If you've ever experienced a hard drive failure or crash, you'll know just how painful it is to lose all your favourite photos, music, and important documents. We all know the importance of backing up our files, but how safe is holding all your important documents on just one external hard drive? What if it fails? What happens if you run out of storage space on that one hard drive? Do you buy a new, larger capacity one and transfer all your files onto that one? What if both of them fail?

We were recently invited by AV Electronics to the official Brunei launch of Drobo, a device that will store and backup your files safely, without you having to worry about such hard drive failures and having to back your files up yourselves.


The Drobo is the world's first 'storage robot', a device aimed at enterprise customers and anyone with the need to safely store their large amounts of photos, movies and documents. It amazingly keeps your data super safe, yet lets you expand its storage capacity at any time.

This device, that can be hooked up to a Mac, PC or Linux computer via USB 2.0 or Firewire 800, holds up to four normal hard drives - all of which can be of different storage capacities.


Once connected, it shows up on your screen as a regular external hard drive which you'll be able to drag and drop your files into. Despite including a Drobo Dasboard software that you can install to give you a visual interpretation of how your storage is being used, using the Drobo is as simple as plugging and playing, so you won't need to install anything to get it to work.

To start off, you'll need to at least have two hard drives in the Drobo, but adding more drives into the unit is as easy as inserting them in the remaining slots. The Drobo will automatically relay all your data across all the drives, keeping you safe and protected. There's no need to turn the Drobo off, or do any configuration. All you'll have do is drag and drop your files into the Drobo, and you're done. You don't even have to worry about what data goes on what drive.


Understanding the Drobo is easy too. A green light tells you that everything is healthy and you have plenty of space in the drive, a yellow light means caution, while a red light means that it needs your attention (probably a drive failure). Each blue light across the bottom of the device represents 10% of the total capacity is used, easily showing you how much more space you have left on your Drobo.


If you've managed to fill up all the capacity on all your drives, you simply pop out the oldest drive and slide in a new, larger hard drive into its place. No configurations, no hard work.

What happens if a drive fails? The Drobo will automatically relay all your data into the working drives until you replace the faulty one with a new one. Absolutely amazing to say the least.

Also launched at the press event was DroboShare, a device that lets you share your Drobo with any computer that's on your network. Simply plug your Drobo into the DroboShare, connect the device to your network with the supplied ethernet cable and you're ready to share.


For more information on the Drobo, check out the highlight of the Drobo presentation/launch at AV Electronics on our Gadget,Ink Webcast below (this is the first of hopefully many more video gadget news and reviews on Gadget,Ink).

Gadget,Ink Webcast 001 - Drobo Launch in Brunei

The Drobo is exclusively available at AV Electronics for $949, while the DroboShare retails at $449. They have also launched special combo packages in conjunction with the launch - A Drobo + 2TB Hard Drives retails at $1,347, while a Drobo + 4TB Hard Drives retails at $1,745.

Product Website: Drobo
Brunei Distributor: AV Electronics
More Gadget,Ink Webcasts: SimpurTV