Drobo was a manufacturer of a series of external storage devices for computers, including DAS, SAN, and

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air (S ...

appliances. Their main product was also known as Drobo. Between 2005 and 2011, the company was known as Data Robotics.

History

Data Robotics was founded in San Jose, California, in 2005. The company changed its name to Drobo in 2011 since the familiarity with the Drobo name (which had only been the name of their product line until then) far exceeded the Data Robotics name. Drobo, Inc. merged with Connected Data, Inc. in June 2013, with the new company taking the Connected Data name. In May 2015, the storage appliance business was spun-off as Drobo, Inc. and acquired by an investment group composed of seasoned tech executives Drobo was later acquired by StorCentric in August, 2018. All Drobo products had been out of stock or severely inventory constrained in both the Drobo Store and retail channels since the beginning of 2020. Drobo initially blamed this on

supply chain A supply chain is a complex logistics system that consists of facilities that convert raw materials into finished products and distribute them to end consumers or end customers, while supply chain management deals with the flow of goods in distri ...

issues caused by the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. In November, 2021, Drobo stated that more devices would be available in "the next few months". In June 2022, StorCentric filed for

Chapter 11 bankruptcy Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...

. After failing to find a buyer or reorganize the company, it shifted to

Chapter 7 bankruptcy Chapter 7 of Title 11 U.S. Code is the bankruptcy code that governs the process of liquidation under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. This is in contrast to bankruptcy under Chapter 11 and Chapter 13, which govern the process of ''re ...

in April 2023. From the Drobo website: ''As of January 27th, 2023, Drobo support and products are no longer available. Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model. The knowledge base, documentation repository, and legacy documentation library are still accessible for your support needs. We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data.'' As of February 8, 2024, the Drobo website at www.drobo.com is no longer accessible.

Products

Overview

Drobo devices can house up to four, five, eight, or twelve 3.5" or 2.5"

Serial ATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host adapter, host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PAT ...

Serial Attached SCSI In computing, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a point-to-point serial Communications protocol, protocol that moves data to and from Computer storage, computer-storage devices such as hard disk drives, solid-state drives and tape drives. SAS replac ...

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s and connect with a computer or network via

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical i ...

USB 3.0 Universal Serial Bus 3.0 (USB 3.0), marketed as SuperSpeed USB, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. It was released in November 2008. The USB 3.0 specification ...

, FireWire 800,

eSATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard ...

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

Thunderbolt A thunderbolt or lightning bolt is a symbolic representation of lightning when accompanied by a loud thunderclap. In Indo-European mythology, the thunderbolt was identified with the 'Sky Father'; this association is also found in later Hel ...

. Drobo devices are primarily designed to allow installation and removal of hard disk drives without requiring manual

data migration Data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer storage system to another. Additionally, the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommi ...

, for increasing storage capacity of the unit without

downtime In computing and telecommunications, downtime (also (system) outage or (system) drought colloquially) is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is ...

, and for data protection against drive failure.

Consumer models

:* Plus one mSATA SSD slot for Data-Aware Tiering :**Plus one 128 GB mSATA SSD card for Data-Aware Tiering :***Plus one 2.5" SATA SSD bay for Data-Aware Tiering

Business models

References

{{authority control Computer storage devices Linux-based devices Computer storage companies Server appliance Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022 Companies that have filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy Companies that filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2023 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies