Data Robotics Drobo intelligent backup drive
Why you must have it: MP3 files, TiVo videos, vacation photos, you name it — a lot of precious information now resides on our hard drives, vulnerable to becoming so much electronic dust in case of a system crash or a drive failure. The Drobo takes a step beyond the large external drives widely available today by adding intelligence and configurability to the device, both simplifying operations and giving you more control. The Drobo enclosure can take up to four half-height or full-height SATA hard drives and combine them into a massive, multiterabyte backup system — no need to figure out RAID settings or worry about whether the drives are the right capacities to work together. And as you add or replace drives within Drobo, it handles the updating and migration of affected backup data automatically. It also initiates the backup for you, so there's no need to have backup software on your PC or Mac.

You can use the Drobo with multiple PCs, backing each up on it. The Drobo personal storage array is also compatible with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine, letting you back up your data and allowing access to the various changes to individual files that Time Machine provides.

Your chances of having the first one on the block: Very good, as Drobo has been available only a few months.

What you should know: To support both Macs and PCs simultaneously, Drobo drives should be formatted with FAT32 partitions. Drobo has no network interface for LAN-based backup, but users have successfully connected it to a USB-equipped Apple AirPort Extreme wireless router to enable network backup in all-Mac environment. The company says Windows-only and mixed-platform network backup should be possible if you use another vendor's USB 2.0-equipped router (AirPort requires that attached devices use Apple's HFS+ partitions for storage).

What you need: A USB 2.0-equipped PC running Windows 2000, 2003 Server, XP, or Vista, or a USB 2.0-equipped Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 or later.