In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a consumer-friendly hard drive array, an online service for managing medical information used in litigation, and document comparison software that can compare anything to anything. Don't miss the next issue.
Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:
Drobo Arigato Mr. Roboto
By Dennis Kennedy
What's the second most annoying aspect of hard drives after disk failure? Running out of disk space! With our office computers bulging from our own documents not to mention the documents of our clients, and our home computers experiencing a similarly expanding digital waistline thanks to music, movies, and photos, the traditional hard drive just doesn't cut it anymore.
But the world of storage beyond the hard drive is filled with acronyms like RAID, SAN, NAS, and other terms that are too complex for the average lawyer, leaving us between a rock and a hard drive.
Enter Data Robotics and its new consumer-friendly Drobo automated storage robot that manages data storage for you. It's designed to ensure that your data is protected and expandable. And it minimizes your need to understand the intricacies of data storage management.
Drobo is a USB 2.0 enclosure that houses up to four 3.5 inch SATA hard drives of any size and make you wish. You need not use all four drive slots initially. LEDs display the status of drives and their remaining capacity. If the lights are green, all is good. Red lights tell you to add or replace a drive. Yellow lights let you know that you are at 85% of capacity and it's time to add another drive or replace an existing drive with a larger one.
On your PC or Mac, Drobo shows up as one very large hard drive — up to 2 TB at which point it shows up as two hard drives. You use this space like a regular hard drive, but behind the scenes it mirrors, protects, and manages your data to provide redundancy in case one hard drive fails.
You don't have to select RAID levels, match hard drive sizes, or delve into network storage esoterica. Drobo's approach to data management speeds up data migration, switches you to other drives if a drive fails, and gives you quick access to new capacity when needed. Drives slide into Drobo without the need for special tools.
Drobo currently works with both PCs and Macs. Expect a Linux-compatible version later this year as well as a version with an eSATA interface. Drobo sells for $499. Learn more about Drobo.
How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.
