Drobo announced the launch of its Drobo Mini with Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, which are available in three capacity bundles of 1 terabyte (TB), 2TB and 4TB starting at a suggested price of $1,199.
Available through the company’s online store or select channel partners, the drives are designed to be portable, rugged and expandable, and are aimed at filmmakers, photographers and creative professionals who need to capture and protect data while on location, and safely transport footage and photos back to the studio for post-production.
The Drobo Mini connects through a Thunderbolt connection or USB 3.0 and features four 2.5-inch SSD drive bays with an mSATA accelerator option, weighing in at less than three pounds.
“The core benefits that any user receives when using a Drobo are still tremendous value. Being able to start with the capacity you need today and growing over time; simplicity to deploy, use and manage is key – no need to be a storage expert,” Joe Disher, senior director of product marketing for Connected Data, said in a statement. “Adding the SSDs to our portable Drobo provides tremendous performance as well as the reliability and redundancy needed for filmmakers that don’t have time to have lost data.”
Like all of the company’s products, Drobo Mini protects data without user intervention, even in the event of multiple SSD drive failures.
If a drive does fail, Drobo Mini automatically repairs itself and returns to a protected state while providing full access to data without performance being affected.
Additional security is provided with battery backup that protects against data loss in the event of a sudden power outage ensuring that all data in flight is protected until power is restored.
“In the event that the power goes while data is being written to disk, that data is written to flash and will be recovered and written to disk once power is restored,” Disher explained. “With power not always being reliable in the field and on location, this is quite an important feature as files that were presumably written could be corrupt without the use of the Drobo battery backup feature. The battery backup feature helps to ensure that data that the host thinks is written to disk, gets written to disk even in the event of a power failure.”
While the device is described as rugged, Disher warned that it isn’t an all-weather device. However, with the SSDs it can withstand the bumps and knocking around that can happen when on location, though it would require the same care and handling as a typical laptop computer.