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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

DROBO....

Jarred Land

Jarred Land

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I am at the end of my rope with Drobo.... over the years I have always tried the new models as they came out.. and one by one they would die, loose data, or just stop working. Jim , the smarter man, had one a year or so ago and it conked out after a month and erased them from his memory... me, I don't seem to learn. I Just got the newest Drobo Pro a few weeks ago... spent 4 days trying to get it to work.. it would come up, i would transfer all my data ( 20 hours of copying ) and then a day later it would nuke itself.

Sent Drobo a support ticket with all the info.. got an automated reply to the ticket. 2 days later a note about a voice mail that never was received and then 8 days later an actual real person ( I think ) responded to the ticket.

Please if our customer service ever gets to that point someone shoot us.

Thank god I don't rely on the Drobos for anything important and we use proper solutions from proper companies.. .. but man o man, I bet you some put their life's work on these things.

Scary Stuff.
 
I'm surprised they are still in business. I have never come across them in my work but I do remember how cool they were when they came on the scene. I don't know of anyone who even talks about their stuff anymore since every company under the sun is now in on the attached storage game.
 
customer service ever gets to that point someone shoot us. ok that funny.

But on a serious note.
I cant think of any company thats as fast to getting back as RED is.

You guys are so good at what you do and so easy to get help from, its a touch deceiving i feel like hes my friend. =)

Here Ryan Biel take my money, thank you.
 
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L. Langer said:
I'm surprised they are still in business. I have never come across them in my work but I do remember how cool they were when they came on the scene. I don't know of anyone who even talks about their stuff anymore since every company under the sun is now in on the attached storage game.
Click to expand...

The only thing that drew me to them was the multiple size random drives; and because of that the ease of expandability. I Don't know anyone else that does quite the same thing. Just 2 bad about the ticking Time Bomb part.
 
Jared,

This is the shit that every one hates cell phone companies and banks are especially bad. I few years ago a friend of mine posed a very interesting tactic when dealing with this sort of corporate time sink runaround. He explained; he calmly and patiently goes through all of the hoops, gets put on hold for hours, transferred from department to department. Than after all is said and done he finds the address of the accounting department and invoices them for his time. The kicker he has been payed...... twice.
 
I don't use Drobo, but I basically assume that whatever I use will fail. Which I think is the right approach :)

My 2c:
Buy two RAIDs. One fast "primary" RAID. Another "backup" RAID. Can be cheap - OWC makes little 4-drive boxes for like $250 that run well via eSATA if you're on a low budget. Make 'em RAID-5 - or RAID-6 if you're hitting 8 drives or more.

Buy nice big fast drives - Hitachi 3tbs for example. Try to buy the drives from different locations, so that they aren't all manufactured on the same date (with potentially the same manufacturing flaws).

Now, buy two sets of drives for the "backup" RAID. One set of drives sits in your backup RAID, the other set of drives sits in a Pelican case with anti-static foam, in a different physical location.

Set up a profile using SuperFlexibleFileSynchronizer (yes, that's really its name) to sync from the current set to the backup RAID. Set it to delay deletions by a few days. Set it to verify copies (so it uses a checksum to make sure that the stuff actually wrote to the drive instead of blindly trusting OS X or Windows).

Every few weeks, take all of the drives out of the backup RAID and swap them with the drives in the Pelican case.

If you have laptops, other computers, set up a profile for them to back up to a folder on your primary RAID as well. This will automatically get propagated to the backup RAIDs.

That way you have:

onsite:
- primary RAID
- backup RAID (maybe a few days out of date, with deletions a few days behind that)

offsite:
- backup RAID (a few weeks out of date, but that's good if you accidentally formatted your primary RAID or there was some kind of catastrophic filesystem error :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Heh... We were just talking about them in another thread. I have a Drobo Pro that has been quite reliable for three years. I find the iSCSI interface to be weird, however, and don't like that the OS has no idea how much free space there is. Beyond all that, if you have any idea how to put a raid together, the allure of the Drobo fades pretty quickly.
 
Jarred, you're a smart nerdy guy. Build a FreeNAS and be your own tech support. Mine has been flawlessly churning away for over 2 years now, and cost about 80% less then a Drobo.

Make sure you set it up using software RAIDs. Yes, they are slower but hardware RAID is dependant on your motherboard. Five years from now when your MB dies you will have a very hard time finding that exact model and version to restore from.
 
A year ago I switched from Drobo to Synology's DS1511+. Never regretted it once. Its awesome, and expands to 45TB fast network backup storage (for a system running on 1gb LAN). Highly recommended.
 
Seriously Jarrad KILL it off...

I have a Promise - Pegasus R4 thunderbolt - SO much better - Miles better .

The Drobo blows (I had one)

Mike
 
Yaque Silva-Doyle said:
Jared,

This is the shit that every one hates cell phone companies and banks are especially bad. I few years ago a friend of mine posed a very interesting tactic when dealing with this sort of corporate time sink runaround. He explained; he calmly and patiently goes through all of the hoops, gets put on hold for hours, transferred from department to department. Than after all is said and done he finds the address of the accounting department and invoices them for his time. The kicker he has been payed...... twice.
Click to expand...

Love this story... :)
 
Paul Nordin said:
A year ago I switched from Drobo to Synology's DS1511+. Never regretted it once. Its awesome, and expands to 45TB fast network backup storage (for a system running on 1gb LAN). Highly recommended.
Click to expand...

Same here. I have the DS1511 automated so it backs up to a couple of DS411j's and it's been working superbly.

Graeme
 
haha, yea, if you already have a consulting invoice around or something just calculate your time and send it in. I find that most of the time we spend so much time trying to figure out what went wrong and how the system actually works that chances are you know more than the Person on the other end of the line reading some script.
 
My colleagues DroboPro became self aware in the 2nd week of November '10 - For the good of humanity we destroyed it with a chainsaw.
 
Drobos are shit. I tried the first model they released. Then tried the "Pro" one a while later after someone tried to tell me it was much better. Won't listen to that guy again.

Bought both of mine through Newegg... returned both for a refund.

For the same money (or less), the Promise and G-Tech desktop RAIDs are a whole lot better. I've got a 6x1TB Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID on an iMac here and it's great. Easy to swap over and plug into my MBP if needed. The G-Tech G-Speed ES units have been working great over eSATA too.

Also have a few SansDigital SAS enclosures connected to ATTO RAID controllers and have been very happy. Wish the SansDigital cabinets had redundant power though....
 
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