No doubt many of you have heard of a product called Drobo [1] which has
now been around for quite a while.
In a nutshell, Drobo is a proprietary data storage box with 4 3.5" sata
slots, and a USB2 connection to your pc.
The thing I *really* like about drobo is the fact you can hot swap
disks, the ability to use totally different size/make/speed of disks and
the fact it rebuilds its array (like normal raid arrays) upon disk
failiure / disk pullout.
The array appears as one partition (or however many you like I guess.)
I was wondering if it's possible to do this with Linux using software
raid, or if not, some kind of special hardware controller. Of course
you'd probably stick LVM on top of that to 'glue' them together. I like
the idea of Drobo, but I also like tinkering and using Linux.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drobo
Thanks!
John.
