Drobo home storage robot ships
updated 05:00 pm EDT, Tue June 5, 2007
Drobo Ships
Data Robotics today announced that it has started shipping the Drobo, its unique intelligent data robot. In line with the company's original announcement, the device is the first to automatically create multi-drive backups without user intervention: sliding in a standard desktop hard drive automatically formats it and merges it into a single large partition; data can be shuffled just as automatically from one drive to another if a disk fails. Color-coded warnings near each drive bay will also warn when a drive runs low to give time for clearing files or upgrading one of the existing disks.
No setup is required on the user's computer, the company adds, and plugging the drive into a USB port on a Mac or Windows PC creates a simple external drive without the need for RAID management or a special utility to make changes to the drive layout. The Drobo should be available without presupplied drives from several online retails for $499, $200 less than was originally announced earlier this year.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2003
Dangerous name choice
Woah! Talk about lack of branding research!! "Dorobo" means "robber" in Japanese, and Japanese are incapable of pronouncing "Drobo" without inadvertently inserting that extra "o", so there is only one way it will be pronounced. That's the last thing they'll want in their home.
It reminds me of the drink, "Calpis," which Japanese were smart enough to rename as "Sunrise" when marketing it overseas so that we English speakers don't think of cow urine while drinking the fermented syrupy milk drink.