Drobo buying tips for a novice. Advice needed please

The DroboShare sucks; it's slow and slow. And expensive.

The Drobo does the job when the drives aren't full; when they are, you have to pull one out and then depending on how much data you have, wait from a day to a week for all the data to be "protected" again. For example, I just replaced a 1.5TB drive with a 2TB drive and so far it's taking about 180 hours+ to rebuild. I still have another 2TB drive to put in; so for a grueling 2 weeks my data is at risk.

Of course otherwise it's a great storage solution.

Great thread, thanks for the advice. Right now I think I'm settling on the Buffalo LinkStation Quad as I'm in need of a gigabit-equipped NAS (and none of this DroboShare via USB business). Still have to take a look at QNAP but I think the LinkStation is in the lead right now.

alphaod said:

The DroboShare sucks; it's slow and slow. And expensive.

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I'd love to see an in-depth performance review of the Drobo vs other RAID solutions in the same price range.

We are debating buying a Drobo vs something like the Buffalo Linkstation. I wish someone had a deep analysis of read/write speeds etc.

Drobo Experience

I have used several models. I am using a drobo pro now. It is connected via the ethernet cable to my macbook (iscsi). The machine is great as you can mix and match drives. I have dual redundancy running.

I have spoken to a lot of people on the drobo. I have never lost or encountered any problems, but never had a hard drive failure when using it. I have added and removed drives with no problems.

Like anything in life there is no guarantee. I use the drobo as my primary drive and have a 2TB drive as a backup to the drobo. (I have less then 2TB of data currently). Could the drobo fail? Corruption is always possible. But I feel safe with the system and my experience using it. Would I buy it again, YES. The simplicity of mixing drive sizes and never powering the unit down is a big plus. Data is always online and accessible. Just follow the rules and procedures from the drobo people when shutting it down.

Now if you are doing heavy duty video processing, you will not beat machine internal storage access with proper drives installed. BUt externally the drobo may appear costly at first glance but when a drive fails how much is that worth and how much will it cost you to attempt to get your data back?

Hope this helps. Check ebay as I have seen some great deals there from legitimate resellers.

Usb Drobo No!

it connects with an ethernet cable to your ethernet card. I created a subnet ip address 10.x.x address to keep it private and share out what I want others to access. I also protect private data by using sparse disk images stored on the drobo I can mount anytime.

MUCH FASTER THEN USB !!!!!

So you are not stuck with usb on the pro model.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140398719874#ht_1931wt_1092

play2win said:

The simplicity of mixing drive sizes and never powering the unit down is a big plus. Data is always online and accessible. Just follow the rules and procedures from the drobo people when shutting it down.

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After spending hours on the net reading various reviews, this is my summary:

Drobo specific advantages:

1. Can mix different drive sizes.
2. Hot swappable

RAID Box specific advantages:

1. Faster write speeds
2. Cheaper (initially)
3. If box dies, can buy any other companies raid box.

Now which one is cheaper gets unclear if you factor in that someday you will need more space. For sure, the Drobo box is more expensive than a RAID Box initially. However, factor in that you are pretty much stuck with the same size drives and that you have to buy all new drives when you want to increase your storage space. A person buying RAID is more tempted to spend more cash upfront on bigger drives. Someone buying a Drobo knows that they can incrementally increase their drive size later.

i dont know about you guys but has anybody else noticed the fan in the Drobo is quite loud when it kicks in? Nobody seems to have mentioned that yet but seems to be quite common

RetroGlide said:

So if I were to own one of the WD My Book edition of drives and there was a "My Book" hardware failure leaving the drives inside ok. Would it be possible to retrieve the info off those drives by just putting them in an enclosure and connecting them via USB/Firewire/esata etc?

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It doesn't work. Scott Kelby wrote it:

"Scott, can’t you just pop those drives into something else and get your photos back?

Nope. It’s a proprietary system that only a drobo can read. Sigh.

I went to their site, followed their troubleshooting guide, and it still just cycles on/off (by the way, as I mentioned above, this isn’t the first time this has happened — drobo has had to replace my entire drobo unit [not including the drives] before).

In fact, this was the fourth recorded incident Brad and I have had with drobo so far. And while you’re waiting for your new drobo, you cannot access any of your photos or files on your bricked drobo. You’re basically locked out."