Data Robotics Inc, manufacturers of the funkiest looking external drive array on the market, today extended the their range with the new 8 bay DroboPro.

The Drobo is a box holding SATA disks which can be aggregated together to provide a single, redundant storage volume. Technically it’s not RAID as you know it, but the principle is the same.

The unique feature of the Drobo range is the ability to use a mixed size batch of disks – unlike normal RAID arrays the disks don’t need to be the same capacity. Drobo disks are also hot-swappable and upgrading capacity is just a matter of replacing a disk with a larger one.

The original product only had a USB connection which made it unique (direct connected USB drives typically don’t offer any redundancy) but the lack of network connectivity hampered it’s adoption in the small business market.

The Pro fixes this gripe, adding gigabit Ethernet and firewire ports to the original USB connector. It also includes iSCSI compatability for higher end corporate environments.

That’s just window dressing though – the main point of the pro is it’s 8 drive bay capacity! That gives you the potential for hosting 16TB of disks, which according to the handy configurator on the website makes for a whopping 12TB of protected storage.

MSRP on the DroboPro starts at $1299. Scan sell the Drobo in the UK, but there’s no sign of the Pro on their site yet.

[Via PhotographyBlog]