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Normally I don't write reviews for all of the products I grasp, but based on the abominable reviews that people have given the drobo, I felt I needed to offset some of the unfair & misleading comments.
I have had this drobo for about a month. I have had very slight interaction with the drobo itself. That is becouse once it is location up you forget it. That is amazing for this kind of storage design.
It really is as simple as putting the drives in, install the software, and initiate using it. I first saw this at Macworld in January 2008, but held out for the firewire version. I am using on a mixed environment network with no compatibility problems. It is very hastily, and very easy. I am using mine for all of my videos streamed to our TVs. IT ABSOLUTELY WORKS WONDERFULLY! It can simultaniously stream mp4 videos to 2 TVs while having data copied to it.... all without any hiccups. That is impressive for a plan like this.
For those of you have have read (or are about to read) some of the negative reviews here, allow me to comment on them:
First complaint: Add (4) 1TB Drives - only fetch 2.7TB of useable data plot. Understand this, the arrangement says that you can do up to 16tb of storage in it. This means that when 4tb drives are available, you can effect up to 4 of them in this draw. Does that mean that you will have 16tb of useable storage. NO. Why? Becouse hard drives are sold based on an improper counting system.
While EVERY SINGLE HARD DRIVE MAKER (or company selling storage area) counts how distinguished station you have based on 1gb =1000mb, this is totally untrue! The truth is that 1gb = 1024mb. This means that they are shorting you 24mb for every GB you seize. I realize that on 1 GB, it is only 24mb lost, but on a TB that starts adding up.
Also the system uses some of the storage to index your drive so it knows how to win the data on your drive. This is why when you acquire a computer with a 80gb hard drive and notice at usable data it will say about 75GB.
Second complaint: "This is a RAID system" while the drobo does not employ raid 5 per se, it does expend something very noteworthy like it. To rep a raid 5 array, you need 3 or more drives that are all the same size. Regardless of how many drives you utilize, you lose the amount of storage residence equivelant to one of the drives. This goes to the protection of the array. In other words, if one drive fails you replace it with another identical drive which will rebuild the array and to prevent data loss.
Most implementations of raid 5 do not allow the storage state to grow, and if they do, it is very expensive for the raid controller card and very difficult to implement. What makes drobo different, is you gather the benefits of raid 5 protection, with out of lot of its costs and complications.
For example, you can save in any 4 sata drives, and it works, regardless of there sizes. Also, if you replace a drive you can replace it with any sata drive, not the same ones you primitive before. Both of these are a grand deal because it is what makes what drobo does very unlike raid.
Third complaint: "Drive rebuilds/expantions can pick 2 to 5 days". OK, this one is accurate. But lets judge about this, there is a fine reason why this is factual. You have data on all four drives. But it is writen to those drives in such a procedure that if any one drive is removed from a system and replaced with a recent drive the drobo can rebuild all of that data.
Look, that is heavenly impressive. And I would imagine if you had a drive wreck you would rather wait a few days to accept your stuff befriend as opposed to losing it all together. But if you are rebuilding data for several terabytes... yes it is going to rob a while. And the same is factual for raid 5.
Ultimately, the drobo does what it says. It is a very consumer agreeable implementation of raid 5 like protection at an extremely affordable sign. I would Treasure for someone to prove me a raid-5 contrivance (or something like it other then the drobo) that you can pick empty for under $500 that can connect to both USB and Firewire 800.
In conclusion, I have old-fashioned many types of raid 5 implementations. So I can safely say: if you want raid 5 without the headaches, glean a drobo. If you want a mirrored drive (raid 1), a striped drive (raid 0) or JBOD (honest a sizable disk) - then the drobo is not for you. There are other products that will better assist your needs.
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UPDATE 11/18/2008:
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When I purchased the drobo, I initially attach in two 1TB drives and two 320GB drives. After nearly filling it up I added another 1TB drive. Shortly there after I decided to add another 1.5TB drive. So this means I have done 2 expansion rebuilds. The process in both cases took about 10 hours and was flawless. Impartial to be determined I did it at night and didn't consume the drive while this was going on. So my statement above about 2-5 days is plot off and not upright. I am distinct that this will be a happier solution.
Also, based on the intention that the drobo allocates state for future growth, I wish I had purchased two 1.5TB drives. IF someone is alive to in learning more about this, I recommend looking at the drobolator calculator at drobo.com. But otherwise I am peaceful very joyful with my drobo.
Someone added a comment to this review that "it fails semi-randomly and takes data with it & that customer service is useless". Well this I can not comment on as I haven't had this scrape nor have I noticed that the serve was useless. I did have one minor boom and called aid. They weren't the best aid team, but far from the worst.
Statements like that need to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes people win a awful unit or talk to someone at succor who is the poor apple of the group... or juts having a awful day. That isn't an excuse for them, but a reality. But again, I don't have any experience with encourage being useless by any means.
When it comes to data protection, I am about give the secret to security. You will never hear something more right then this: The more you value your data, the more copies of it you should have. For example, priceless pictures on your hard drive are honest begging to travel. Backing them up to a plot like the drobo is a great safer solution. Burning a copy of them and putting them in your closet is even better. Making another copy and keeping them somewhere else (outside of your home) really prevents data loss (mediate fire, theft, etc) . Another backup onto the internet... well you my friend can sleep well at night intellectual that your data is suited.
Now, I am not saying that you have to be this paranoid about data. But if you have data that can never be lost, remember this simple rule about backups: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Ultimately, I stand by my notion that this is a tremendous intention. I am in the process of getting a few more for our company.
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UPDATE 11/22/2008:
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A few things I have view about since my last update.
First the drobo is not for everyone. If you are concerned about having the maximum available amount of your data as possible, this contrivance isn't for you. As their website CLEARLY explains, the drobo uses a graceful amount of data to protect you incase of a single drive failure. It also reserves some storage for overhead and for future expansion.
Second, before purchasing this check out the drobolator (http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html) . This is a calculator that shows how the drobo will address the hard drives you keep into it. You will peek exactly how worthy storage will be obsolete for overhead, protection, future growth and available to expend. If people were familiar with this page alone, it could attend solve a spacious fragment of the drobo's misconception.
Finally, I have tried to reply to the questions and comments of this review. So, there may be additional information there.
I believe both 1st and 2nd gen drobos, so I can do disclose A-B comparisons. Tag that I've space up both models with the identical hard drives: 3x 1TB WD green 5400rpm. These hard drives are ideal for the drobo: They are plenty speedy enough, but pace at 5400 rpm and so are quieter, acquire less power, and acquire less heat than typical 7200 rpm drives. (Putting 7200 rpm drives in a drobo is pointless.)
The drobo has so far done everything it is supposed to do. I've even yanked out a drive when it's turn on to test the raid rebuild. It rebuilt delicate, and I lost no data. The rebuilt on a 2TB volume took almost 1 day, but it did work.
Apart from the dumb run of USB and even Firewire compared to in internal raid array (which is something a lot of people complain about unfairly, since it is not data robotics' fault!), I have fair one complaint: The scheme is loud. Don't own their marketing materials that say that the 2nd gen drobo is quieter and cooler than the 1st gen. They don't provide any dB measurements, or anything quantitative. I can boom you, qualitatively, that both 1st and 2nd gen drobos are quite loud. The appear to consume the same crappy fan, which is probably the culprit. When the fan is off, even with all drives working, the method is soundless (those improbable WD green drives are soooo still) . But as soon as the fan turns on, the fan noise is annoying. I may be forced to void my warrantee by spending $20 on a suitable fan. Whey didn't they fix this jam in the 2nd gen model? It seems like a titanic mistake to me.
If you aren't putting this draw in a still room, then I have only clear things to say (so far!) . If you're putting it in a calm room, then it'll probably work but will probably annoy you a bit. I don't assume there's a better alternative product out there, though, so I give 4/5 stars.
To Data Robotics: Please, please, please keep in a superb quality fan. And never turn the fan off: Race it at 1000 RPM at all times, and ramp up the RPM with the temperature. It's such a simple thing to fix!
See mark at bottom for update to the myth here. Drobo CO did approach through and obtain our data restored. I am impressed by that.
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I will revise this review later if fable turns out to be anything other than what it now appears to be. We consume a Drobo as main disk array for Apple Mac that we employ for video editing.
Everything has worked dazzling for about 6 months. We have Drobo loaded with 4 WD 1,000GB drives. Everything is top notch equipment, with very strong surge protection and uninterruptable power supply, top of the line Apple computer. Okay, that's background.
The other day, Drobo stopped booting correctly. Called Drobo, and they nicely sent us another unit. Same predicament. Now they are saying to accelerate obvious software to further diagnose. Jam is that drives have to be recognized of course to hurry that software. It appears at show that something catastrophic happened in the Drobo unit that caused all four of these recent 1,000GB WD drives to fail at the same time.
We are now investigating which company to send them to in order to try to gather the data off of the platters themselves. Once we have our data attend, if we ever have our data help, and we acquire unique drives, what are the odds that they are going relieve into a Drobo unit? We will now utilize hundreds of dollars to try to recover what we can at the platter level.
The Drobo techs have been nice enough, but they act like this is some scrape of ours other than a major failure of their plan. Which I guess means it IS a jam of ours, to fix.
Update number one: There will be more. We had our computer tech expert arrive over and check everything that we have checked and that the Drobo techs had us check. He concluded there is nothing for it but that the drives are indeed now ALL lifeless and we have now sent the drives off to the experts in town that recover files from platters. I'll let you all know how that works out. Astonishing.
Update number two: Got assessment benefit from recovery company. The drives are all dreary. It will cost us $ 8,000.00 to obtain our data serve off of the platters. (That is, of course, on top of the costs of four slow 1 Terabyte WD drives and a Drobo unit we'll never trust again. Nor any replacement, frankly.) We are not definite yet what we will do. Drobo has indicated they may try to do something for us. I'll let you know if they do. (or don't)
Update number three (a couple weeks into this) : Nothing really happened since update two except that we are working through our best options for recovering or reproducing the information we lost on the drives.
Update number four: Drobo has offered to check our platters for us and notice if they can recover our data. The independent company's say for $ 8,000.00 is partly that high because of the proprietary RAID algorithm that Drobo uses (would have been a lower cost speak if it was more industry standard) . Maybe Drobo can recover the data more efficiently since they will better understand their beget RAID execute. I'll hold you posted from here!
Update number five: We received the unit abet from Drobo today. They got it all working again and we have all our data befriend. I am impressed that they were able to do this and that they were willing to do this. I wish they had suggested this option from the git go because it would have saved a lot of time and other efforts by our team. But, they really did reach through in getting this done for us. I have not talked enough with our team person in charge of this to know if Drobo was able to diagnose what happened but I do know it's working now and we have the data help.
