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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.
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.
* Linux support in Beta.
Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization
 Unlike rigid, inflexible traditional RAID solutions, Drobo can utilize the capacity of different size hard drives. Using an intelligent mixture of industry-standard practices to protect your data, Drobo can offer significantly more storage capacity than standard RAID solutions. Drobo works just how you would expect storage to work: add more drives or replace smaller drives with larger ones, and get more space. No matter what combination of drives you use, Drobo will almost always be more efficient than RAID 5. Find out exactly how much free capacity you'll have with your choice of disk capacities, try out our interactive Drobolator.
Proportional Rebuild Times
Upon disk failure or partial corruption, Drobo automatically enters a state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the remaining healthy disks and sectors. The time it takes Drobo to move that data is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool—meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 1TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional RAID, which does not have proportional rebuild times and is forced relay out every bit even if it does not contain user data. Since Drobo is Data Aware, it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure. In short, your data is safer on Drobo.
Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a "bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does next is exceptional. Drobo enters self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or bad disk, working until it returns to the safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand a second hard disk failure. That's the power of self-healing. Unlike other storage arrays, Drobo doesn't just sit around and beep at you when something is awry—it takes the set of actions available to it to fix the problem without human intervention.
Status Lights and Email Warnings
Don't say Drobo didn't warn you! Drobo is an over-communicator. If it has something to tell you, it will let you know on the device itself through its exclusive and patent-pending LEDs that indicate drive status and free capacity. If you can successfully navigate a traffic signal, you can understand Drobo. Drobo Dashboard can additionally offer you pop-up and visual alerts as well as email alerts if you're on the go.
Storage Pooling
Drobo can hold up to four hard drives, but its storage virtualization engine lets your computer see this capacity as a single drive. That's because it uses storage pooling technology to merge all available drives into a single, large pool of protected capacity. You can format Drobo into multiple partitions if you choose, but most users find having a single virtual drive that can scale up to 16TB to be the most flexible and efficient setup.
Storage Virtualization
Drobo and BeyondRAID are built on top of a storage virtualization layer that enables on-device intelligence, superior flexibility, and the easiest path toward future enhancements. How powerful is storage virtualization technology? Imagine creating a huge spreadsheet by hand with a pencil, paper, and ruler and filling it out with hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of data in the thousands of rows and columns. Imagine then being told to "insert a column of data in the middle"and to "resort the data accordingly." You'd have to start from scratch! It would take days or weeks! Now imagine how easy it would be to perform that same task with a modern spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. That's why it is so incredibly easy for Drobo to add an extra hard drive for example, whereas you'd have to start from scratch with traditional RAID. That's the power of storage virtualization.
Thin Provisioning
 Thin Provisioning is a technical term for a white lie that Drobo tells your operating system. It is a feature normally only found in storage solutions that go for tens of thousands of dollars, but Drobo utilizes it as well. By lying to your OS about how much disk space Drobo currently has, you can format your Drobo up to 16TB on Windows Vista and OS X Leopard (it will vary with older operating systems and file systems). This large format allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity. Drobo automatically also reclaims space as you delete files.
Zero Management
Zero Management means zero management. Drobo takes advantage of standards-based technology to ensure an absolutely plug and play experience. There are no complex configuration screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles, driver installations or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box. Drobo does the work for you.
Zero Upgrade Time
Running out of free capacity? Compare the upgrade experience:
Drobo
Upgrading capacity on Drobo takes only seconds and requires no software or hardware configuration whatsoever.
1) Simply slide an additional hard drive into Drobo or replace your smallest disk with a larger one.
2) Start using your new capacity immediately.
Them
Accomplishing this same feat on a traditional RAID array, would require you to:
1) Purchase a second RAID array and storage for data migration. Format and configure.
2) Migrate your data to the new array, potentially costing you days of time and hundreds or thousands of dollars
3) Purchase new drives of matched capacity in a full disk set for the original array
4) Format and configure the original array with the new disk set
5) Migrate your data back from the new array back on to the original array with the upgraded disk set, once again potentially costing days of time.
Watch a video of just how easy it is with Drobo.
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