BeyondRAID™ Technology
Going beyond traditional RAID means leaving behind choices between striping and mirroring, limitations on expandability, drive sizing, and drive ordering, among others. BeyondRAID is the next generation of redundant storage technology that brings together safety, reliability, expandability, efficiency, and of course, ease-of-use. It is RAID in the sense that the technology utilizes a redundant array of independent disks but not in the usual meaning of the acronym.
Battery-Backed NVRAM
What happens when the lights go out? Most storage arrays simply drop what they are doing, leaving your data at risk for corruption. Drobo has battery-backed NVRAM, a feature typically found only on devices many times its price, to help reduce the risks of file system, metadata, and general data corruption.
Carrier-less, Screw-less Drive Installation
Screws are for nuts. Drobo does not require tools, screws, or proprietary drive carriers to install or remove a hard drive. It's all done with the touch of a button. Why don't other storage device makers do the same thing? Good question. It's probably because Data Robotics has patented the idea, but feel free to call other vendors and ask them why you can't recover your data when you've lost your 3/16th inch Phillips-head screwdriver. Watch the videos of how easy it is to insert a hard drive into Drobo.
Drive Reordering
When you remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you like. Having to remember the particular order of drives seems odd doesn't it? Hence, Data Robotics discarded that limitation so that the system behaves exactly as you would expect.
File System and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo and its underlying technologies currently support the Windows, Mac, and Linux* platforms with file system support for NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3, and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it adapts easily. One major benefit of this is that Drobo and DroboShare can operate as network attached storage while formatted in your native file system.
