Drobo Releases Pricing for Thunderbolt Storage Devices, Preorders Start Monday

[MacRumors]

Drobo has announced pricing for its two Thunderbolt and USB 3.0-capable storage devices, expected later this month. Units will be available for preorder at a number of resellers including Amazon and Drobo's own online store, starting Monday July 23.




The Drobo Mini starts at $649 with the Drobo 5D starting at $849. Prices include a Thunderbolt cable and 2-year warranty. These are US prices only, with pricing for the rest of the world being announced on Monday.

The company notes that initial demand for the Thunderbolt units have been twice what they've seen for similar product introductions.

Article Link: Drobo Releases Pricing for Thunderbolt Storage Devices, Preorders Start Monday

[kwikdeth]

$650 for that? The joke that is thunderbolt just gets funnier and funnier. Not even firewire had this kind of early adopter penalty...

[wickerman1893]

If apple wants to update their iMacs anytime soon I would consider buying a drobo mini. Too bad it's useless right now with my Mid 2007 iMac...

[basesloaded190]

About twice as much as i am really willing to pay for something like that right now.

[peteullo]

Oh great! More affordable Thunderbolt products!

[SuperCachetes]

Originally Posted by MacRumors

The company notes that initial demand for the Thunderbolt units have been twice what they've seen for similar product introductions.

Consumers note that initial pricing of the Thunderbolt units are twice what they're willing to pay...

I do wonder what their "initial demand" projections were...

[ArcaneDevice]

I'll stick with my Synology NAS thankyouverymuch. Works with everything.

[Peace]

Originally Posted by peteullo

Oh great! More affordable Thunderbolt products!

To be fair there has never been a cheap Drobo.

[motoracer1486]

Who would actually shell out this kind of money?

[Rocketman]

So everyone posts to complain even though the device has features and benefits different from other NAS products and also initial demand is great.

Trolls.

[bb426]

I'll buy 50. As soon as I win the lotto.

First world problems.

[glutenenvy]

...decimal point. Once they find it I might try one.

[rmwebs]

Originally Posted by Rocketman

So everyone posts to complain even though the device has features and benefits different from other NAS products and also initial demand is great.

Trolls.

If initial demand was great there wouldn't be a need for such an obscene price. I get it...Thunderbolt is new technology, but in this day and age, licensing aside it costs pennies to produce the components used in these products.

Thunderbolt will continue to be a failure until they get real on pricing. It's simply too expensive for even a pro user to consider over the alternatives.

[Peace]

Originally Posted by Rocketman

So everyone posts to complain even though the device has features and benefits different from other NAS products and also initial demand is great.

Trolls.

True. I was reading over the specs and it looks good. I'm guessing they updated the software because it lists 10.8+ compatible.

This could be a beast of an external device and well worth it.

[disclaimer]

I owned a Drobo before.

[/disclaimer]

[Tuckrat]

Originally Posted by supercachetes

i do wonder what their "initial demand" projections were...

5?

[Gemütlichkeit]

Come back with price point that's worth it.

[fxapple]

I've had a Drobo for about a year and do not see the cost vs benefit to go Thunderbolt. Actually not really impressed with Drobo in general.

[auero]

I don't think some people here understand that this isn't aimed at people who want to store and or backup photos of their cats. This is for people who need massive storage and need it quickly.

Drobo still sells their original NAS which are expensive as well (for what it really is). If you need one that bad, you still have options. This is still a new technology which is JUST beginning to reach the PC market. You'll pay a premium for being an early adopter.

[Kaibelf]

Originally Posted by kwikdeth

$650 for that? The joke that is thunderbolt just gets funnier and funnier. Not even firewire had this kind of early adopter penalty...

The real joke is failing to grasp that brand-new technology costs a lot and that the price drops over time. The other joke is ignorantly being dismissive of it based on the initial high price, despite the fact that Dell is about to bring supporting devices to market, and pretending that everything won't change after that.

[ps45]

Originally Posted by auero

I don't think some people here understand that this isn't aimed at people who want to store and or backup photos of their cats. This is for people who need massive storage and need it quickly.

Drobo still sells their original NAS which are expensive as well (for what it really is). If you need one that bad, you still have options. This is still a new technology which is JUST beginning to reach the PC market. You'll pay a premium for being an early adopter.

Actually, previous Drobos were not snappy enough to be used for much more than backup storage. The problem with Drobos (and I have several myself) was never the bottleneck caused by firewire, but rather the SLOOOOW processor and irritating sleep schedule. This, by the way, is ignoring the issues with reliability. If they have updated the internals sufficiently so that it works faster, then perhaps it has some use for high bandwidth media usage.

[haravikk]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

Thunderbolt will continue to be a failure until they get real on pricing. It's simply too expensive for even a pro user to consider over the alternatives.

Thunderbolt will continue to be expensive until it starts to become more available. Most Macs may now have it as standard, but that's a much more professional market.

The speed of Thunderbolt is great, but it's got limited benefit to your average consumer in practise, as drives fast enough to really benefit are either using RAID or backed by SSD's, neither of which is desperately cheap, and the latter of which isn't going to give the kind of capacity most people want from an external drive, as most people just use them for backup and nothing else.

Other example products that people are excited about are things like external GPU's, but they're a niché product as well as many people won't need a more powerful GPU.

I've no doubt that Thunderbolt will become much more widespread eventually, but it really only meets fairly specific demands; the most widely useful thing it can do is simplify your system so you only need thunderbolt ports and nothing else on the machine itself, since hubs can easily easily meet any demand for USB, firewire etc. But that still represents a significant investment, even if prices were to plummet tomorrow, so again it's not really something immediately useful to consumers.

[Eidorian]

Originally Posted by haravikk

Other example products that people are excited about are things like external GPU's, but they're a niché product as well as many people won't need a more powerful GPU.

MSI GUS II where?

[nutmac]

$849 for 5D is actually pretty decent considering it includes $49 cable AND older Drobo S (FW800, eSATA, USB 3.0) retails for $799.

Considering Drobo S is now discounted to $580 on Amazon, I hope to see 5D discounted to sub $650 next year.

[MikhailT]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

If initial demand was great there wouldn't be a need for such an obscene price. I get it...Thunderbolt is new technology, but in this day and age, licensing aside it costs pennies to produce the components used in these products.

Thunderbolt will continue to be a failure until they get real on pricing. It's simply too expensive for even a pro user to consider over the alternatives.

Except that's very inaccurate. It does not cost pennies to produce those new components. Only one or two companies are even producing the active cabling components in the thunderbolt cables, that's why they're super expensive. As far as I'm aware, only Intel are the ones producing those TB controllers and they're expensive as well.

There aren't any mass producers for those components, once the PC makers get on TB, it'll get cheaper. It used to be that 20mb drives were selling for $1K.

It's simply supply and demand here, not enough supply to meet demand = high prices initially.

[jaduffy108]

It's hard for me to find a single good thing to say about my experience with Drobo products.

First, the FW800 products are S_L_O_W...as in USB2 slow. Will the thunderbolt Drobos also perform below expectations? I would definitely want to see some benchmarks before dropping any cash.

Second, "failure rates" are high and it's a proprietary system so your data is held hostage. Of course, Drobo offers a recovery service. Ka-ching. $300 please. See Scott Kelby's public declaration from a few weeks ago "I'm done with Drobo!" and the 100's of comments generated. Just to be clear here, I'm not talking about a drive failure, but the drobo itself failing. Data on the drives is fine, but you can't access it.

Drobo customer service sucks.

By the time you put some drives in the new 5D, you can buy a 4TB Pegasus for less.

Drobos might be fine for Time Machine BU's, but that's it.