Stuff Geeks Want

Drobo has been getting a lot of press in the last year, but only recently has it deserved any.

That’s because the company that makes the stupidly simple and stupidly overpriced 4-bay storage solution finally came out with a FireWire 800 equipped model, instead of just that poky USB 2.0 connection.

Two things separate Drobo from the regular drive enclosures:

• 1) You can expand it on the fly by adding drives. Drobo intelligently moves data around to add the additional drive to the array.
• 2) If one drive dies, replace it and your data will be restored.

In essence, Drobo is a self-contained external RAID5, which is nice since most computers don’t come with RAID5 hardware or software (Mac OS X doesn’t have any support).

This convenience doesn’t come cheap: at about $500 retail a real geek could build their own 10-bay RAID5 tower running Linux.

But simplicity rocks, and so do street prices: after $50 rebate Amazon has the Drobo for just $374.95.

Buy now for $374.95 after rebate via Amazon (rebate expires 2/28/09)