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Drobos Product Maker Hires New CEO

Paul Lilly — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:38:06 -0600

Data Robotics on Monday announced it has hired Tom Buiocchi as the company's new president and chief executive officer. Buiocchi succeeds company founder Geoff Barrall, who held the title of CEO for the past four years.

"Geoff has done a tremendous job creating an exciting, dynamic company which is approaching 100,000 units sold and is on track for continued growth. The board is very appreciative of this achievement," said Aneel Bhusri, chairman of the board for Data Robotics. "Tom's appointed as CEO marks an important milesonte for Data Robotics. His competitive nature underlies his proven track record of building successful organizations and delivering strong growth, both of which will be critical in bringing Data Robotics to the next level of success."

Buiocchi's resume includes serving as Executive in Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, but his last executive business role was at Brocade Communications Systems, where he served as VP of worldwide marketing, investor relations, and sales operations. Buiocchi also has some 20 years experience in a range of positions with heavyweights such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Apex Systems, and Rhapsody, Data Robotics said.

New Drobos Add Drive Bay, Higher Price

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:08:46 -0600

Data Robotics is refreshing its excellent line of Drobo automated external hard drive enclosures. The Silicon Valley startup is launching the Drobo S and DroboElite. The Drobo S is similar to the standard Drobo but offers a fifth drive bay, allowing up to two drives to fail with no data loss. The new ‘S’ version also packs a faster ARM chip and an eSATA port to go along with the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Users can enable dual drive redundancy via the software control panel.

The DroboElite is intended for enterprise use. It has room for 8 SATA drives, much like the older DroboPro. The Elite now comes equipped with two gigabit Ethernet ports as the only connection method. You won’t find any iSCSI or FireWire like on the Pro. There is however, a USB port intended for device management, not everyday use. The DroboElite is definitely not something for consumers to go pick up.

The new units are shipping now. The Drobo S is going for $799 and the DroboElite for $3,499. The standard Drobo will continue to be sold for $399.

Drobo Adds Performance with New FireWire 800/USB 2.0 Version

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:44:51 -0500

The Drobo storage robot, which we tested in 2007, offers a fascinating combination of advanced data protection features, flexibility and support for SATA drives. Unfortunately, the original Drobo provides low throughput via its USB 2.0 connection. While its optional DroboShare accessory and forthcoming DroboApps application family enable it to operate as a storage device or a streaming media server on your Gigabit Ethernet network, better performance is what we'd like to see in either use.

Drobo, the Second Generation

Stung, perhaps, by our review's less-than-stellar 6 out of 10 score, Data Robotics is now rolling out a new version that features FireWire 800 (aka IEEE-1394b) ports as well as USB 2.0 ports. If you don't have a FireWire 800 port, the new Drobo has you covered. It includes bilingual ports that also run in FireWire 400 (IEEE-1394a) mode.

Making Drobo Faster

The new Drobo is designed to be faster, even if you use USB ports instead of FireWire ports. According to Data Robotics, "even if you’re now using USB 2.0, the new Drobo is up to three times as fast its predecessor in typical usage."

Give credit to a faster processor under the hood. Data Robotics says that the new Drobo is now fast enough for video editing.

Considering Drobo? Use Drobolator!

The Drobolator online capacity calculator will help you determine how many drives to install in a Drobo to reach your desired capacity (Drobo reserves some drive capacity for its RAID-like redundancy data protection features). For example, install three 500GB drives, and you'll have effective storage space of 929GB.

Bargain-Hunting for Drobo

The first-generation USB 2.0-only Drobos are now being cleared out at the Drobo Store, and you can buy either the new or the original Drobo in various 2TB and 4TB drive bundles.

With greater speed for USB 2.0 users and support for FireWire 800 ports, Drobo 2nd Generation looks like a sequel that could be better than the original.

Graphic courtesy Data Robotics.

Data Robotics Drobo

David Murphy — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:06:46 -0600

Data Robotics was a bit concerned about its Drobo external enclosure being tested in the Maximum PC Lab. After all, the name of the game at Maximum PC is speed. We hate that which is not fast almost as much as we hate that which doesn’t work out of the freakin’ box.

Saying the Drobo is slow is like saying dry ice is cold or that the Buckeyes are just another football team. Running our HD Tach benchmark test on the Drobo was like waiting for water to boil, only to find that the burner wasn’t even on to begin with.

Although Data Robotics swears the Drobo doesn’t use RAID for data redundancy, the device’s proprietary technology is basically a giant RAID in a box. You toss a hard drive into one of the device’s four hot-swap-style openings, and the Drobo constantly auto-configures the array. It uses your biggest hard drive as a mirror backup of your data and runs like a RAID 5 when you have three or four drives present.

Unlike a normal striped array, the Drobo doesn’t limit your total array capacity to the number of hard drives you have multiplied by the smallest drive’s capacity. If you want to use the Drobo to format a single drive that’s already been chained to an array, you have to jam a paper clip into the Dro’s butt—the included software won’t do it for you.

We wonder why the Drobo defaults to a protection setup when you have only one drive in the unit. Yes, the device is ideally designed for more than one drive, but there’s no benefit to stashing away half a drive’s contents for protection if the entire drive fails.

The Drobo has all the visual appeal of an Apple product, but in black. It also comes with enough usability issues to give a first-generation iPod room to laugh. We just can’t forgive its unholy combination of interface annoyances and worthless speeds.