The original Drobo direct-attached-storage (DAS) device hit the scene in summer of 2007 and took the tech world by storm. It represented a new paradigm in how you could implement external, redundant back-up storage with much of the same goodness that RAID offers, but without a number of the headaches and the complexity that also comes with traditional RAID solutions. The Drobo still used RAID to redundantly store data across multiple hard drives, but did so using Data Robotics' own version of it, which it calls BeyondRAID. The primary advantages that Data Robotics' BeyondRAID has over traditional RAID is that with BeyondRAID you can add and remove hard drives that have different capacities and speeds and from different manufacturers; and you do this while the device is operating--without any downtime--and without needing to do any manual data migration.

One of Data Robotics' newer devices is the Drobo S, which is a five-bay DAS device, with eSATA, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0 ports. Journey on for our full, detailed coverage and performance analysis...