Published on 04/ 9/2007
Data Robotics has touted its new Drobo to be the first storage robot in the world, although in real life it is actually a hard drive enclosure that can detect and format up to a quartet of 3.5" SATA drives of any capacity automatically. While it might not move around and cook up a dish or serve wine for you, it handles a wide range of maintenance tasks such as creating redundancy, sensing and repairing data corruption automatically. Compatible with both Mac and PC platforms, the Drobo is hooked up via USB 2.0. Four colored LEDs indicate the status of each bay, where yellow means that particular drive is running low on storage space while flashing red indicates failure. Each empty Drobo enclosure retails for $699.