Storage on-the-go often comes with compromises, though Drobo is doing its best to eliminate most of them with its new "Drobo Mini with SSD," a portable and rugged storage solution that uses solid state drives. According to Drobo, ideal candidates for its expandable storage device include filmmakers, photographers, and creative professionals who need to capture and protect data while on location, and then safely transport footage and photos back to the studio for post-processing.

The Drobo Mini sports four 2.5-inch SSD drive bays and an mSATA accelerator option. If one of the drives fails, the Drobo Mini will automatically repair itself and return to a protected state while still providing full access to data without a performance hit.


Other features include instant capacity expansion up to 6TB, mixed drive size utilization, single or dual disk redundancy, thin provisioning and reclamation, virtual hot spare, and drive re-ordering. The Drobo Mini also has a battery backup in case of a power outage.

When it comes time to transfer your data, you can take advantage of either of the two Thunderbolt ports or the single USB 3.0 port.


The Drobo Mini with SSD is available as a standalone drive ($449) and in three capacity bundles of 1TB (4x256GB) for $1,199, 2TB (4x512GB) for $1,799, and 4TB (4x1TB) for $2,999.