Being a bona-fide gadget freak, I got really excited about this little device. This is a little USB storage enclosure from Data Robotics. You might say, meh a USB enclosure what so special about it. Well, glad you asked that question. It allows for 4 hot-swappable SATA or SATA II hard drives, which don’t have to be the same size, or manufacturer. It appears on your desktop as 1 drive, that you can expand on the fly. Let say you are running out of space, just swap one of the smaller drives for a larger one, all while your watching a movie, or copying files to the device. According to the manufacturer it works with Windows or Mac OS X. There is no RAID to worry about or configure, because it’s not using RAID of any level. This is a perfect solution for all your media files, movies, pictures, iTunes. Imagine connecting this to Apple Airport Extreme. Instant storage device for everything you need. The possibilities boggle my mind! It’s a bit pricey, at $699.00 US plus hard drives, but after watching this video, I am completely sold. Now to get them to ship to Canada….
This looks really amazing, I’m going to try and get my hands on one to review.
I can only wish, but good luck. 🙂
You and me both Glenn 🙂
It is pretty cool. It’s a bit like a combination of RAIDS. I dragged 2 100 Gig HDs and 1 500 Gig into the Drobolator and it let me know that I would have 184 Gig of available data space. Now that’s a drag. To know you have 700 available but not even 200 to use. Plus, it’s the price of a top Mac mini! Without disks! Ouch!
I played with the Drobolator, and noticed that essentially it is sort of like and advanced RAID system. So basically the best solution is to keep the same size hard drives in there. Still cool item, but after the Drobolator experience, not so cool. 🙁