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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....

client brought a drobo to set as a backup solution once. the sucker didn't even mount on esata, only worked on fw800, and locked up my finder on transfers. I told the client to return it, the one and only encounter with drobo in person, and told myself never again. even consumer grade, network raids are better than drobo, no clue how they stay in business with so many faulty units.
 
I have 2 Drobo Pros, 1 Drobo 5 bay and 1 Drobo 4 Bay
why so many? None of them have broke and like Jarred the idea of the expandability etc. I really liked, none of have died yet but these days I'm hearing more frequently that these die super easily...
Might give Synology a shot and back everything up before it's all too late!

The unfortunate thing is, I do also buy all the drives from one dealer because its of the discount and all, perhaps should change up and shop around,

The dumbest thing ever I noticed though and spoke with my IT guy about this was that the Drobo's are SO DAMN SLOW on FW800 compared to something like a GTECH and I am using all the same drives, sizes and types... (I never by seagate because they've always failed!)
Even I believe the network server for backups is faster then my Drobo and doesn't freak out as easily when mass amounts of data are being shoved into it
 
I'll buy a Pegasus R4 4TB Raid and a Pegasus R4 8TB backup Raid (TimeMachine). Don't like Raid1, always two separate (raid-)machines.
 
For private use I think they are quite ok. I'm on a normal Drobo (4-Bay, FW800) equipped with 5.5 TB (4x2) and still happy with it - but I use it not for "work", I use it only as Backup/Storage device. The only Problem I had once was related to WD Green-Series harddisks which are not at all recommended for RAID-use anyways (at least by WD) so it was no surprise and that was something one could look that up in advance because these problems are known (TDLER-related, massive slow-down and crappy data-rate, should be fixed with newer Drobo series). And it seems to have trouble with direct Timemachine-Backups sometimes (slow speed) - so for that I use a separate drive because it's more convenient.

But what I do think;
The Drobo-people are not really the best at communication how to correctly use and set up the device. I think many data has been lost just because of this - an example; they tell you that you can expand the unit anytime with bigger drives at _any_ time. And it works (pretty slow when migrating and not setting up new though). BUT you really have to take care of the volume-size and of the allocation of reserved space in advance. If you don't take care here you easily loose all your data even with the RAID Level when you want to upgrade (if you exceed the safe limit for expansion and loose the wrong drive you shoot your volume/partition). Sounds scary but if you do it right (using a fixed partition with little less space than of the harddrives installed in first place) you wont run into any troubles here...

After all I'm quite happy, got it early 2009 an it's still running - quite some time for consumer hardware (it's the non pro so I consider it consumer grade)...
 
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I've always heard bad things about Drobo, which irks me because I like the effortless RAID management. I liked the idea of upgrading a 4 drive array, buy buying four new faster drives and slowly swapping them in and letting it rebuild.

Also no worries about having a matched set of drives or any such. Just grab whatever drives you have and go.

Right now I've sort of given up on them.

I'm looking for the commodity priced Thunderbolt enclosures ... like whatever OWC comes up with to replace their QX2.
 
I have two of the early Drobos.. They are the worst piece of hardware I every owned.. Not only did it take about a year for them to support 3TB harddrives (whats the point of having creating 16TB partition, when they only can support 2TB drives I dont get it) but those bastards runs slower and slower the less space you got on the units. Now I've filled them both up, only leaving a couple of GBs space worth left, and then are crawling down to something like 15KB/s unless I start erasing data.. Seriously the idea of swapping harddrives was fun, but their products are just crap. I have told everyone I met that plan to have some kind of NAS that whatever they do, don't buy a Drobo. Not now, not ever. If I would ever re-live my life, I hope I saw Qnap in my order basket instead of Drobo, and my life would have been happier :)
 
I bought a first gen Drobo, and what a bumpy ride it's been. Just last week a harddisk died, and the Drobo is still working on re-creating the structure a full week later. A week where it is not protected against disk failure or power problems. And I cannot upgrade to drives larger than 2TB because Drobo has EOL'd their product. At some point they wanted me to pay for Firmware fixes.

Gets me a) angry b) to realize just how RED is spoiling us in terms of customer service/dedication

I'll keep using the Drobo as a backup-backup, but never with a good feeling. Certainly won't buy any of their newer products.

They had something going in the beginning, but once the Investors wanted results, it went downhill.

For now it's single harddisks and LTO backups for me.
 
I have a pair of Drobos. They haven't really been a problem aside from just being slow, and a couple of times just going off on massive rebuilds for no apparent reason. But despite their flexibility I've never been happy with them. If you ask me, this calls for a RED Raid...
 
Martin Weiss said:
For now it's single harddisks and LTO backups for me.
Click to expand...

Hi Martin, what LTO backup would you suggest? I am looking for something like this...
 
Yeah, I've had a lot of difficulty with my Drobo aswell. I had a 4 bay version with 2tb drives and something went down with it and I lost ONLY THE MOST RECENTLY ACCESSED FILES!

SO basically the last two projects that I was working on were ruined. It eventually caused 6 weeks of delays trying data recovery, hiring someone etc and then I finally had to tell the clients that the project was unrecoverable and unable to be finished. Costing me approx 6 thousand.

Drobo was slow to deal with and finally sent me a replacement. I sold it right away but there aren't really that many options for a decent RAID.... I have a 16tb setup now.
 
Colter Ripley said:
Yeah, I've had a lot of difficulty with my Drobo aswell. I had a 4 bay version with 2tb drives and something went down with it and I lost ONLY THE MOST RECENTLY ACCESSED FILES!

SO basically the last two projects that I was working on were ruined. It eventually caused 6 weeks of delays trying data recovery, hiring someone etc and then I finally had to tell the clients that the project was unrecoverable and unable to be finished. Costing me approx 6 thousand.

Drobo was slow to deal with and finally sent me a replacement. I sold it right away but there aren't really that many options for a decent RAID.... I have a 16tb setup now.
Click to expand...

Most vendors are pretty up-front that a RAID is not a replacement or excuse for a good backup system. I have a cheap 4*2Tbyte enclosure but I always make sure I have additional backups because even though the RAID *should* be OK, it is not always.

Losing the most recent files/changes is not that odd because they are likely to be cached, or the journal writing "in process" for journaled filesystems, so that's very likely gonna be the first thing to get damaged.
 
Don't go there!
We have used the "pro" units as transport drives over a period of two years, worked pretty well....
....Until they started failing. A simple reboot could trigger data corruption on multiple drives, and make the stripe set unreadable.
On one occasion I spend three months with their ticket support system without any luck, their final suggestion was to spend $40000 dollars at their preferred data rescue service.
Calling up that service was a fun experience with sound bytes like this: "Ahh another DROBO unit" "We are preparing a class action suit, wanna' join?"

Using LTO4 as my main backup solution saved the day....simply rock solid backup and has never ever failed me.

They seem to use more funds for enclosure and website design than quality components and solid firmware
 
I have a new Drobo-S hooked up via USB 3.0 and I have to say it's never given me a problem. I have it set to spin down when it's not getting used, so it does have to warm back up when I start pummeling it with stuff, but it's never failed or seemed slow or anything.

Just thought I'd toss some balance out there. :)
 
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