Too be fair the people with problems are always going to be louder than the people without any. I've never had any problems in the 6 years of owning drobos. No product is perfect, but if you're happy with what you're using that's all that matters. Oh, and drobos have had time machine support for years as well.
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Drobo Announces New 4-Bay Gen3 with USB 3.0, Enhanced Time Machine Support
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Too be fair the people with problems are always going to be louder than the people without any. I've never had any problems in the 6 years of owning drobos. No product is perfect, but if you're happy with what you're using that's all that matters. Oh, and drobos have had time machine support for years as well.
I am looking for a NAS solution like the 5N to store all my movies and tv shows for XBMC on my Intel Nuc. Maybe somewhere in the 5-10TB range capacity that does some sort of RAID. I should stay away from Drobo then? Any better suggetions?
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How does Drobo compare to Synology? I've been using Synology DS's for a few years, but am considering other brands. I mainly use mine for media storage connected via Cat 6 to my 2013 Airport Extreme and a 2012 Mac Mini HTPC, as well as Time Machine backups. Since it's EXT4 FS based, DSM 5 via AFP, SMB, NFS is the only way to go although I think some models now have HFS+ read/write support.
Hey people this is not a NAS so quit comparing it to Synology who does not even make a DAS. They are 2 different animals.
Drobos, or at least this model and most of their other models, are direct attached storage so they support being formatted to HFS+. They aren't the fastest, but work fine for my media storage needs.
One thing I will warn you about is that they have a volume limit of 16 TB. You can add more/larger drives to go above the 16 TB, but you'd need to create a 2nd volume to access the space. It's not a problem yet on the 4 or 5 bay models, though it will become one as drive sizes increase. It's also not a problem if you don't mind your data being separated across different volumes (I do mind so I'll be looking at other solutions when I hit that limit).
I agree. I've gone through 6 of them so far. Three personal ones and 3 business ones. An 8 Bay FS, 2 older 5 bay FS models, 2 Drobo S models, and a 4 bay model.
About to get the 5D and may just get this new model and sell both the FS and 1st gen 4 bay under my desk.
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Also agreed, but I wouldn't expect the general public to know this. They will just keep comparing Apples to Oranges while stating they don't like fruit.
The 5D does seem to have mostly resolved the performance problems that dogged earlier models but their useless support would still put me off buying another Drobo. I had to call them a couple of times with mine and each time they were a hopeless waste of time and even rude. For this reason I sold mine and moved on to a Pegasus which is rock solid although quite a bit more expensive.
What I never understand, is why people like the Drobos? Outside of being able to dynamically expand storage (which takes an eternity).... There are no other advantages over a simple 4 bay $100 Mediasonic USB 3.0 DAS. You can use OSX to create a RAID 1 and the price difference of $250 means you can buy a second Mediasonic....
Oh yeah, and the Mediasonic will run at full hard drive speeds....
Oh yeah, and the Mediasonic will run at full hard drive speeds....
Drobo no way
I got suckered into buying a 2nd gen drobo years ago from their relentless advertising on some podcast station.. I have constant issues with it not waking from sleep. It is slower than molasses. I actually use the USB port as the firewire port is even less reliable.
I somehow convinced a friend when I first got my drobo that he should get one too. It made me realize that you should never make suggestions to people to buy such things.
However, I do have to compliment the fact that when one of the drives died in the drobo, it worked as advertised. But over the long haul and for cost effectiveness.. It would have been far cheaper to just use a mirrored raid in some other type of NAS set-up like FreeNAS, or even between a couple externally usb drives.
I got suckered into buying a 2nd gen drobo years ago from their relentless advertising on some podcast station.. I have constant issues with it not waking from sleep. It is slower than molasses. I actually use the USB port as the firewire port is even less reliable.
I somehow convinced a friend when I first got my drobo that he should get one too. It made me realize that you should never make suggestions to people to buy such things.
However, I do have to compliment the fact that when one of the drives died in the drobo, it worked as advertised. But over the long haul and for cost effectiveness.. It would have been far cheaper to just use a mirrored raid in some other type of NAS set-up like FreeNAS, or even between a couple externally usb drives.
No mentions of QNAP? I have a first-gen Drobo (got off eBay for $100) and it works well. I would like to have the "app" capability of the QNAP units though.
The Drobo will create a redundant RAID 5 or 6, something you cannot do using a Mediasonic 4-bay ProBox, and an OSX software RAID. You can however get a hardware RAID 5 out of a 4-bay ProRAID for $200. So, point taken, but not for quite as inexpensive as you implied if you want data redundancy.
Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but I have a Drobo 5N and love it. 13TB of mismatched 2/3TB drives giving ~7TB of available dual-disk redundant backup + mSATA 256GB SSD "accelerator". I have it plugged directly into the latest gen Airport Extreme and have acceptable speeds - that went up after the recent networking tweaks of 10.9.2.
My wife and I both Time Machine over the network, we use Carbon Copy Cloner to full-disk clone to a .dmg once a week, I have Transmission set up to seed files even when I'm away from home, my iTunes movie collection streams from Drobo to MBP to multiple ATV's without a hitch, Plex serves music and movies to my devices when I'm away from home - and Transporter tech is "coming soon" to the 5n to let me host my own private "dropbox".
http://www.drobo.com/file-transporter/
I had a drive give an error <1 month after initial setup; Drobo support parsed the logs in a day over email and told me that the drive had not failed - but was likely to fail in the future. I removed that drive without skipping a beat, RMA'd it back to Seagate, received the replacement in 2 days, and popped it back in the Drobo with zero downtime.
I understand if you (or someone you know) was burned by a piece of tech, but my 5n has rocked - and continues to get better with updates.
My wife and I both Time Machine over the network, we use Carbon Copy Cloner to full-disk clone to a .dmg once a week, I have Transmission set up to seed files even when I'm away from home, my iTunes movie collection streams from Drobo to MBP to multiple ATV's without a hitch, Plex serves music and movies to my devices when I'm away from home - and Transporter tech is "coming soon" to the 5n to let me host my own private "dropbox".
http://www.drobo.com/file-transporter/
I had a drive give an error <1 month after initial setup; Drobo support parsed the logs in a day over email and told me that the drive had not failed - but was likely to fail in the future. I removed that drive without skipping a beat, RMA'd it back to Seagate, received the replacement in 2 days, and popped it back in the Drobo with zero downtime.
I understand if you (or someone you know) was burned by a piece of tech, but my 5n has rocked - and continues to get better with updates.
Drobos are garbage.
Should you have an issue, the software and hardware tell you different things. Their customer support is non-existent to the point that they like to blame you for everything.
And the fact they use proprietary code means when it fails you are crap out of luck.
Avoid Drobo at all costs.
Should you have an issue, the software and hardware tell you different things. Their customer support is non-existent to the point that they like to blame you for everything.
And the fact they use proprietary code means when it fails you are crap out of luck.
Avoid Drobo at all costs.
Complaining about a company being proprietary on an Apple forum.
Classic.
FWIW....I've been using a Drobo as my media storage solution for a few years now. Works just fine for me running over FW800. Mixing and matching drives is a nice feature.
The Drobo S runs the drives at full speeds too. I get maximum throughput using FW800 and eSATA out of my old school Drobo S.
Also, one needs to understand RAID to understand why the Drobo has the advantage for run of the mill users, and why the first gen 4 bays were so slow. Also, rebuilding a RAID takes just as long with any other RAID array. If I wanted to use anecdotal evidence, I'd say the Drobo S, Drobo FS, and the 8 bay Drobo FS rebuild faster than the Avid ISIS chassis, and the Facilis Terablock we have in our facility.
True, but this is what you'll get when it comes to brand favoritism and fanboy/fangirl nature.
Folks are still trying to compare NAS units to DAS units, and software RAIDs with hardware RAIDs.
My Drobo was rediculously slow.... Let me explain my problem with Drobos....
4 bay Drobo - $350 + 4 - 3TB ($100 each) - Total = $750 for 9TB of storage right?
4 Bay Mediasonic ($100) + 4 - 4TB ($140 each) - Total = $660... Set in RAID 1 gives you 8TB of storage
1st example is almost $100 more, uses a priorietary RAID and (based on my previous experience) is slow (transfer speeds) and takes forever to rebuild
2nd example is $100 less, loses only 1TB of storage, uses software RAID so it can be put in ANY enclosure and OSX will read it, all drives run at full speed and "rebuilding" is done very quickly (I had a failure and only took OSX about an hour to rebuild a 3TB failure).
So yeah, I don't understand Drobos.... I own one and have hated it for it's lack of speed and proprietary nature and *****ty software.
Would you recommend the 5D or this for storage between 5 people, 3 time machine backups, media server (Estimated space required to be about 8TB) for use between Mac and Windows and the OS X Server app.
Oh please!
Look, just because Drobo started out with a product that was good but not refined and great, doesn't mean that its still awful. I had the second gen Drobo and never had an issue other than it was slow. Then I upgraded and got myself the new Drobo 5D with thunderbolt and never had a problem. Yes, Drobo has their own propriety software and it has improved over the last 2-3 years. Sometimes companies make mistakes, they review their product(s) and make the necessary changes to make it better. I feel that Drobo has improved tremendously. As for Kelby, so he had to put Drobo down because his failed on him. He had an earlier version and Drobo may have had issues and unfortunately they didn't stand up to their name. Do you think Drobo would just avoid the problem? No, they may have fixed it and created even more products that works great.
As consumers we all make purchases and there are no guarantees that the product that you just bought might or might not work well. If it works, then you're in luck. If it fails on you, then it fails. Life goes on. Good for Drobo.
Look, just because Drobo started out with a product that was good but not refined and great, doesn't mean that its still awful. I had the second gen Drobo and never had an issue other than it was slow. Then I upgraded and got myself the new Drobo 5D with thunderbolt and never had a problem. Yes, Drobo has their own propriety software and it has improved over the last 2-3 years. Sometimes companies make mistakes, they review their product(s) and make the necessary changes to make it better. I feel that Drobo has improved tremendously. As for Kelby, so he had to put Drobo down because his failed on him. He had an earlier version and Drobo may have had issues and unfortunately they didn't stand up to their name. Do you think Drobo would just avoid the problem? No, they may have fixed it and created even more products that works great.
As consumers we all make purchases and there are no guarantees that the product that you just bought might or might not work well. If it works, then you're in luck. If it fails on you, then it fails. Life goes on. Good for Drobo.
Personally, I would just buy two 4TB USB 3.0 drives for about $300 and call it good. Then schedule nightly updates of the backup drive using something like SuperDuper or ChronoSync (or set it up as a Time Machine volume). This gives you 100% redundancy in case of a failure of a hard drive, or a drive controller.
I don't understand the usage case for something like the Drobo box in the home. RAID is not a backup solution. Someone who thinks it is will be in for a very rude surprise when there is a failure of the RAID controller hardware or firmware. So, after spending a ton of money on a Drobo box, you still need to buy a backup solution.
In a business environment, where you would like every single transaction to survive a disk failure, I can see the value of a RAID system (with additional backup).
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Bit of a ripp off..
Why buy this 4 bay when you can buy a 5 bar with Thunderbolt AND partition one volume for time machine another for data? Better support for time machine? What a load of crock, my partition has been running great. Took one click to setup
Why buy this 4 bay when you can buy a 5 bar with Thunderbolt AND partition one volume for time machine another for data? Better support for time machine? What a load of crock, my partition has been running great. Took one click to setup
I've had great luck with my Drobo 2nd gen. It's slow (21-24MB/sec), but it's been rock solid. It's saved my bacon a few times. I might get this too, because my other Drobo's running out of space and it's maxed out.
As for proprietary format, I've worked in places that had to recover RAID volumes. The success rate is really, really low, and the amount of work to try to recover anything is tremendous. The guy the wrote the disk driver implementations for the systems in question said that in general if your RAID dies, there's only a 10-15% of getting anything back - if you're lucky.
So your RAID may not be proprietary, but in real life it makes no difference whatsoever if it's proprietary or not. What matters is if your RAID implementation is adequately tested or not.
We bought 2 Drobo Pro's for the company I last worked for with 30 users. Never had an issue read/writing data from multiple concurrent users. WD RE4 drives were used.
Drobo FS was horrible (personal purchased). Emailed the CEO directly, he let me return it and buy a Drobo Pro for home at a discount. Huge speed improvement.
Any drobo with an FS after it is going to be much slower be it old or new models. The original Drobo's (USB/FW) were slow too.
The new 5D, Mini, and Drobo B800i and B1200i are fast. The B series also supports running VM instances - more so on the B1200i.
Anyone that says their 2012+ models of Drobo are slow, replace your drives. I run either WD Black or RE4's. If you are running WD Green - of course you'll have issues. Red isn't all that great either on the B series. Use the mSATA as well to help speed bursts.
Customer service - I've called tech several times without DroboCare. I've been told to run a Diag, email them. Got a phone call back with the problem fixed within an hour or two at most. They even swapped out a faulty unit at their expense. Haven't had to call support in the last 2 years so I don't know.
Personally, I don't think I'd recommend Drobo for business anymore though. So many other vendors offer longer support. 3 years is not long enough for a business. You need at minimum 5, but 7 years would be ideal. Most companies do tech refreshes on 5-7 year schedules.
Drobo FS was horrible (personal purchased). Emailed the CEO directly, he let me return it and buy a Drobo Pro for home at a discount. Huge speed improvement.
Any drobo with an FS after it is going to be much slower be it old or new models. The original Drobo's (USB/FW) were slow too.
The new 5D, Mini, and Drobo B800i and B1200i are fast. The B series also supports running VM instances - more so on the B1200i.
Anyone that says their 2012+ models of Drobo are slow, replace your drives. I run either WD Black or RE4's. If you are running WD Green - of course you'll have issues. Red isn't all that great either on the B series. Use the mSATA as well to help speed bursts.
Customer service - I've called tech several times without DroboCare. I've been told to run a Diag, email them. Got a phone call back with the problem fixed within an hour or two at most. They even swapped out a faulty unit at their expense. Haven't had to call support in the last 2 years so I don't know.
Personally, I don't think I'd recommend Drobo for business anymore though. So many other vendors offer longer support. 3 years is not long enough for a business. You need at minimum 5, but 7 years would be ideal. Most companies do tech refreshes on 5-7 year schedules.
What's the point of having USB 3.0 on a machine that can't even do full 2.0 speeds the last time I checked? I'm guessing it's purely marketing BS.
i love my gen 2 drobo, but i think ill give this a miss, I'm going to plumb for the 8bay drobo has towards the end of the year and move to that as an iTunes drive, the 4 bay just doesn't give me enough space for my iTunes library anymore (4x4tb drives, give 12tb storage, and I'm at less than 1TB left)
oh and I've been running WD greens with no problems, easily fast enough to max out the FW 800 connection i use, and can run multiple 1080p streams to multiple apple TVs as well as work as a file store.
oh and I've been running WD greens with no problems, easily fast enough to max out the FW 800 connection i use, and can run multiple 1080p streams to multiple apple TVs as well as work as a file store.