As impressed as I am with the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s Time Machine, added to Drobo, Time Machine becomes the ultimate set it and forget back up effort.

Drobo is billed as the world’s first storage robot, a futuristic looking black box that can be filled with up to four hard drives. Use one, two, three or four hard drives. It doesn’t even matter if they’re the same size.

Drobo pulls all the hard drives together and makes a single pool of storage. That sounds like the complicated and delicate RAID, right (redundant array of independent disks; all the rage among the techno geeks in my IT office).

It’s not RAID. It’s Data Robotics’ black box technology which makes your Mac think of Drobo as a single, huge, honkin’ storage device-- the ultimate humongous hard drive.

Drobo connects to Macs and Windows PCs with a USB cable. There’s not much else to do. No RAID to worry about.

No management. No configuration. It’s just another big hard drive connected to your Mac. With four 1 terabyte hard drives stuck inside it really is a BIG hard drive.

The problem with some external hard drive back up systems, including Apple’s own Time Capsule, is that sooner or later the hard drive will fail. Drobo doesn’t care. You can add or remove hard drives while Drobo is running; that’s called a hot swap.

No downtime, no file swapping, no data migration strategy. Start with a single hard drive, add another later. Drobo recognizes the drive and increases storage capacity accordingly. The drives don’t have to be the same size, the same speed, or from the same manufacturer.

Open the Drobo door and slide in a new drive or remove an old one. Is that not the ultimate home back up system? Yes, Virginia, Drobo works with Time Machine. Or, SuperDuper!, or whatever you like. Drobo is just another big hard drive to your Mac.

The black box is roughly a six inch cube and holds up to four hard drives. From what I can see, Drobo works as nothing more than a big, slow hard drive connected to your Mac via a USB cable.

Slow? Yes, though it isn’t too noticeable if you’re using Time Machine. After all, Drobo is a back up system; it’s for system storage, perfect for home use, small office use, not corporate file servers.

The specs say maximum sustained transfer rates are a mere 20MBs per second; not speedy. Hard drives need to be SATA I or II, the kind that come with Macs these days. Four drives use barely 40 watts of power under use.

Mac users are becoming more serious about file back ups because our files are many and valuable. From digital photos to music we pay for online to television shows and movies and more, a hard drive that dies can spell disaster.

Apple recognized this and provided a very attractive package in Time Machine and Time Capsule, for wireless back ups.

But Time Capsule is a single hard drive, prone to failure, too. Drobo is merely the next step up, adding multiple hard drives to the mix.

I’m impressed. Drobo is slicker than slick (but slow). For those with a need to have files shared by others, there’s also DroboShare which lets Mac users share files over a local network; home or small business.

DroboShare sits under Drobo as yet another slender black box and connects to your local area network via Gigabit ethernet. Compared to a single Apple Time Capsule, Drobo is more expensive, though much more expandable (though still a single point of failure).

The ultimate home and small office back up system isn’t here yet, but we’re seeing regular improvements. Time Machine. Time Capsule. Drobo. What’s next?

How do you back up your Mac’s files? Share your experience or disasters in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

• Article by Jeffrey Mincey • Published on Friday, May 2, 2008
• Category: Tips & Tricks • 14 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

the_killer says:

I don’t know anything about RAID or networking hard drives or SATA this or that, but I know that DROBO has worked rock solid for our small office for six months. Adding a hard drive was drop dead simple. Didn’t even have to shut off DROBO. Just opened the door, added a couple of new hard drives, and it was done. DROBO did the rest. All these so-called solutions that require RAID set up are more complicated to set up and manage, often requiring someone with IT knowledge (and hourly rates), and they ALL fail at one point or another. We just wanted to back up files and DROBO sure does that.

— Posted on Sun May 04 at 12:19 am by the_killer

Gecko says:

Drobo has great PR but the slow speed and unreliable recovery system makes it a clear loser against any SATA single or multiple drive hot swap backup system.

With a SATA system backup is 20x faster and the price is usually less. Drobo sounds great to the uninformed but anyone with large files will scream once the experience how slow the transfer rates are

— Posted on Sun May 04 at 12:12 am by Gecko

Mark Gipson says:

I have a drobo and it will soon become a backup to time machine and that is all. I had stored photographs on the machine and it recently began telling me thru the drobo dashboard app that I was low on space which was curious given there were 4 1tb hd inside so I waited while it began rebuilding the drives to save the info but it did not tell me a drive was bad. The next day it began flashing green and orange and said a drive was bad then it sat there: no movement or whirring of drives . It said red condition which means “it can’t protect you from another hard drive failure. I contacted support who got back to me on my cell and said just replace the bad drive. The problem is it is supposed to flash red for the drive that is bad but it did not so. With great trepidation I turned off drobo which must be done very carefully thru the drobo dashboard app and lo and behold the third drive down had a flashing red light. So, I ran to the store and got another 1tb drive slid it in the slot and it began rebuilding. By the way I had to reseat all the drives to get DROBO to start rebuilding because when I first turned it on it started to mount then flashed the red I can’t start lights. So , I dismounted every drive but reseated them in the same slot and it worked ...my chest pain is better now… The bottom drive in the drobo woud not eject , who knows, so when I get the data transferred I will send it back for repair.The issue during the rebuild is that your info IS available but it” cannot protect you from a single hard drive failure meaning if another drive fails during the rebuild your are hosed. If you transfer data from the rebuilding drobo the reallocation process which the drobe app keeps you up to date on takes 130 HOURS...which I thought was a mistake but it did take as long as 80 hours for the drobo to rebuild that 2 terabytes of data all the while you get to stare at a red warning: YOUR’E DATA IS NOT SAFE.... It did work and my data is ok but this is the second drive failure since Nov and I’ve checked both drives with software and they work fine.
By the way, I HAD a drobo share which never mounted a drobo on my desktop-Leopard despite restarts , forum postings etc.
My newest backup scheme is a Rocketraid card-230mbps transfers using a PM box of 8 drives in RAID 6 which will tolerate 2 drive failures and still save your data and so much faster, this combined with bucket explorer and amazon s3 which recently lowered it’s storage prices. check AMUG’s reviews of these raid setups and pm boxes. I’m not a super geek but it really is simple to configure.... DROBO= good concept but dangerous and scary.

— Posted on Sat May 03 at 6:44 am by Mark Gipson

Walter Hogan says:

ReadyNAS is no end-all-be-all, either. It’s nice as inexpensive NAS boxes go. Try a hot swap hard drive upgrade. NO can do. Configuration? It’s a bear to set up and manage, certainly not for the typical Mac user who wants a plug-in-and-play backup system. Drobo seems fine for that.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 1:32 pm by Walter Hogan

bay city roller says:

Our company used those crappy ReadyNAS boxes for a year before finally ditching them. Half the time they didn’t work, the other half they were being swapped out. NOT a best buy, by any means. We put in a single DROBO late last year and it’s worked flawlessly since. Let’s see.. hmmm. ReadyNAS was never ready, Drobo has always worked. Hmmmm. Which to choose.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 1:28 pm by bay city roller

Odysseus says:

I agree with Dan: Drobo is slow and overpriced. I’d add that despite the redundancy, it’s unreliable. I’ve read many reports of people who have lost all of their backups after a firmware upgrade.

The reliable NAS to get these days is the Netgear (formerly Infrant) ReadyNAS Duo.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 1:18 pm by Odysseus

ben harris says:

Drobo is as noisy as four hard drives stacked one on top the other. It will depend on your drives.

The beauty is that USB cable which can be up to about 5 meters in length which means the Drobo can be tucked out of the way. Add the DroboShare for gigabit ethernet access and you can hide Drobo in a closet somewhere.

Pricey for most home users, but pretty good for the small business Mac user.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 11:29 am by ben harris

Andy's Buddy says:

Do you folks remember Andy Ihnatko, long-time Mac user, Mac lover, Sun-Times writer, author of Mac books, and general Mac critic?

Ihnatko loves Drobo. If it’s good enough for a Mac critic, it’s good enough for me.

Otherwise, show me something better than Drobo.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 11:25 am by Andy's Buddy

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