Alright, I promised someone on this list I'd mention something about this when I get my Drobo, which I got yesterday. Here's a quite long summary of what the Drobo is, how to set it up, and my take on the accessibility of this all. Please take it with a grain of salt since I am sighted although somewhat familiar with vo and jaws (just a geek/programmer interested in accessibility in general), and if you have any questions just reply!
For those of you who don't know what a Drobo is, simply put it's a storage device. You can connect it to your computer, or you can connect it to a separate device called DroboShare to share it on your wired network with gigabit ethernet. The drobo device itself comes in two versions, the older generation is USB 2.0 only and the newer supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Both generations of drobos can be used with DroboShare, but DroboShare must be purchased separately. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to buy DroboShare yet, so my email is going to be about the Drobo itself connected straight to a computer. Ultimately what Drobo does is that it lets you put up to four 3.5" (regular desktop sized) SATA hard drives in a redundant configuration. That means you don't have to worry about losing data from a failed or failing hard drive. The downside to a redundant storage scheme is that you are not able to use the full space available. Say I put in four one terabyte drives in the Drobo, I'd end up with approximately three terabytes of space, and one terabyte will be used to make it redundant. If any single drive fails, I can switch it out and put in a new one and it'll rebuild the hard drive for you with no loss of data. The storage to overhead ratio on the Drobo (i.e. like I said, 3 terabytes out of 4 is usable) is a lot better than something like mirroring, also known as raid 1, where if you had 4 terabytes, you'd only be able to use 2. However, it's really important to keep in mind that redundant storage like Drobo is absolutely not the same as a backup. You can use Drobo as a backup, you can use Drobo as primary storage, but absolutely do not go without a backup of some sort. Drobo only takes care of the possibility of a hard drive dying (which is only a matter of time, not an "if"). It does not do anything about, for example, your fat fingered deletion of a really important file you needed. You delete a file off the Drobo and it's gone forever from the Drobo. Please absolutely do not forget that! Physically, the drobo is the height of about five hard drives stacked on top of each other and it's about 1.5 times longer. It's actually quite a small device. Also, I think it's fairly quiet just barely louder than my mac mini and the iMac as well as all the laptops when it's writing a lot, especially if the drives you get are quiet as well. Any 3.5" desktop SATA hard drive will work with this device. Right now, one terabyte hard drives can be purchased for around $130. Installing drives in the Drobo is ridiculously easy. All you have to do is take off the front cover (it's magnetic, it'll come right off with a small tug outward), then grab one drive, hold it so the circuit board on the drive is facing the floor and that the SATA port is facing the drobo, and shove it right into any of the four spaces for the drives, which are all stacked one on top of each other until you hear the click from the latch to the left of the drive. To eject, push that latch to the left and the drive will pop out. After you are done, just put the front cover back on. No screws or screwdrivers necessary. The main software you use to monitor Drobo is something called Drobo Dashboard (from here on for the sake of convenience I'm just going to call it Dashboard, not to be confused with Apple Dashboard). It is accessible provided you don't go into the main dashboard interface, but instead you go into the advanced interface. You can do things like format your Drobo, put it on standby, monitor how much space is on the drobo (since the reading from Finder and Disk Utility will NOT be accurate) and more. You can also set it up so the Dashboard software will send you an email alert if anything is going on with the Drobo itself, like a failing drive or a new drive inserted, but the software has to be running on your computer all the time. Dashboard comes with a menu extra, but it's pretty useless since the only useful thing there is the icon itself showing drive space available and that icon is inaccessible. So here's the problem. Drobo and the Dashboard software both use colors and lights to show the health of the drives. The drobo itself will use colors next to each drive on the device, and the Dashboard software will also show this in colors. I've played around with it in VO and basically while you will be able to figure out if something is wrong with or without email alerts (it will go from "I am healthy" to something like "Data at risk"), you won't know which hard drive is the issue. And this is a problem because Drobo's greatest strength is handling issues like these. So unless you can get sighted help once in a while, I don't think there really is a way to deal with this. Voiceover just chokes on the image representation of the drobo in dashboard, which is the only way to see the hard drives having problems. Upgrades are also similarly problematic since unless you labeled the hard drives you're not going to be able to figure out which drive to replace when you want to upgrade the space available. Anyway, that may or may not influence your decision. I have not tried many devices similar to the Drobo before purchasing it, just knowing that it came highly recommended by many friends. I had a RAID array before this, and the Drobo makes my life so much easier. I love the redundancy because I know that some day these drives will fail. So your mileage may vary. So far, I've only had it and used it for a day, but it's been pretty good. Performance-wise it's not fantastic, but it's par with most external USB/firewire drives out there. The drobo with firewire 800 is going to be around $500 (search for a promo code if you are buying from the drobo store, you can usually find them for $20 to as much as $100 off). The older USB 2.0 only drobo is around $350. Droboshare is $189 or so. All these figures are USD, give or take a little depending on where you buy them. They're on sale at drobo.com as well as on newegg and macmall - there is a list of resellers on the drobo.com website. Hope this comes in handy for someone, hehe. Cheers, Jane
