Drobo is a manufacturer of a series of external storage devices for computers, including DAS, SAN, and NAS appliances. Drobo devices can house up to four, five, eight, or twelve 3.5" or 2.5" Serial ATA or Serial Attached SCSI

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...

s and connect with a computer or network via

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

USB 3.0 USB 3.0, released in November 2008, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds the new transfer rate referred to as '' ...

, FireWire 800,

eSATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use ...

Thunderbolt A thunderbolt or lightning bolt is a symbolic representation of lightning when accompanied by a loud thunderclap. In Indo-European mythology, the thunderbolt was identified with the 'Sky Father'; this association is also found in later Hel ...

. Drobo devices are primarily designed to allow installation and removal of hard disk drives without requiring manual

data migration Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommis ...

, for increasing storage capacity of the unit without

downtime The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an u ...

, and for data protection against drive failure. The company Drobo, Inc. changed its name from Data Robotics in 2011 since the familiarity with the Drobo name (which had only been the name of their product line until then) far exceeded the Data Robotics name. Drobo, Inc. merged with Connected Data, Inc. in June 2013, with the new company taking the Connected Data name. In May 2015, the storage appliance business was spun-off as Drobo, Inc. and acquired by an investment group composed of seasoned tech executives Drobo was later acquired by StorCentric in August, 2018. All Drobo products have been out of stock or severely inventory constrained in both the Drobo Store and retail channels since the beginning of 2020. Drobo initially blamed this on supply chain issues caused by the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

. In November, 2021, Drobo stated that more devices would be available in "the next few months"., however, as of the end of March, 2022, product is still not available. As of 20th June 2022, StorCentric filed for bankruptcy.

Products

Overview

Consumer models

:* Plus one mSATA SSD slot for Data-Aware Tiering :**Plus one 128 GB mSATA SSD card for Data-Aware Tiering :***Plus one 2.5" SATA SSD bay for Data-Aware Tiering

Business models

References

External links

* {{authority control Computer storage devices Linux-based devices Computer storage companies Server appliance Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022