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 it can continue to operate even if a hard drive fails. 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.
I got to experience the value of my Drobo just a few weeks ago. I noticed that a hard drive inside of my Drobo was making a strange noise. So I removed the front of the Drobo — it is just attached by magnets to make it easy to remove — and touched each of the hard drives. Sure enough, I could tell by feeling it that one of my hard drives was shaking a little.
So I did something that made me nervous, even though I know that the Drobo is made for it. I ejected the troublesome hard drive and yanked it out, without even turning off the Drobo. The Drobo immediately sensed that I had done so, and busily started working with the other drives to make sure that all of my data was still protected. The Drobo didn't miss a beat and didn't lose a file, even though it was suddenly missing 1/4 of its storage space.
If that drive had died, I could have just replaced it with a new one. In this case, though, all I needed to do was put it back into place and snap it in more snugly. It stopped making the noise, and the Drobo immediately started copying back the necessary data to that fourth drive.
Yanking out a hard drive from a connected device made me feel like I was performing brain surgery, but from my Drobo's perspective the whole thing was rather uneventful. The Drobo is made to keep on working even if a hard drive fails. And even though in this case the hard drive did not fail but instead just got a little loose, I was glad to go through this fire drill so that I could see how the process works whenever I do have a hard drive fail. And remember, all hard drives will fail at some point ... the only question is, when will it happen.
My Drobo holds tons of large files that I don't want taking up space on the internal drive of my iMac — such as home movies of my kids filmed in 4K video. The Drobo gives me the security of knowing that these irreplaceable files are protected from a hard drive failure.
The model of the Drobo that I use, the Drobo 4 Bay, costs $299 if you get it with no hard drives included, handy if you already have some SATA drives that you want to use. I bought it with four 1 TB drives included, and that model costs $549. There are other sizes available if that one doesn't seem right for your needs. And 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.
Thanks again to Drobo for sponsoring iPhone J.D.