Data storage device maker Drobo and Pogoplug detailed partnership on Monday that will let users access content on Drobo hardware through Pogoplug Cloud. Dubbed Personal Cloud, the new service gives users up to 10GB of free online storage. It's meant to give small business users and professionals to access files that are too large to e-mail from anywhere they are.
Data Robotics has announced that it has officially changed the company name to Drobo. The move follows several years of product releases under the Drobo brand, which has been used for a wide range of data storage products for consumers and enterprise customers. Although the company had maintained the original name since its inception in 2004, references to Data Robotics late last year were dropped from marketing and press materials.
Drobo on Tuesday brought out its first range of Drobo business drives aimed both at companies and at home users with very high demands. The eight-bay B800fs and B800i, as well as the 12-bay B1200i, are speed-optimized beyond their regular counterparts and have new management tools along with extra after-the-sale support and services. All have been greenlit to work with Citrix, Exchange, SharePoint, Symantec backup, and VMware.
Data Robotics today upgraded the Drobo S to add USB 3.0 support. The 5Gbps connection gives it a speed advantage over even FireWire 800 and is theoretically as much as 10 times faster than USB 2.0. The company's multi-drive storage still works over both of the earlier formats and can handle as much as 32TB of storage across its five bays, although modern drives limit it to 15TB.
Data Robotics has launched its DroboPro FS, a networkable file sharing and backup storage unit with up to 16TB capacity. The DroboPro FS is designed to give the small-to-medium business market redundant storage, networked backup, and file sharing over dual gigabit Ethernet ports and with VPN support. Unlike the Drobo FS, introduced earlier this year, the DroboPro FS offers native support for Time Machine, and supports Windows (XP/Vista/7/2003 Server/2008 Server), Mac (Intel processors and Leopard or later), and Unix/Linux. Storage can be expanded by adding SATA I and SATA II hard drives to fill up to eight bays.
Data Robotics on Tuesday stepped into true network-attached storage with a new Drobo. The Drobo FS uses the same five-bay arrangement as the Drobo S but adds a gigabit Ethernet connection to put its data on a local network. Besides raw storage, it acts as a server for DLNA, iTunes and UPnP media and adds native AFP and SMB (Samba) support.
Data Robotics started the week off with two major upgrades to its Drobo external drives. The Drobo S adds a fifth bay that gives it even more room (up to 10TB) and dual-drive redundancy that lets owners lose two drives at once without facing actual data loss. It further brings the first use of eSATA to give primarily Windows-based PCs a fast alternative to the normally more Mac-friendly FireWire 800 and universal but slower USB 2.0 ports.
Data Robotics this morning chased after more than just individual users with the DroboPro. The external array now has 8 SATA bays and can carry as much as 16TB of storage using current hard drive technology. It also expands Drobo's well-known automatic data redundancy by supporting the failure of as many as two disks at once and dynamically shuffling information as disks are added, removed or partitioned into new volumes.
In time for Thanksgiving, Data Robotics today started offering a $50 holiday discount in the form of an instant $50 coupon for the driveless model of its of its Drobo storage robot as well as the preloaded 2TB and 4TB versions. This comes in addition to recent, permanent price cuts to the 2TB and 4TB Drobo. As before, all offer a hot-swappable drive functionality that lets users keep a perpetually upgradable redundant backup by adding or replacing SATA drives of any capacity that automatically merge their storage existing content.
Data Robotics today gave its Drobo storage robot an often-requested update with an upgraded model that adds dual FireWire 800 ports to the existing model. The extra bandwidth allows a Drobo with more than one drive to potentially transfer data far faster than the existing USB 2.0 connection (up to 50MB read, 35MB write) while providing a free port to daisy-chain other devices.
Data Robotics is looking to expand the usefulness of its high-profile Drobo storage unit with today's news of the DroboShare. The underside companion connects to the Drobo through USB and automatically turns the robotic drive into network-attached storage (NAS) with a gigabit Ethernet connection. In contrast to some network drives, the combined storage from the RAID disk array is accessible to any computer on the local network and is the first to be viewable using most major file systems: FAT32, HFS+, NTFS, and Linux's EXT3 can be seen on the network as long as software exists to recognize them, the company explains. On Mac OS X and Windows systems, the drive will auto-mount to the network.
