I’ve been worrying over my home storage for some time and I think I’ve maybe found an answer. Drobo manufactures a cool looking drive enclosure that completely automates RAID 5 -style storage, but makes it better. The product allows putting in one to four disks of any size and it’ll store data on the disks in a redundant manner even if the disks are of different size. And of course you can hot swap the disks.

The reason I’m interested in this is simply due to the fact that I have some 50,000 or so digital photographs and slowly but surely accumulating set of HD video files from my videocap. I thought I’d never say it but I’m finding I have more than one and a half terabytes of data on my drives, and it’s driving me insane. Backing up this amount of data is a royal pain, and I’ve learned adding yet another external drive to my collection of external drives becomes more and more painful every time. A starter three or four drive setup plus the box would cost something like 600 euros, but I think it’d be worth it, especially since I could maybe salvage a couple hundred euros from the old drives.

The combination of cool looks and “no worries, it’ll manage itself” zero configuration support is very, very tempting.