Gizmodo wrote about Drobo. But, I saw it about a week ago and was asked to keep it quiet. Obviously someone else couldn’t keep it under wraps. So, what the heck.

What is it? Well, you know to keep your data on two seperate hard drives, or more, right?

How do you do that? RAID? Yep.

But this thing is RAID made simple. You just slide in a new SATA hard drive (Seagate is gonna love this) and it automatically senses it, and uses it.

Stick in only one drive (it has four slots) and it isn’t happy. It knows your stuff isn’t stored on two drives. So, it’s at risk. It’ll tell you. Warns you with a yellow light that your data isn’t safe.

Slide in a second drive. It takes a few seconds to reconfigure (it does this while live — you can even be copying, or storing, data to the first drive while you slide in a second drive). It will turn both lights green after it makes sure everything has a second drive.

Slide in a third drive. Same thing. It goes yellow while it reconfigures everything to share across three drives.

Take out the first drive. All your data is still there. But the lights go yellow while the drives reconfigure the data and make sure you’re safe.

Take out the second drive, leaving only the third (assuming all are the same size). Now things still work, but the lights don’t go back to green. Yellow all the way.

Along the bottom it tells you how much space is available.

This thing rocks. I can see buying quite a few of these for PodTech.

Won’t be on the market for another month or two. Can’t wait to be able to buy them. Here’s the official Web site.

Leo Laporte just reported he’s leaving Twitter to go to competitor Jaiku instead. Here’s what he posted:

“I’ve asked Ev to delete my Twitter account. I’m concerned about confusion with TWiT. I’m moving to Jaiku: account is ChiefTWiT. CU there!”

and

“I should never have trademarked TWiT. Curse you Ev. Couldn’t you have called this Odeoer or something?”

I’ll follow the details and post more on my Twitter account.

UPDATE: we’re having dinner with Lisa Stone and Chris Carfi and Chris says Leo is the “Twitter quitter.” The reason Leo’s leaving Twitter is significant is because Leo kicked off the Twitter hype by talking about Twitter on his show, TWiT (This Week in Tech) about two weeks before SXSW.

UPDATE2: Jaiku is currently down. So, at least they have the same scalability problems that Twitter had three weeks ago.

UPDATE3: more on Leo’s blog about his decision.

UPDATE4: I’m on Jaiku too now at http://scobleizer.jaiku.com/. Personally I like the simplicity of Twitter better. But that might just be me.

I didn’t film this one, but demonstrates that Photowalking is a good idea. Eddie Codel is behind camera for this one and gets a group of photographers talking about equipment and shooting images in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lots of fun.

Tomorrow I’m recording a Photowalking at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View at 11 a.m. I’ll be filming Mark Richards, who did a book of photos of old computers. No Thomas Hawk, though.

Next photowalking? On April 29. In Half Moon Bay. We’ll be at the “Dream Machines” show. I hear you have to get there early in the morning if you hope to park anywhere near the airport. So, we’ll probably arrive at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. 2,000 machines will be there. I swear Thomas Hawk can spend four hours filming one tractor. So, who knows how many we’ll get.

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