Thinking outside the box. Drobo for external drives? PCIe card? ATX? 2.5"?

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1

Think of a small box with 5 or more eSATA ports. I know it would be messy, but I was wondering if someone could think of a good business reason for it.

How about an internal PC drobo? A PCIe card with 5 sata ports. Use the card for the drobo and the drives are powered by the computer.

How about partnering with Lian Li or some other computer case manufacturer and offering a drobo built into the case? Have a small door near the bottom of the case and the drives slide right into the case.

How about 2.5" drive drobo? How about a small drobo that fits in a 2 bay 5.25" space and the drives slide in vertically? 8 drives could easily fit and maybe 10.

Sure, some of these ideas are off the wall, but what do you think?

2

I’m sure the internal drobo and the 2.5" drinks exist as beta test hardware in a DRI Lab

The esata drobo is just a mess, too many points of failure … Plus you could DIY it with Sara to esata cables :wink:

3

I certainly would like to have an internal drobo - i.e. a pcie card with 8 sata ports to the 8 drives or something like that.

4

does this mean drobo could potentially replace things like the raid1 (pair of hard drives in a windows box) for example?

5

it would need to be a lot faster !