INBOX:Digital photographs and videos take up huge amounts of space on hard drives, and storing them is becoming increasingly tricky, MIKE BUTCHER

STANDING IN what appeared to be a five-mile queue at the airport this week, merely to buy a packet of chewing gum, I glanced momentarily at the items designed to lure us in as we wended our weary way towards the checkout.

There among the "family-sized" chocolate bars and the travel plugs was a lonely-looking box of photographic film.

Film! I almost stopped dead in my tracks. With film-based cameras now all but supplanted by digital photography, film is becoming an anachronism.

But if envelopes stuffed with old negatives make you feel nostalgic, you may also be yearning for a time when working out where to store another box of old photographs was as simple as shoving an old suitcase aside in the attic. Because now, with photographs, videos and heaven knows what else all deposited on computer hard drives, digital storage is becoming an increasingly tricky issue.

My household is probably typical. Three years ago, I purchased an 80GB portable hard drive to store photographs of the kids.

Then I bought a digital video camera. Suddenly the hard drive was full.

I graduated to what seemed like the vast, unending uplands of a 400GB hard drive.

But with the birth of a second child, that too was groaning under the weight of family snapshots and videos.

I was edging towards a terrabyte of storage (1,000GB) and there was no way out. More cost, more tricky transfers of data and more fretting about whether the next storage drive would be enough.

There is more to worry about too. Storing everything you ever photographed on a single hard drive - a hard drive that might fail for whatever reason - is a gamble. The average hard drive fails after four to five years of use.

But the available options can be bewildering. Microsoft has its Windows Home Server. Apple has the new Time Capsule, which is both a WiFi base station and a single storage drive for backup. But will they be enough?

The Drobo is a new type of storage solution which may provide an innovative answer to these problems. It is aimed at high-end consumers (which is increasingly all of us, as our digital data needs expand to suit our audio-visual collections) but it is also a relatively cheap and easy solution for a home office, school or small business.

Available for both Mac and PC, the Drobo has taken the thinking behind the professional storage solutions used in business and made it consumer friendly.

Due to be sold in Ireland by Irish-owned distributor CMS Peripherals and Expansys for about €530, the Drobo combines the reliability of a multidrive Raid system with the simplicity of a USB stick.

What looks like an oversized black shoebox allows you to expand your storage as your needs grow with a simple solution. It houses up to four high-capacity hard drives which you slot in and out as you want.

In technical terms, the data is stored "redundantly". That means that if one of the hard drives fails, all of the data will be intact on the other three drives. And you can mix and match almost any size of drive and any make without having to turn it off or stop using it.

In theory, across the four drives, the Drobo could hold up to 16 terrabytes of data, which would probably serve even the most doting of camera-happy dads. Certainly, these features have made the Drobo the top-selling storage device on the Apple store.

And since hard drives are always coming down in price relative to capacity, this solution to the storage dilemma saves you money - because you just add the extra capacity when you need it.

The Drobo also has a separate solution allowing you to put it on a network to back up several computers at once, making it an ideal solution for a small business.

I am impressed by the Drobo. I wouldn't say it's the last word in storage. But put it this way - I'll have to go on a lot more day-trips with the kids to fill this thing up.