Product Reviews

RAID arrays allow you to use multiple hard disks as if they were a single large disk, or to mirror the contents of one disk on another automatically, providing protection against hardware failure. RAID can be tricky and time-consuming to configure though.

The Drobo is an easy-to-use alternative to an external RAID enclosure, and it connects to your computer through a USB port. The Drobo can accommodate up to four SATA hard disks, which Windows will recognise as a single drive. When you add a disk to the Drobo, the total amount of available storage grows automatically and immediately without any manual

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configuration. Unlike a RAID setup, the disks don't have to be of the same size, and you can simply slide them into each drive bay without any need for trays or other mounts.

If the Drobo starts to run low on storage space, a red indicator light next to the smallest disk starts to blink, so you know which one to replace. If you want to replace it with a larger disk, or if a single disk fails, all your data is preserved and will be copied to the replacement disk once it's inserted. Around a third of the total combined capacity of your hard disks is reserved for this data-protection feature.

Unfortunately, the Drobo's performance in all our file transfer tests was disappointing. It was particularly slow at copying small files, as our results below show. Its performance is comparable to that of a RAID 5 enclosure but it's noticeably slower than a standard external USB hard disk.

The Drobo's disk management technology is impressively clever and is easier to configure than RAID. However, it's very expensive at £353 when you consider that it doesn't include any hard disks. We'd recommend that you opt for a standard USB hard disk with the capacity you need instead.