Looking for a mobile storage solution for your most important data? The Drobo Mini is a fully-featured storage array that’s not much bigger than your hand!
In case you aren’t familiar with how storage arrays work, they essentially take the storage of multiple hard drives, combine it into a single pool, and set some aside for redundancy. So, in the case of the Drobo Mini, should one (or even two) of your drives die, you won’t lose any of your precious data.
Despite it’s compact design, the Mini has all the power of bigger arrays. This has been largely achieved by designing it to use 2.5-inch, rather than 3.5-inch drives. It has a total of four drive bays for storage, plus a fifth bay for an industry-standard mSATA SSD, which can be used to accelerate the performance of the array.
Currently, you can add up to 3TB of storage, which is based on a configuration of four 1TB drives and single drive redundancy. The four drive bays are hot swappable – so you can literally slot in and remove drives, and it doesn’t matter if the drives are all different capacities. If speed is your main concern, you can add SSD drives to each bay.
In terms of connection options, the Drobo Mini has a single USB 3.0 port which is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, plus two Thunderbolt ports. You can dasiychain the Mini with up to six other Thunderbolt-enabled devices, including a display right at the end of the chain.
Designed to be durable, the enclosure of the Drobo Mini is made from carbon-fibre which has been coated with a soft touch material. LED lights located around the front edge of the device provide instant information about the status of your drives, while the company’s Dashboard OS X app provides more detailed stats and controls.
At the time of writing this post, the Drobo mini is priced at £550 from amazon.co.uk.
For more information about the Drobo Mini, check out the following links: