A new Drobo model was introduced today, the Drobo Pro. This new model holds up to eight drives for a maximum of 16 Terabytes of storage. The Drobo Pro is capable of RAID levels 0, 5 and 6.
For those of you unfamiliar with RAID, level 0 provides no redundancy which means no protection in the event one of the drives were to fail. If you lose one drive, you lose everything. RAID 0 is commonly used for capturing and editing video.
RAID level 5 will reserve one of the drives for data redundancy. If one drive fails, the user can replace the failed drive and the device will automatically rebuild itself back to RAID 5 protection.
RAID level 6 provides dual redundancy. A device can lose up to two drives without losing any data.
Another feature added to the Drobo Pro is iSCSI, a network ready Gigabit Ethernet interface that compliments the already available USB2 and Firewire 800 interfaces.
The Drobo Pro is also rack mountable for use in Data room racks.
Erik