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Is the Drobo the way to go?

HE15MAN

HE15MAN

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 3, 2009
955
14
Florida's Treasure Coast
I am in the purchasing stage of my Mac Mini HTPC setup, and I need to figure out what I am going to do for storage of the files that I want to share across my network. Would the Drobo be the best and easiest way to have your data backed up anad easily accessible? I know that the Drobo puts things in their own format and it can take a long time for the files to be replicated if a drive goes bad, but other then that, it seems to me to be the easiest and most straight forward data sharing and backup option out there...


THanks!
 
DO those work in the same manner? Just plug in the hard drives and it does all the copying and such on its own? I just like the sleek black look the Drobo has also. Can you go more into detail about the issues you had with it? Seems most the reviews I have read the people love them
 
Sorry to hear about bad experiences, but mine has been a dream.

It's hooked up to a mini and is a server for all users at home. Great setup, could not be happier.
Can absolutely recommend it.
 
Bye Bye Baby said:
Sorry to hear about bad experiences, but mine has been a dream.

It's hooked up to a mini and is a server for all users at home. Great setup, could not be happier.
Can absolutely recommend it.
Click to expand...

I agree. Most of them are fine and work great. I have had no issues and there is nothing widespread that is wrong with them. Just do not plan to ever edit video with it, because it is much too slow for that. Great for iTunes though.

I have about a 1TB library on my Drobo and stream/sync with several Apple TV's. No issues whatsoever.
 
zedsdead said:
I agree. Most of them are fine and work great. I have had no issues and there is nothing widespread that is wrong with them. Just do not plan to ever edit video with it, because it is much too slow for that. Great for iTunes though.

I have about a 1TB library on my Drobo and stream/sync with several Apple TV's. No issues whatsoever.
Click to expand...

It is slow with firewire 800?
 
HE15MAN said:
DO those work in the same manner? Just plug in the hard drives and it does all the copying and such on its own? I just like the sleek black look the Drobo has also. Can you go more into detail about the issues you had with it?
Click to expand...

Where to start.. Drobo declaring a perfectly good drive "bad" and taking it out of the array (the drive later tested fine on a stand-alone system).. Drobo doing 4-6 hour long re-builds of the file system for no apparent reason.. The same issue also happened twice to a colleague of mine, who happens to be a NAS professional.. So I know it's not just my unit being faulty.

On top of the reliability issues - crappy I/O performance even over FW800.. my old USB-attached drive gave me better I/O. Forget about writing to a disk and simultaneously streaming HD video - the whole system comes to a crawl.

Sure it's a nice pretty enclosure, and may be OK for home backup.. but no good for any serious use.
 
I've had a Drobo 4bay firewire hooked up to my iMac for about 6 months now with zero problems. Bought it brand new along with 4 brand new Western Digital Green 1TB drives and have had the thing up and running nonstop since I installed it.

While I'm not a "NAS Professional" (I can't even type that with a straight face) I'm not sure the Drobo is what you are looking for. The Drobo is a great drive to plug into a computer which acts like an external USB drive. I'm not sure if this would look good in your living room next to your TV. If there is a way for you to hide it - sure, go for it.

If you are wanting to use it as a NAS drive (which costs extra for their dumb add-on), which I've never done - I would be a little suspect. I remember when I was looking at it as an option, all the reviews were soso at best.

If you are looking for a simple NAS solution - keep in mind where you are going to store it and how loud it's going to be. I had a Buffalo 4TB drive in the 2nd bedroom and it was so damn loud that no one could sleep in there. Although a wonderful drive, just too loud. Thats why I moved to the Drobo which has a lot of flexibility and I was able to move it to a place where noise wouldn't be an issue.

Hope that helps some. I think in the end if you even go with a Drobo you'll probably be happy.
 
HE15MAN said:
It is slow with firewire 800?
Click to expand...

Perfectly adequate for streaming video. I have at least three users connected and streaming iTunes movie/DVD rips all throughout the house.

I use WD Caviar Black drives because they offer a larger cache. Never had any issues with stuttering or dropped frames etc.

Even the HD (apple dowlnloaded content) streams with no problems. I don't ever use Plex etc (tried them but never liked them and never saw the advatages).

I would say that the Drobo is the way to go. The expandability and the backup are a must if you have a very large and very expensive digital library.
 
Had a Drobo for 6 months now with WD Green HDs inside. I use it to store my Referenced Masters for Aperture. Absolutely no problems whatsoever. Upside with Drobo is the ease of use and the fact that you can mix drive sizes. If you are to get an enclosure - expensive and needs the same size drives, I would recommend an eSata interface - which would require an eSata card.
 
My Drobo has been very reliable and I've not lost any data during its time here which has included upgrading various drives. I think it is a bit slow with large copies over FW800 compared to other devices, but for streaming its fine and for jobs like backing up, I don't think speed is a great issue as such.

Is anyone here using a Drobo Share to share their iTunes libraries? Am thinking about trying one, but have heard mixed reports about whether its up to the job or not due to slow network speeds. Some say its far too slow, while others seem to be saying it performs pretty much as expected for a network device and that this is fast enough, even for video.

Any opinions?
 
ascender said:
My Drobo has been very reliable and I've not lost any data during its time here which has included upgrading various drives. I think it is a bit slow with large copies over FW800 compared to other devices, but for streaming its fine and for jobs like backing up, I don't think speed is a great issue as such.

Is anyone here using a Drobo Share to share their iTunes libraries? Am thinking about trying one, but have heard mixed reports about whether its up to the job or not due to slow network speeds. Some say its far too slow, while others seem to be saying it performs pretty much as expected for a network device and that this is fast enough, even for video.

Any opinions?
Click to expand...

I don't have a Drobo (would love to get one) but I have heard people using the PogoPlug with their Drobo. This way its accessible locally and remotely. Opens it up to many uses and gives it network access for half the price.
 
Irritatingly high latency

While the Drobo is fast enough to stream video without any real problems, I find the file open/seek times quite irritating. Combine that with Drobo's difficulty with multi-tasking and you end up with a laggy and unresponsive desktop. It's a constant irritation and I am looking for a replacement. My current Drobo will be relegated to Time Machine backups.

I've also found that Drobo's don't play nice with Firewire 400 devices (I've had mine replaced once already). Put a FW400 device on the bus and the Drobo will lock up after transferring a few hundred gigabytes. Remove the FW400 device and the problem goes away. This happens with different devices (iSight camera, Elgato EyeTV).

It's too bad, because apart from the performance problems, it's the right idea.

A.
 
+1 for Drobo. 6 Months strong no problems.

Why not Edit the original post and make this a poll? I'm kind of curious as to what the consensus is.
 
Looks like the Firefly server doesn't let you stream video, so even with Drobo Share running it, you'd need a computer in the middle of it and an Apple TV.

Hmmm, back to the drawing board.
 
HE15MAN said:
It is slow with firewire 800?
Click to expand...

I use the USB only version and have had no problems with streaming. The only slowdown I ever have is when transferring 100+ GB of movies and images, but I don't do that often, and you have to sleep sometime.

My only gripe is that it is loud. I run a rather large projector, Mac Mini, XBOX 360, and Drobo in the same space and the Drobo is about 5 times louder than all of the others combined. I am too cheap to buy the DroboShare, and have considered storing it in another room somewhere.
 
Alrescha said:
While the Drobo is fast enough to stream video without any real problems, I find the file open/seek times quite irritating. Combine that with Drobo's difficulty with multi-tasking and you end up with a laggy and unresponsive desktop. It's a constant irritation and I am looking for a replacement. My current Drobo will be relegated to Time Machine backups.
Click to expand...

+1. If you're going any kind of concurrent I/O to Drobo (e.g. multiple apps accessing the data, or doing multiples writes and reads at the same time).. Forget about it - the whole system comes to a halt.

If all you need is a Time Machine target - Drobo is probably fine (all my other issues non-withstanding). But for any kind of serious use, it doesn't cut it.

And don't even get me started on DroboShare - another overpriced and slow-performing add-on for something that should have been included in the base system (simple Ethernet port). Can you tell I am NOT a Drobo fan? :)
 
I have a V2. I love it for what it is (expandable storage, reliablely serves moves up to the whole network). I would recommend it.
 
hitekalex said:
+1. If you're going any kind of concurrent I/O to Drobo (e.g. multiple apps accessing the data, or doing multiples writes and reads at the same time).. Forget about it - the whole system comes to a halt.

If all you need is a Time Machine target - Drobo is probably fine (all my other issues non-withstanding). But for any kind of serious use, it doesn't cut it.

And don't even get me started on DroboShare - another overpriced and slow-performing add-on for something that should have been included in the base system (simple Ethernet port). Can you tell I am NOT a Drobo fan? :)
Click to expand...

Well then what other cost effective method is there?
 
Happy With It and its limitations

I really like my Drobo. I use it for time machine backups - MacPro & MBP. It also holds my aperture library and I have about a gig of movies on it.

For time-machine it's a no-brainer, it just works happily in the background and no issues. I feel relaxed and confident knowing my data is pretty much safe.(at least a lot better off than before the Drobo).

Aperture is OK once up and running, but it does lag a bit. Not enough to piss me off, but noticable compared to when I had my library on a local disk.

As for streaming videos to my ATV - no issues at all.

As previousy mentioned though - do 2 or 3 of the above tasks at the same time and you will run into performance issues. I very, very rarely have that issue. If you want some piece of mind, then it's a great product. A NAS RAID enclosure is really the only other option you have for data security, backup and network access - but I think probably more expensive(at least in Australia it was going to be).
 
HE15MAN said:
Well then what other cost effective method is there?
Click to expand...

As I mentioned, I have had very good experience with OWC Mercury line of enclosures. They're FW800 capable and very reasonably priced.

I do not run RAID, and instead I do my own nightly data replication across the disks with ChonoSync. This gives me full control over the data I need to replicate and makes my data failsafe from the enclosure-level failures. My 2TB drives are formatted as standard MacOS GUID partitions, and therefore are readable by any system without the enclosure (unlike say Drobo-formatted drives that are only readable by Drobos).

But OWC enclosures also support RAID-5, if you prefer to go that route. Looks like a bare bones 4-drive OWC enclosure is just $330. So I'd check that out.
 
That looks pretty sweet! I'll bear that in mind when I outgrow my 1.5tb media drive.

Overall I've been very happy w/my OWC products. I've had to replace the power supply on my enclosure twice but I don't think that's OWC's fault rather than the power spikes that are prevalent in the Tampa Bay Area.
 
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I have a FW800 drobo feeding mu iTunes library of over 2TB of content to TWO Apple tvs.

Have not had a single problem from Drobo. Not one, not ever.
 
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