The Drobo Data Backup Robot & DroboShare

You wouldn’t know it by watching the news coverage, but Time Capsule was not the only new and cool storage backup hardware to make its debut this week at Macworld. DroboShare, an accessory that significantly enhances the capabilities of the Drobo “storage robot”, also made its first official appearance Tuesday at Macworld 2008.

A little history is in order. About eight months ago, Data Robotics introduced Drobo, a unique hardware based storage product designed to provide an alternative to the often complicated NAS (Network Allocated Storage) backup process. Drobo is an external hard drive enclosure which also contains programming code telling it how to operate as a backup device, a feature that sets it apart from typical enclosures, which are nothing more than boxes with electrical and drive connectors.

Drobo connects to a computer via USB 2.0, and can hold up to 4 hard drives. Drobo can be operated with one drive for simple external storage needs, but once you add a second drive, it automatically becomes a backup utility, by backing up the content on the original drive. One really nice feature is that you can swap hard drives out at will, when a drive is full, you can simply eject it, store it in a safe place, and insert another drive. You can also insert drives of different sizes, and insert as large a drive as you can find.

The DroboShare accessory improves Drobo by increasing its connection speed from the USB 2.0 maximum of 480 Megabits per second to the Gigabit Ethernet maximum of 1000 Megabits (1 Gigabit) per second. It also enables FAT32 support for Drobo, so that Drobo now supports all major file systems, including NTFS (Windows), HFS+ (Apple OS X), and EXT3 (Linux). The DroboShare accessory also auto mounts Drobo on OS X and Windows computers, and allows sharing with OS X, Windows, and Linux computers over your network.

Drobo is priced at $499 and DroboShare at $199. Given the unexpected competition from Time Capsule, a similar but definitely not identical product, I’m hoping that Data Robotics will consider offering the entire package for $499, and bundling backup software, so that Drobo and DroboShare can function was a backup drive (not just an external hard drive) even when only one hard drive is installed.

Despite Time Capsule’s sudden appearance on the scene in the Macworld keynote, if you feel your needs just might grow beyond the 500 MB or 1 GB limitations of Time Capsule, or if you need the flexibility to swap out hard drives, you owe it to yourself to look into Drobo and DroboShare further. You can find out more at www.drobo.com (homepage) and www.drobospace.com (community site).