I posted this a couple of days ago to the Latest News section of the Digital Production BuZZ, but this is a big enough deal that I wanted to mention it here.
When Data Robotics first announced Drobo, it was intriguing because for the first time we had a RAID with expandable storage. All other RAIDs can’t be expanded without reformatting and losing your data. But the first version of Drobo, though cute, was way too slow for any serious video work.
With the second release, Drobo stepped up to FireWire. While this version was still slow, it was usable for a variety of tapeless formats where data safety was more important than hard disk speed. This was the version I wrote a review about — which you can read here.
The styling and expandable storage were very nice, but it was still too slow for video editing. Until this week, when DroboPro was announced.
As the Drobo press release states:
DroboPro delivers a radically simplified storage experience enhanced by advanced self-monitoring and self-healing functionality that enables small and medium businesses (SMBs) to maintain uptime in the face of constant data growth — including protection against multiple concurrent drive failures and no-downtime capacity expansion.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Data Robotics crew during the development of this project. I kept stressing the need for more speed and with the DroboPro, they are now claiming data transfer speeds, using iSCSI, that can reach upward of 70 MB/second. This is more than enough to support most popular video formats.
Drobo has several key benefits:
I have not yet had the opportunity to test one of these new units. So everything I know comes from my conversations with the people at Drobo. However, they will be showing the new version at NAB, and shipping shortly thereafter. If reasonable speed, data safety, low noise, and great looks are important to you, take a look at DroboPro.
