Data Robotics has released the Drobo FS, a 5-bay NAS unit designed for home use and small businesses. The system is easy to manage and leverages BeyondRAID technology to let users easily add non-matching disks, create new volumes quickly and manage redundancy options.
Data Robotics has released the Drobo FS, a 5-bay NAS unit designed for home use and small businesses. The system is easy to manage and leverages BeyondRAID technology to let users easily add non-matching disks, create new volumes quickly and manage redundancy options.
The Drobo FS is one of the first entry-level NAS systems to include 5-bays, most products in this class only support 4-bays. This means that the maximum capacity of the Drobo FS is 10TB, compared to 8TB in four-bay NAS units.
Aside from the increased capacity, Data Robotics has made the use and management of the Drobo FS easy to work with. The usability highlight is BeyondRAID, which is a combination of hardware and software tools that users manage volumes and disks without the constraints of traditional RAID. This synthetic RAID can be configured for both single and dual-drive redundancy and can handle multiple makes and models of drives and multiple drive capacities. BeyondRAID also regularly checks data blocks and sectors on each drive to alert users at the first sign of an unhealthy drive.
Other usability features include a one-click toggle between single- and dual-drive redundancy, the ability to add more storage on the fly without losing access to data, file sharing with standard data transfer protocols including Apple File Protocol (AFP) and Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS) and access to a library of DroboApps to customize the Drobo FS even further.
Availability
The Drobo FS is available without drives for a suggested $699. Configurations with drives run up to $1449 with 5 2TB hard drives.
