Meet Drobo: A Data-Saving Robot

The Data Robot In Action

Mixed Mode: No Trouble With Different-Sized Hard Drives

Using Drobo is easy. You can get started with only one hard drive inserted. This configuration does not provide any kind of data security, though. For a redundant data configuration, you will at least need two hard drives. But Drobo does not require hard drives of the same size. ABM (asynchronous balanced mode), with an 80 GB and a 160 GB hard drive, is just as feasible as it is to use three 250 GB hard drives.

It doesn't matter if you use hard drives of different sizes.

Utilizing hard drives of different sizes will also result in different usage capacities. With the Drobo Dashboard, you can find out how your hard drive capacity is exactly allocated.

Drobo's Dashboard provides information about the current utilization of available hard drive capacity...

...and indicates which slot carries which hard drive as well as any given redundancy.