Ok, before we start, let me come clean about something. I absolutely adore the product I am about to tell you about and it is now number 1 on my list of things to buy when I earn some more beer tokens, and is a very simple DIY PC upgrade.

The product in question is named a Data Robot or Drobo for short. SO what does this little beast do? Simple, it is safe storage for dummies. For the last 10 years, every PC I have built for my own use has contained a pair of mirrored drives, using at first an IDE RAID controller, and later a SATA RAID. The problem is that mirrored drives (RAID 0) is not exactly 100% redundant, sure in theory it should be, but with the current RAID controllers built into most motherboards, there is a slight possibility that the mirror will become broken and you will lose data, this has happened to me twice in the past. Usually because I have had a drive failure in the mirror and not had the time to rebuild the entire array and kept using it. What I would have loved is a proper RAID 2 solution, which uses a minimum of three drives, one of which acts as a parity drive and enables on the fly error correction. But these have always been fairly expensive.

So now along comes the Drobo and it could well be my next PC upgrade, it is an intelligent external storage handler, and if it performs as the manufacturers claim, it will mean my data protection headaches will be gone forever. Although I think I will also purchase the DroboShare module which lets me convert it into a NAT (Network Attached Storage) device, so all of my PC’s in my home network will benefit.

The main advantages of Drobo are the fact that it’s a FOF (Fit and Forget) style of upgrade, it will accept up to 4 SATA II hard drives, of any size, and will intelligently work out the best way to protect your data 100%, whilst ensuring you have the most amount of free storage space available. Diagnostics are simple, just look at the LED, if it’s green then everything is fine, if it’s yellow, it’s starting to fill up you need to add another drive, if it’s red, then one of the drives have failed, your data is still safe but you need to add another drive ASAP. How simple is that?

At a retail price of around $500, this could be the first truly affordable, fully redundant mass storage medium I have ever been able to buy. Plus it looks darn sexy too in that sleek black case, and will probably make an excellent foot rest!