Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger asked those punks for their clothes, their boots and motorbike, we have been a little wary of robots. So the news that a company has produced a robot that can automatically sense and configure hard drives to use as storage for your computer was met with a little trepidation.

Claimed by the company as the world's first storage robot, the Drobo from Data Robotics can automatically detect and format up to four 3.5-inch Sata drives of any capacity. Intelligent software inside the robot looks after all the data and disk swapping.

When the robot appliance is connected to a PC or Mac via its USB 2.0 connection, the computer sees the unit as one drive. There are also LED lights of different colours all over the show that tell you what's happening with the robot: green is ok, yellow indicates a drive low on space, while a red flashing light warns of disk failure. Lights at the bottom tell the user how much overall storage is left in the enclosure. When all four red lights start blinking, that means the time has come for robots to rise up and take over the world and destroy all humanity!!!! (ok that last one was a lie! - we hope!)

Up to four 1TB disk drives can be installed giving users 3.6TB of usable storage. The enclosure (without any hard drives) is set to retail at $699 (£360) from 1 June.

"Drobo is the world's first storage robot, providing fully automated, infinitely expandable storage that safeguards against drive failure and data corruption," according to a statement from the company. "Drobo is self-healing; when a hard drive fails, it reconfigures data to ensure it is once again protected - all without any human intervention."

Drobo is alive, Drobo will rule! Drobo is your master, all your data are belong to us!