Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by archgrove on Friday June 18, 2010 @07:38AM (#1441891)

I've had my Drobo 18 months without a hiccup - It's not silent, but it's not noisy either. I've never had to contact customer support, so I can't really comment on that. I am marginally concerned by the fact that its death would mean I must have another Drobo to read the data, but this really isn't any different from most other hardware RAID controllers/NAS boxes, where the death of the card almost always means purchase of another identical card/driver combination to get your data back.

The point here is, Drobo/RAID/NAS are disk redundancy solutions - they cater for the fallibility of spinning magnetic platters, and never promise 100% reliability. Just like any solution, if you want to avoid data loss, you need to have an orthogonal backup system for when the other fails at a system level.

It sucks that he's had such problems with his Drobos, and it looks like the support he's got is subpar. This is not, however, the universal experience. Based on my experience, I'd be happy to recommend the Drobo to most people I know who want a simple and easy to setup solution for hard drive failures, with the big caveat that they still need at least one other backup solution.

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Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by imajes on Friday June 18, 2010 @09:53AM (#1442204)

I'd echo this experience; I have a drobo fs with the new wd caviar greens. It works like a treat and is very quiet. I'm next looking into a tape backup solution for longer term storage, but for now- the drobo is an excellent way to work with.

Tip: don't buy the old drobo, get the new one. Don't get the drobo share, use an airport extreme or similar disk-sharing network device.

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Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by jwr on Friday June 18, 2010 @02:36PM (#1443199)

Yes, I think your setup might work much better. The DroboFS is supposedly an improved version. And the DroboShare simply isn't a reliable device at all.

Still, after seeing the corruption and after trying their support, I don't think I'll want to buy any more Drobo products ever again.

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Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by napierzaza on Friday June 18, 2010 @02:14PM (#1443129)

So buy two things? The fact is that you can find something with a gigabit ethernet port built into the unit. Not a tricky dongle that doesn't offer the real thing, not a sketchy router-based SMB share. It's a bad idea to have two devices when you can have one. Especially if you can get a one-device solution that will transfer files faster over your network.

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Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by imajes on Friday June 18, 2010 @02:55PM (#1443260)

Actually, i disagree it's a bad idea to have two devices; I trust that the apple extreme will work fantastically to share a disk for me; they get the OS and the fs, so it's pretty straightforward.

A one device solution? Well, that'd be a router, switch, hard disk... (can you say, computer?)

sometimes we want stuff that's single purpose, done well, easy on the power/heat/etc. I now have an appletv on a turn-off power strip, enabling me to 'turn on' the tv system and have something running easily, rather than having to get my laptop out, an external disk, try and make it all work. Ugh. madness.

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Re:Here's why you should not buy a Drobo by cgomez on Friday June 18, 2010 @01:18PM (#1442947)

Ditto. I've been running a DroboPro with eight 1.5TB WD drives and the device has been running fine connected via iSCSI to a Mac mini and shared across the network via NFS. It's not loud, not silent but not loud. Read/write speeds are perfectly satisfactory, although not what I'd get with a software RAID or higher end setup (I get about 25-45MB/s read/writes, but it sounds like I have a different model than he does).

It is a bit unsettling that Drobo advertises these are completely fool-proof in their marketing materials but support, rightfully I may add, recommends routine backups. In the end, it's a JBOD RAID in a pretty enclosure with approachable software. For me, that works.

All I wanted out of my DroboPro was a way to combine eight drives and have an expandable dual-disk redundancy array. It's working like a champ for that.

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