No, it's not. You can restore your data using any standard PC with an Ubuntu live CD:
http://www.synology.com/en-us/support/faq/579
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Drobo Announces New 4-Bay Gen3 with USB 3.0, Enhanced Time Machine Support
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No, it's not. You can restore your data using any standard PC with an Ubuntu live CD:
http://www.synology.com/en-us/support/faq/579
too bad that 4-bay mediasonic so is fugly. no way would i put that thing near my desk.
And seeing that they are using EXT4 as their primary filesystem, that puts any Linux distro into play to be used for any sort of data recovery. So definitely not proprietary by any means.
Not for nothing, but looking at this, plus the article that 9to5mac posted a couple of weeks ago, I was initially thinking of getting a Mac Mini. Now, I may not, and just keep my MBA and connect it to a monitor when I want to use it at my desk. Let personal cloud handle everything else, and I'm good.
BL.
How about the Vantec also only $100 (and reminds me a lot of the New Mac Pro)
http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-3-5-In...8&qid=1395870523&sr=8-1&keywords=vantec+4+bay
Or the San Digital that (usually) runs about $140....
http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-...=1395870566&sr=8-5&keywords=san+digital+4+bay
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It's the risks associated with the Drobo's proprietary nature that are the problem. If your Drobo dies, you can't read the disks. You're screwed until you get another Drobo.
People should at least be aware of this before making a purchase, not have their concerns dismissed with some facile point about Apple also having proprietary technology in various areas.
Horses for courses, obviously.
But if your 'course' involves large amounts of critical data you need quickly or frequently, such as video editing, then Drobo turns out to be a bit of a donkey.
Not pooing on anything - just sharing my experience people who may be in the same situation. They fooled me twice, so... uh... won't get fooled again.
But if your 'course' involves large amounts of critical data you need quickly or frequently, such as video editing, then Drobo turns out to be a bit of a donkey.
Not pooing on anything - just sharing my experience people who may be in the same situation. They fooled me twice, so... uh... won't get fooled again.
I have previously owned, and still own a Drobo, so I can reinforce my opinion with actual experience.
Firstly - the article is factually incorrect. ALL existing Drobos feature the ability to create a Time Machine backup partition (or multiple) of a fixed, limited size. This is not a new feature, and in fact, is a feature of the software, not the hardware.
Secondly - Drobos are not slow. I can stream HD content over Wifi (and WAN!!) from my 5N's media server, not to mention, host a mail server, web server and incrementally backup the device to both off-site and on-site hosts. The steamed content is actually re-encoded on the fly based on my bandwidth which, if you think about it, is actually pretty impressive.
Thirdly - Drobos do use a proprietary file system. This is not good. If you're Drobo dies the only way you can recover the data is by popping the drives into another Drobo (of the same generation). Part of the reason this is a big issue is because as a company Data Robotics only offer 3 months of advance RMA support and phone support. After that point you have to ship your broken Drobo off before a replacement arrives, and make do with email support. Not cool. Of course you can just pay them extra to extend support with Drobo Care, but we shouldn't really have to should we?
In conclusion - I love lots of things about my Drobo. But the aforementioned proprietary nature of the file system scares the crap out of me, especially when I have valuable data on the device. Therefore my next device will be based on FreeNAS - opensource, adaptable and FREE.
Firstly - the article is factually incorrect. ALL existing Drobos feature the ability to create a Time Machine backup partition (or multiple) of a fixed, limited size. This is not a new feature, and in fact, is a feature of the software, not the hardware.
Secondly - Drobos are not slow. I can stream HD content over Wifi (and WAN!!) from my 5N's media server, not to mention, host a mail server, web server and incrementally backup the device to both off-site and on-site hosts. The steamed content is actually re-encoded on the fly based on my bandwidth which, if you think about it, is actually pretty impressive.
Thirdly - Drobos do use a proprietary file system. This is not good. If you're Drobo dies the only way you can recover the data is by popping the drives into another Drobo (of the same generation). Part of the reason this is a big issue is because as a company Data Robotics only offer 3 months of advance RMA support and phone support. After that point you have to ship your broken Drobo off before a replacement arrives, and make do with email support. Not cool. Of course you can just pay them extra to extend support with Drobo Care, but we shouldn't really have to should we?
In conclusion - I love lots of things about my Drobo. But the aforementioned proprietary nature of the file system scares the crap out of me, especially when I have valuable data on the device. Therefore my next device will be based on FreeNAS - opensource, adaptable and FREE.
I'm joining the chorus of those saying that Drobo units are junk, and the customer-service stinks to high heaven. Avoid Drobo products at all costs.
I had to return three Drobo units before I finally got one that kinda-sorta works. (It's painfully slow, shuts itself off without warning, and sometimes doesn't respond even when it's turned on.)
Also, on the second replacement, I was told by the customer-service rep that I would have to pay for the return-shipping of the defective unit even though it was still under warranty. I explained that the return-shipping costs should be Drobo's responsibility, and asked to be put in touch with a supervisor. The supervisor also blew me off.
Eventually, my complaint reached the company's head of Asia-Pacific sales, a guy by the name of Philippe Cazaubon.
I explained to him that the cost of flat-rate shipping would be the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee at a Tokyo Starbucks, so I couldn't figure out why Drobo would refuse to cover that under a warranty. It wasn't the money that I was upset about, it was the fact that Drobo wasn't willing to accommodate a customer.
He replied with a snotty email that said, "Just send it back. Next time I'm in Tokyo, I'll buy you a cup of coffee."
Unbelievable...
I had to return three Drobo units before I finally got one that kinda-sorta works. (It's painfully slow, shuts itself off without warning, and sometimes doesn't respond even when it's turned on.)
Also, on the second replacement, I was told by the customer-service rep that I would have to pay for the return-shipping of the defective unit even though it was still under warranty. I explained that the return-shipping costs should be Drobo's responsibility, and asked to be put in touch with a supervisor. The supervisor also blew me off.
Eventually, my complaint reached the company's head of Asia-Pacific sales, a guy by the name of Philippe Cazaubon.
I explained to him that the cost of flat-rate shipping would be the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee at a Tokyo Starbucks, so I couldn't figure out why Drobo would refuse to cover that under a warranty. It wasn't the money that I was upset about, it was the fact that Drobo wasn't willing to accommodate a customer.
He replied with a snotty email that said, "Just send it back. Next time I'm in Tokyo, I'll buy you a cup of coffee."
Unbelievable...
Yeah, so if your device has a problem, you have no way to access your files. It's a pretty big deal. I will not be getting another one.
I've never seen a tech company inspire so many heated hate filled rants. It pretty much guarantees that I will never buy a drobo... Just don't want to take the chance.
Thanks so much for the info! Very helpful. Thankfully, I spent a good year studying codec's and such in order to fully digitize my media - Blu-Ray's being the main bugger. Using MakeMKV and Handbrake (finally supporting DTS passthru in m4v containers), I was able to rip ~50 GB BD's, keeping DTS surround sound, etc. at near lossy via Handbrake down to ~8-10 GB's a movie (took 8-10 hours per encode on my - now replaced - 6-Core Mac Pro5,1). Compared them to the original on both a Pioneer Elite 60" Plasma and 55" Samsung LED Smart TV, it was well worth the effort, saving me a lot of HDD space so I shouldn't need more than a 4 Bay NAS. Playing them through my Mac Mini allowed much better flexibility than even my old jailbroken AppleTV 1 and 2.
Right now I have a simple Synology DS212J running the latest DSM 5. While it suits my needs for movies, music, etc I sometimes find it's a bit slow. Checking out NAS's, I noticed Synology pushed what appears to be a complete line refresh. The DS214 is tempting, but I'd like full HFS+ support (don't ask, just my thing). If DSM 5 supports this on some Synology models, and the reviews on Drobo I've read aren't stellar, I may stick with a new Synology NAS unless there are others out there that are better.
Yep, the Synology system is the single greatest appliance I've purchased (next to my Apple products of course
). I can ssh into my unit and have full access to the entire file system. I'm able to connect it online and make it easily accessible externally so that I have all my data on my personal cloud and not worry about any provider either losing my data or selling it to someone else. I've even setup the system to backup to CrashPlan storage so that all my data is backed up to the a 3rd party cloud that I can restore from if I have a multi drive failure (the data is encrypted so I still don't have to worry about anything distributed without my permission).
So you're saying that your experience is the only one that counts and everyone should just ignore the negative experiences multiple people have had? Yeah...you sound like someone that's unbiased and objective for sure!
I had a Drobo FS, it didn't last long. It was faster than the ReadyNAS NV+ I had before it, but it was still sooooo slow and the Drobo Dashboard had issues connecting to it unless I rebooted it. I've read multiple different reviews of the more recent DAS Drobo models, such as the 5D...and they are still much slower than similarly-priced competitors. Drobo does have a following of people that do seem to stick by the company and their sub-par performing products for some reason, I don't know why. Glad you like your Drobos, though.
Unfortunately, 200MB/s IS slow in today's market. A Drobo 5D for over $650 and all you can get is 200MB/s over Thunderbolt? The Areca ARC-5026 4-bay does nearly 500MB/s over Thunderbolt using RAID5. Over 600MB/s using RAID0.
If you're happy with the $/performance, great. I'd be pretty upset if all I got was 200MB/s out of a $650+ RAID enclosure and that's why I don't even bother looking ay Drobo for storage anymore.
I've had my 2nd gen 4-bay Drobo for about 3-4 years now. The device itself has ran great, it's quiet enough that it's always sat in my living room, though I'll agree that the older devices were slow (I assume this is no longer true with newer hardware, as is often the case).
If I had to buy a new RAID device today though, it wouldn't be a Drobo, for 2 reasons:
1) There is absolutely no diagnostics that you can do on your own. I had a drive that was failing (took 2 years to finally fail) but I couldn't identify which one. Because of it, the whole system was incredible slow, to the point where I couldn't stream video over ethernet. I would expect in most DAS devices one could look at logs of diag utilities without needing to contact support (and pay for it if your out of warranty). Their proprietary nature doesn't bother me, but from what I read at the time they kept their logs encrypted because they contained secrets to their proprietary algorithms.
2) As mentioned in the thread, if it dies, I have to find another Drobo (perhaps of the same model and generation?) to get at my data. With hardware RAID, it could be as hard as finding another similar RAID controller (same model or manufacturer), or could be as easy as just dropping the drives into another enclosure of any make/model. Software RAID could of course be even easier.
Hope that helps someone.
If I had to buy a new RAID device today though, it wouldn't be a Drobo, for 2 reasons:
1) There is absolutely no diagnostics that you can do on your own. I had a drive that was failing (took 2 years to finally fail) but I couldn't identify which one. Because of it, the whole system was incredible slow, to the point where I couldn't stream video over ethernet. I would expect in most DAS devices one could look at logs of diag utilities without needing to contact support (and pay for it if your out of warranty). Their proprietary nature doesn't bother me, but from what I read at the time they kept their logs encrypted because they contained secrets to their proprietary algorithms.
2) As mentioned in the thread, if it dies, I have to find another Drobo (perhaps of the same model and generation?) to get at my data. With hardware RAID, it could be as hard as finding another similar RAID controller (same model or manufacturer), or could be as easy as just dropping the drives into another enclosure of any make/model. Software RAID could of course be even easier.
Hope that helps someone.
For your information I paid $555 for my Drobo 5D, and the Areca is $850. It also requires identical drives and does nota plow mix-and-match, so upgrading storage requires buying 4 new drives at once (plus a spare for good measure). And while there are good uses for that kind of speed it would not benefit my work at all.
As long as you're happy with it then that's what matters, there's compromise with everything. For people that want or need speed the Drobo still doesn't fit the bill at that price point. Is it better than before? Absolutely. Is it as fast as comparable models from other companies? Absolutely not. That's all I'm saying.
What would you recommend for a thunderbolt 4- or 5-bay hw RAID solution then? Something that I can buy diskless. I really wanted to check out the Pegasus2 but Apple is the only source and they list 1-2 months wait time which would have been well after my return window. However if there is really something better then I might return this and wait until I can get something else.As long as you're happy with it then that's what matters, there's compromise with everything. For people that want or need speed the Drobo still doesn't fit the bill at that price point. Is it better than before? Absolutely. Is it as fast as comparable models from other companies? Absolutely not. That's all I'm saying.
I am sorry your Drobo is slow, I've been able to rebuild two failed 3TB drives from the 8 bay in about 45 minutes, but machine was only at 15% capacity. My FS and S models are the same, I offload finished projects and haven't filled either to full capacity.
You can't compare the Drobo to a simple simon box like that. Any joe schmoe box with 4 3.5" or 5.25" bays, and eSATA ports, will work as you describe. Hell, the Pegasus, CalDigit, Sonnet, and G-Tech boxes are even more expensive, and even more proprietary.
I get that Drobos have a bad rap with some, but every product/brand has it's issues.
For a diskless hardware RAID that won't break the bank I would recommend an Areca, they have been receiving very good reviews and feedback. They make a 4-bay and an 8-bay unit. I actually just ordered the Areca ARC-5026 4-bay unit after doing quite a bit of research. Areca seems to be getting equal or better reviews than the Pegasus these days as well.
Another option is to get something like the OWC Thunderbay IV and do software RAID since that's simply a TB -> SATA enclosure, the downside is that OS X doesn't support RAID5 so you would have to get on-board with the SoftRAID 5 beta if you wanted RAID5, otherwise you could do RAID10 natively with OS X.
I'm going to be putting 4x3TB drives into the Areca and doing RAID5, that will give me ~9TB usable and should last me nearly forever.
IMO, the whole thin provisioning thing that Drobo, Synology, etc do is great for the home user that wants to start out small/cheap and grow over time without having to reformat every time. For professionals, that's not really a factor. I don't know anyone in the professional world that only has a single array and/or no long-term/archival storage. That's a disaster waiting to happen, a single copy of a piece of data sitting on a RAID is not a backup, so the argument some have about having to reinitialize/reformat to add more space should be an inconvenience at most and not a critical problem and that's why it doesn't bother me that things like the Areca don't have thin provisioning, flex RAID, whatever you want to call it.
I actually just sold my Synology DS1511+ this week in preparation for going with the Areca. It was reasonably fast (generally had no problems filling a 1GbE pipe if you were doing large file/sequential reads or writes, but random and small file access time and throughput suffered) but I decided to shift gears and needed something faster.
Everyone's needs are going to be different, so it comes down to an individual's budget and needs.
Correct. RAID is not a backup. However, Time Machine on RAID is. Sometimes, the Time Machine drive fails, but you don't know it until after the source drive fails. This helps prevent that, while also allowing for more backups.
Without having any personal experience with Drobo, I have found, when doing some extensive looking into them on the web, that their users (or former users) appear to be sharply divided into those who love their units, and those who for various reasons --running the gamut from poor legacy support and reliability, to proprietary software problems and customer service, and everything in between --swear to never ever buy them again.
Even though those kinds of mixed reactions, to a lesser degree, always show up, no matter what product you 'research', this gives me reason to pause, when it comes to something as crucial as data back-up.
I'm also not a fan of Raid 5, which their 'Beyond Raid' essentially is an improved, but proprietary flavor of. Perhaps the 'Drobo Gen3' will be a departure for the company, and address some or all of the reliability and software problems of previous generations of Drobo, but I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude before plunking down my hard-earned cash.
How can you not compare? If in the end, you are looking for redundancy, and OSX has built in software RAID 1, then how can you not do a comparison? The only advantage that Drobo has over any other enclosure is that you can dynamically expand the RAID. Most can not do that. With that said, in order to get that you have to use their software and their proprietary RAID. As someone who almost got bit by a RAID controller going down (Dell Perc 5), I can tell you that having to worry about finding a replacement is NOT something anyone wants to go thru.
Now I use Software RAID 1, because when I want to move my drives from one enclosure to the next (regardless if it is internal, USB 3.0, eSATA, etc. etc.), I can do that and OSX will know how to deal with those drives.
For a home user, software RAID 1 in OSX is simple and fool proof and is all one needs especially since you can buy 4TB drives now for $140 (on sale). And since Drobo isn't known for their speed, Home/Consumer is all these are geared towards.
Cheap USB enclosure dies? No problem, buy ANY other enclosure (quick run to staples/office depot/bestbuy) and throw them in and you are up and running.
As we've said, it's a nice solution, but not what the Drobo, G-Speed ES, Sonnet and Caldigit enclosures were built for.