Drobo
More info
- Released
- 2005–2023
- Type
- Storage appliance (BeyondRAID)
- Creator
- Geoff Barrall
The storage box with the row of lights that let anyone mix drive sizes without understanding RAID — until the company itself ran out.
Drobo — first under the company name Data Robotics — was founded in 2005 by Geoff Barrall and shipped its first box in 2007. The pitch was BeyondRAID: you could drop in hard drives of different sizes, pull one and slot a bigger one while everything stayed running, and a strip of lights showed how full the box was. Everything ordinary RAID made fiddly was hidden behind glossy simplicity.
The box aimed at photographers and Mac users rather than the server room, which was also the problem: margins were thin and the tech was a hard sell against both cheap NAS and the cloud. Parent company StorCentric collapsed and Drobo filed for bankruptcy in 2023. The lights went out — and the drives inside suddenly became hard to read without, well, a Drobo.