Drobo S

Meet the new primary and backup storage solution that’s perfect for creative professionals and small businesses with “set it and forget it” storage needs. The safe, expandable Drobo® S offers blazingly fast eSATA, and the best data storage experience ever. In addition to eSATA, Drobo S features enhanced FireWire 800 performance and USB 2.0 connectivity. It is a self-managing, self-healing solution ideal for safely storing large files and rapidly growing data. Built on award-winning BeyondRAID™ technology with single or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo S protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. It can hold up to five hot-swappable drives, for on-the-fly drive capacity expansion with zero downtime.

Up to 5 Drives of Instant Expansion to 10TB and Beyond

Grow your storage to meet with your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all five drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found in Drobo S enables you to mix and match capacities, drive brands, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as drive capacities grow and larger drives become available. With Drobo S, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.

Protection from Two Drive Failures

Enable the dual-drive redundancy option to protect your data from failure of up to TWO hard drives. It’s all done with a single click, and without ever losing access to your data. Running out of space? Switch back to single-drive redundancy. Unlike moving between traditional RAID 5 and RAID 6, there’s no need to reformat or migrate data off of Drobo, potentially saving you hours or days.

Self-Healing Technology

With the self-healing technology now incorporated into Drobo S, your data is safer than ever. Even when sitting idle, the Drobo will continually examine the blocks and sectors on every disk, flagging questionable areas. This preemptive “scrubbing” helps ensure your data is being written only to the healthy areas of your drives, and that your data is always safe. And if a drive fails, Drobo S will strive to keep your data in the safest state possible, utilizing the available space on the remaining healthy drives.

Windows, Mac, or Linux*

Drobo S connects to Windows, Mac and Linux* systems and supports NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3, and FAT32 file formats. Regardless of operating system, everyone can take advantage of simple, powerful, complete Drobo data protection.

* Linux support currently in Beta.

Technical Specifications

Host Interface: eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 compatible), and USB 2.0
Drives: Accommodates from one to five 3.5” SATA I / SATA II hard drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache. No carriers or tools required.
Power: Idle system (standby, drives off) = 12 watts Typical busy system (four drives) = 56 watts
Box Contents: Drobo S External power supply (100v-240v) with U.S. 110v power cord eSATA cable FireWire 800 cable USB 2.0 cable User Guide and Quick Start Card (printed) Drobo Resource CD with Drobo Dashboard application, help files, and electronic documentation
Accoustics Normal operation: 31.8 dB¹ Acoustics tests performed 1m from the front of Drobo S with five 1TB Western Digital HDDs. Drobo S has a smart, five-speed fan governed by multiple internal temperature sensors that will normally be off or operate on its lowest setting. The fan is programmed to minimize noise, but never at the expense of disk integrity. The fan can switch to higher speeds if necessary in in hot operating environments or during strenuous usage to protect drives from overheating up to 38.1dB.
Width Height Length Inches 5.9 7.3 10.3 mm 150.3 185.4 262.3	File System Options Windows: NTFS Mac OS X: HFS+ Cross-Platform: FAT32 Linux²: EXT3 Operating System Support Windows 2008 Server Windows 2003 Server Windows 2000 Server Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 7 Mac OS 10.4 or later Linux² using EXT3 ² Linux support currently in Beta
Weight: 8lbs (without hard drives or packaging)

BeyondRAID™ Technology

Every Drobo product comes with the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology — the next generation of redundant disk protection. BeyondRAID not only keeps your data safe, but will also increase uptime and availability. BeyondRAID technology offers several improvements over traditional RAID-based storage systems, including the flexibility to replace failed disks and increase capacity all without costly downtime.

Key features of BeyondRAID include:

• Data protection against hard disk failure
• Instant capacity expansion without downtime
• Self-management
• Automatic healing

Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization

Grow storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all four disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.