Drobo

» see drobo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The promise was that you would never think about it. Pull the magnetic front panel off the box, push in whatever bare drives you happened to own, in whatever sizes, in whatever order. Add a bigger one later and the array quietly grows into it. Pull a failing one out while it is running and a row of lights goes amber until the rebuild finishes. Data Robotics was founded in San Jose in May 2005, with Geoff Barrall running it alongside Julian Terry and Ken Rosen, and the first Drobo went on sale on 5 June 2007.

It solved a real problem. RAID at the time expected you to match drive sizes and pick a level, which meant first knowing what a level was, and it expected you to accept that growing an array meant rebuilding it from a backup you probably did not have. The Drobo did none of that. It exposed a single big volume to the computer, sorted out the redundancy internally under the name BeyondRAID, and communicated its entire state through lights on the front. For photographers and small studios and anyone else with a lot of files and no sysadmin, that was worth the premium.

The corporate history after that reads like a drive being passed around. The company merged with Connected Data in June 2013 and took its name, spun the storage business back out as Drobo, Inc. in May 2015, then sold itself to StorCentric in August 2018. StorCentric filed for Chapter 11 in June 2022 and could not find a buyer or a plan. Drobo support and sales ended on 27 January 2023. The Chapter 11 became a Chapter 7 liquidation on 28 April, and drobo.com stopped answering on 8 February 2024.

This was never a category that reached me. Prosumer storage in Turkey meant import prices on a box whose whole value was that you did not have to learn anything, and if you were already the person other people called about their computer, you had learned it. What I recognize anyway is the shape of the customer at the end: somebody with a decade of work on a shelf, an enclosure with no support behind it, and no obvious next move.

~ the dossier ~

~ the promise ~

The lights were the product. Green means fine, amber means this drive is filling up, red means replace this one now, and a bar along the bottom shows how full the whole thing is. No terminal, no array configuration, no vocabulary to acquire. That was a genuinely good piece of design thinking about who was actually buying the box, and it is why the name stuck around long after the hardware stopped being competitive.

The cost of that abstraction was that the abstraction owned your disks. A Drobo array is not a standard layout you can move to another enclosure and read. Take the drives out and put them in a generic caddy and you have a stack of platters with a format on them that only Drobo hardware understands. As long as the company existed, that was a support call. Once the company did not exist, it was a different kind of problem.

~ the actual end ~

There was no announcement worth the name. The Drobo website put up a line saying that as of 27 January, support and products were no longer available, and pointed people at self-service. StorCentric had been in Chapter 11 since the previous June and had gone quiet on customers of both Drobo and Retrospect, the backup software it also owned. The Chapter 7 conversion at the end of April was reported by the trade press rather than communicated by anybody.

So the failure mode was the one the product was built to prevent. The whole argument for a Drobo was that a dead drive should not be an emergency. It turned out the single point of failure was never in the chassis. It was the company that knew how to read what the chassis had written.

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