Thank you to Drobo for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month, especially because the company is offering a great discount right now for iPhone J.D. readers (more on that below). A Drobo device appears to your computer to be a single external hard drive, but it actually has multiple hard drives inside of it and each part of your data always exists on multiple drives. By default, data exists on two drives at one time, but you can set that to three if you want. 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 whenever you need more space.
The Drobo magic works because some of your total drive space is allocated to backups. For example, I have a Drobo 5N that contains five 2 TB drives, a total of 10 TB. I can use 7 TB of that space to store files; the other 3 TB is used for redundancy to protect my data in case one of the drives fails. Drobo handles all of this behind the scenes so you don't have to worry about it.
The company sells two types of devices that would appeal to iPhone J.D. readers. First, there is the type of Drobo device that connects directly to your computer, using USB or USB-C. I own an older version of one of those devices which I purchased a while back called the Drobo 4 Bay. The company now instead sells the Drobo 5C, Drobo 5D, and Drobo 5Dt, more powerful versions of what I use.
Second, there is the type of Drobo device which sits on your network and can be accessed by any computer on your home or office network, or even from the Internet using a Drobo app. A few months ago, I described the Drobo 5N, which has five drive bays and attaches to your network, and which also supports Drobo apps to support lots of different functions.
I currently use my Drobo 4 Bay to store large video files and other documents that don't need to keep on my computer's hard drive. I use my Drobo 5N that the company sent me for review purposes for backups and a few other purposes. Both of these devices work very well for me, and I can't imagine going back to traditional external storage on a hard drive that might fail.
A Drobo device is a great option for anyone looking to add external storage to a Mac or PC. Just decide whether it makes more sense for you to use a Drobo that directly connects to one computer or a network Drobo. And this is a great time to buy a Drobo device because the company is offering the best discount it has ever offered to iPhone J.D. readers: 20% off of a Drobo 5N, Drobo 5D, or Drobo 5DT when purchased at www.drobostore.com between now and December 31, 2016 using the discount code IJD20.