Thank you to Drobo for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. Drobo appears to your computer to be a single external hard drive, but it actually has multiple hard drives inside of it and your data is always stored on multiple drives. Thus, when one of the hard drives fail — and remember, all hard drives will fail at some point — your data is still safely stored on the remaining drives. Just eject the dead drive and replace it with another drive, and you are back in business. You can also swap out the hard drives to larger versions, making it easy to expand your storage. To read more about why I love using my own Drobo, check out what I wrote in December of 2015.
The Drobo that I purchased last year is the standard model, simply called the Drobo. It holds four drives and attaches directly to my computer using USB 3.0. Mine has four 1 TB drives, which only cost about $50 to $60 each. My computer sees that as a single drive with a capacity of 2.67 TB. (You don't get the full 4 TB because some space is being used to backup data on other drives.) But you can use larger drives if you want more space.
When I took these pictures, there were only four (of ten) blue lights lit up on the front of my Drobo. But just this past weekend, as I was saving some video files (home movies of my kids), a fifth light went on because I'm now using about half of my total capacity (1.23 TB used, 1.43 TB free).
Drobo has other models too, including the 5N which holds five drives and attaches to your network using Gigabit Ethernet.
Finally, Drobo has a special discount for iPhone J.D. readers. For a limited time, if you buy a Drobo 4-bay, Drobo 5D, or Drobo 5N on the online Drobo Store, and use coupon code Jeff100, you'll get $100 off. So it will only cost you $449 to get the same configuration that I have, or only $199 to get that same Drobo with no hard drives included — handy if you already have some hard drives to use, or if you want to buy the drives separately from another store like Amazon.
I love my Drobo because it gives me lots of space to safely store my files. If you are looking for external storage for your PC or Mac, check out Drobo and save some money with the coupon code.