The Ghetto Drobo

The Drobo Elite, with a capacity for 16 TB is a beast of an external hard drive, but what about those of us who want unnecessary amounts of computer storage but don't want to pay $5899 for it. A friend of OE Technology sent in this picture of his 5 slot hard drive raid switch that allows for up to 10 TB of storage.

The Ghetto Drobo cost under $500 for 4.5 TB [3 x 1.5 TB Drives] with 2 slots still open. 10 TB would cost you around $700, one fifth the cost of a 10 TB Drobo. For the hard drive consumer, this is the way to go for massive amounts of storage if you do not have a businesses budget.

Big Boy Toys: The DROBO Elite

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Meet the King of All External Hard Drives,

The Drobo Elite.

Grow your storage in line with your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace your smallest disk with a larger one, even when all eight disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found in Drobo Elite enables you to mix n’ match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This allows continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. With DroboPro expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

Not only can this hard drive hold eight 2 TB hard drives, totaling in 16 TB of possible media storage, it also has "Dual-Disk Redundancy' that backs up your data even if you remove three of the hard drives. The price tag is a little high though, starting at $3499 and with 16 TB of storage it cost $5899. It makes a great holiday gift though.

Some of its draw backs are that only 12.48 TB of storage is usable due to the disk redundancy, making the price tag very high for only 12.5 TB. But the Drobo Elite is made for businesses and allows multiple servers to connect to it.