With the ridiculous amount of photos, music and videos being stored on the average persons computer, storage capacity is a constant challenge. Backing the data up should also be a challenge, but unfortunately most people don't give it more than a passing thought. Finding a solution that will provide you with enough storage and reasonable protection can be difficult, but it doesn't have to be. If the terms Raid Controller, Fault Tolerance, Data Redundancy make you want to sit this one out in the safety cupboard then we have the solution for you. The Drobo Storage Robot.

The Drobo Storage Robot offers a scalable high capacity, plug and play storage and backup solution that even you mother can use (that was not a yo mama joke). The Drobo automates everything for you so there is no setup, no configuration, and no need to worry about back up. The Drobo is actually a “Smart” 4 bay hard drive enclosure that allows you to choose the size of the drives you use. You can start by putting one 40 GB hard drive in the Drobo, and as that fills up it tells you that more space is needed. Now you can add a 100 GB Drive into the unit. They don't have to be the same size, in fact, they don't even have to be from the same manufacturer. Now for whatever reason you 40 GB drive fails. No worries, you didn't lose any data, Drobo has you covered, now just pull the bad drive out and put a new, say 1 TB drive in, it is that simple.

This is all possible because of Drobo's greatest asset, it's Autonomous Storage Management System. This means Drobo is always managing, reconfiguring and backing up your data in the background. Now you are rocking with a 1 TB drive and a 100 GB drive in your Drobo listening to your favorite Captain and Tennille album (which is securely stored on your Drobo), and you decide to stop messing around and take it to the next level, with four 1 TB drives. No need to even hit pause on your media player, simply pull the drive out and put the new ones in. There really is no way to screw this up, short of smashing the Drobo with a sledgehammer during the installation.

Because of this storage management you don't get to use all 4 TB of space. The Drobo apportions about 1.4 TB of this for backup and data management, but that is what redundant storage is all about, sacrificing some space for security. So at this time the maximum amount of space you get is 2.6 TB (thats 2,726,297.6 MB, or the equivalent of 3894 CD-Rs filled to the brim).

I only found a few drawbacks to the Drobo. First is that currently they only offer a USB 2.0 interface. That is not the end of the world, but I'd like to see firewire, or network compatibility. The only other complaint I had was the Drobo is a little noisy. This could probably be remedied had I chosen quieter hard drives.

Bottom line is the Drobo truly is the ultimate storage and backup solution for the technically challenged.