No, it’s not something from the upcoming Transformers movie, Drobo is an easy to use, RAID backup replacement for your PC.

Drobo is the world’s first storage robot, providing fully automated, infinitely expandable storage that safeguards against drive failure and data corruption. Fully automatic protection: Drobo is self-healing; when a hard drive fails, it reconfigures data to ensure it is once again protected – all without any human intervention. Infinitely expandable capacity: Drobo is self-improving; just add a new drive, or upsize a smaller one, and you’ll instantly increaseoverall protected capacity without needing to do anything else. Effortless storage management: Drobo is self-aware, knowing where your data is and how to heal or improve itself in the event of trouble – Drobo takes the pain out of managing large amounts of data. System requirements: Apple Macintosh OS-X 10.4 or greater, Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista.

The problem with most RAID arrays is that that all the hard drives have to the same. If they support different sizes, the array will only store the amount of the smallest drive. The cool thing about the Drobo is that you can use any Serial ATA drive you want. Use three drives of different sizes and the next time you see a Hard Drive on sale for cheap, replace the smallest drive with a larger one. Very cool. Now, too bad they’re $499 (no drives included). Let’s get that down to about $249.