Anyone using Drobos again?

[Brandon Fraley]

I had one a few years ago and basically just stopped using it because it was too slow to ever be convenient. Then I hear a lot of bad stuff on these forums, culminating on Jarred's post saying he'll never use them again.

I've heard that some of their newer products are winning people back, and when I was given some used, large internal drives I decided to swap them into my drobo for shits and gigs. After installing the 4 firmware updates released over the last 2+ years since I'd last used it, I was shocked at how much faster the drives were working then I remember (the old ones, before putting the new ones in).

Anyone have changed feelings about drobos these days?

Thanks!

-B

 

[Mark Wilkinson]

I've got a D5 - no issues to report. Though not nearly as fast as a SAS raid.

 

[Peter Stelzhammer]

I still did not get over a big data-loss I had with an original Drobo (2.0, the FW800 unit) when I tried to upgrade to bigger disks… to be fair this was a few years ago; first I've been very happy with my unit (like for the first 1.5 years) - but after it ran full to about 80-90% transfer speeds went really really slow (with that I mean like to 3-4 Megabytes/Second, upon Rebuild process only like 0.5-1 Megabytes/Second - you can imagine what that means when you want to manage the 3 TB of data on it; writing a full backup was literally impossible at that point) and right at the point where I was putting in bigger disks (hoping to solve this issue by doing so) the unit crashed upon the rebuild process. Afterwards I cam to the conclusion that part of it was user Error (the Partition-size I created in first place did not include possible drive-upgrades) and part of it was bad luck (one drive just failing at the wrong moment)… nonetheless - I lost 3 TB worth of data in the end (nothing "important" but it sure did hurt). Maybe with a RAID6 level this would not have been happened, maybe with a better understanding of how this unit actually works it would not have happened… but well… it happened…

I really don't know if I should give them a 2nd chance now; in the meantime I'm doing pretty well with individual drives and regular backups (at pretty neat price-points; a single 2 TB or 3 TB drive plus some external enclosure costs literally nothing anymore)…

Maybe I'll give it another shot at some point - but definitely not without running additional backups!

 

[Martin Weiss]

No.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

If you want a great NAS, there's much better products than Drobo. I use Synology and they serve (no pun intended) me well. For direct attach storage, you have so many superb options these days too.

Graeme

 

[Bruce Allen]

If you want a great NAS, there's much better products than Drobo. I use Synology and they serve (no pun intended) me well. For direct attach storage, you have so many superb options these days too.

Graeme

+1! Totally agree!

I have a Synology DS4213+ and love it. Great speed, great reliability and quiet enough. And I'm running the poor thing with only 0.5TB of free space (that's not much free if you have 12 WD Red 3TB drives in it). So far it is holding up to my stress-testing fine

So yeah, I need to buy another one! Damn you Synology for eating into my personal film production fund by being so awesome! But I know it'll save my ass when I come back with tons of footage.

I can't believe that I ever did things with a collection of drives. Being organized is so better. Well, I guess I can remember - I was a broke student!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Martin Weiss]

Græme, what are you doing here. Go back to your son!

Congratulations.

 

[Colter Ripley]

These are a terrible idea. Man, I had a Drobo-S, 5-bay version. It worked great until it went down and I had to spend 800$ on data recovery.

Drobos are pretty stable but when they go down, they are proprietary file-system so it's tough to recover data from them. My guy couldn't do it. It's a scary system.

Now we only work with mirrored Raid-0 stuff

 

[Jason Comparetto]

Martin that was a perfectly timed drop of a Bush-clip

 

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi Brandon,

I got a Drobo mini in for testing, as it was of the first multidrive units that had both a thunderbolt and a USB 3 interface. This in spite of the fact that my previous experience with Drobo has been quite bad.

Second verse same as the first I'm afraid. The product is a fail. It's throughput is slow and quite variable, and i have had a lot of failures, several firmware updates later, and it still sucks. My advice is give it a pass.

Hope you are doing well,

Steve