 Welcome to an unboxing featuring what is possibly the worst retail box that I've ever seen. This is the Drobo S as you can tell by the small sticker located somewhere on the outside of what otherwise looks like a shipping carton. So I went and I opened it up thinking oh there's probably a retail Drobo unit inside. No, no they sent me an OEM one which is fine. There are retail boxes and that's what you'll see at your local NCIX store but for the purpose of the video that we're doing they just sent me an OEM one because I don't think they realized I was going to do an unboxing in addition to the actual Tech Tips video. So here we are. Let's find out what comes with the Data Robotics Drobo S. Welcome to the world of Drobo. Alright, so we have power, got your AC to DC adapter, got your AC power cord which is your standard computer one rather than being that notebook one that there's never one handy when you need one. So that's perfect. Restore CD as well as a getting started guide which is about 4,000 pages thick. I really hope this isn't a number of different languages here. Yes it is. Oh good because if the manual was that thick and the whole point of this product is that it's easy to use then a step was missed somewhere. Okay here we go USB 3 cable, eSATA cable, nice long robust feeling eSATA cable. Very confident about this particular Sata cable. It's about a one linus height so a little bit more so it's about 6 feet tall, long. And then we also have a Firewire B cable so they include high quality versions of pretty much all of the cables you require and nice long cables too. So they're not like a lot of companies with their external enclosures that include short little rinky dinky cables so that you have to put the box next to your monitor or next to your PC. They give you the option to put it somewhere more convenient. So this is also a 6 foot long cable and that's the USB 3 A to B so that's the extra pins are all in there. Remember you can use a USB 2 A to B cable so that's like your standard printer cable but it will only operate at USB 2.0 speed. So let's go ahead and tuck all of this stuff away and get the actual Drobo S itself out of the box. So it comes very very well packed. You can see it's using a closed cell phone with a good inch of empty space, an inch plus of empty space on all sides so your Drobo is going to be nice and protected in transit. Alright, let's take these off. There you go. I always prefer closed cell phone because it is more durable and more resistant to multiple impacts. It also has a nice little dust cover on it so it's not going to get scratched or anything. Okay, let's go ahead and extract it. So the Drobo S is the natural progression from the original Drobo. So this isn't the network version of the Drobo, that's the Drobo FS but the advantage is that this one has over the original Drobo is that it has 5 bays as opposed to the original Drobo's 4 bays. It also has a much much wider variety of interfaces. So the original Drobo was only USB and then there was an additional version of it that I think added Firewire, something like that. And then the Drobo S adds to that by providing not only USB but USB 3, eSATA, oh I think there was an eSATA version at some point as well. Okay whatever, this one is the current one, this is the one that matters, USB 3, 2 Firewire 800 ports, eSATA, your power, Kensington lock so that you can make sure that it doesn't walk away on you, a power switch on the back, oh it's just a power cycle switch, interesting. Or oh okay. We'll have to find out why it is that it turns itself off right away, maybe it's a matter of it has to actually be plugged in in order to do that. You've also got a reset button here and the cooling fan at the back of the unit so I wonder if I can even take this apart. The Drobo is meant to be more of an appliance so you can see here there's a warranty void if removed so I'm not going to be taking the panels apart and actually pulling the unit limb from limb. Let me just see if I can figure out how big that fan is at the back because I wanted to be able to tell you guys. Yeah that's a 120mm fan, I can see the blades moving now. So it's a 120mm fan at the back which means that it's going to stay nice and cool and also be very quiet when it's pulling air across the drives. Remember once you install a drive in here it will stay open like that. In fact you know what let's just throw a drive in here really quick so that you guys can see. Here we go, so here are some of the drives that we're going to be using to test out the Drobo. I haven't talked much about what makes Drobo special overall though so let's show the easy installation first. Let's just kind of... Yeah, there we go. Hold on. There we are. So it locks in place like that so you can put it up to five drives and once it's open you can see there's actually a gap so some airflow will come through. So what makes Drobo special? Drobo is the easy answer to RAID. So RAID can be complicated because you do need a RAID controller so you need an actual logic board if you want to have any kind of reliable RAID 5 or RAID 6. Okay, so you need that. You need, highly recommended, you need identical drives. So RAID works best when you have all the same hard drives so that they all perform exactly the same and so you don't have any weird issues like with your WD greens dropping out of the RAID array or one drive performing better than the other one or one drive performing slower than the other one dragging down the performance of the whole array. Drobo you don't have to worry about that because rather than using a standard type of RAID it actually uses their proprietary non-RAID but also redundant backup. So what that means is that it protects you from drive failure much like RAID but it doesn't use a standard RAID. So you just pop in whatever old drives you want whether you want to mix up capacities, you want to mix up manufacturers, you want to mix up speed bins, none of that matters. You just throw in whatever you please and Drobo will automatically balance the storage around between the drives to provide you redundant storage so safe storage as well as convenient storage. Now the other thing that Drobo does really well and we will of course be doing a full episode on this is protects from data loss. So if any one of those drives fails it will notify you and all you have to do is replace the drive, it will rebuild itself and take care of you that way. Drobo is also scalable in a way that RAID isn't really. RAID you usually have to get everything you want unless you're talking about very expensive RAID cards like hardware RAID cards. You have to have everything you want for your storage pool, you have to add it all at the same time and then you're pretty much kind of locked in. Drobo you buy one of these, you buy one drive or I'd recommend two drives at least, you buy two drives and then as the sweet spot changes for cost per gigabyte in terms of hard drive capacity you can add drives that are higher capacity and less expensive in order to expand the drive as you go. So you might buy it with two 1TB drives now while hard drives are expensive due to the shortage and then as prices go down you might add a 2TB and then you go okay I'm out of storage now add a 3TB and so on and so forth. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Drobo S. Don't forget to subscribe not only to Linus Tech Tips but also to NCIX Tech Tips for more content like this as well as more content about this and check this out, there's a handy little guide there. All the drives have their own indicator LEDs which tell you what's going on. Nothing, system healthy, add a drive here soon. Cool, don't remove this drive because it's balancing data, add a drive here and drive failure replace.