? that's the power of self-healing.

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, youd 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.

Host Interface: 10/100/1000 Ethernet Port

Supported data transfer protocols: AFP and CIFS/SMB

Drives:
Accommodates from one to five 3.5 SATA I / SATA II hard drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache. No carriers or tools required.

Power:
Idle system (standby, drives off) = 12 watts
Typical busy system (four drives) = 56 watts

Box Contents:
Drobo FS
External power supply
Gigabit Ethernet cable
User Guide and Quick Start Card (printed)
Drobo Resource CD with Drobo Dashboard application, help files, and electronic documentation

Capacity
Continuously upgradeable with larger and faster drives. Use our capacity calculator to estimate your storage in various configurations.

Dimensions

Width Height Length Inches 5.9 7.3 10.3 mm 150.3 185.4 262.3