Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices

[imahawki]

OK, so Drobo will support USB 3 and Thunderbolt. What will it matter if it still has transfer speeds approaching 3.5" floppy speeds? They need to address the throughput of the device, the reliability of the device, and the proprietary nature of the device.

They don't WANT to address the proprietary nature. The market for a generic RAID enclosure is not what they're after. They're after an expandable storage pool that will take different sized disks of different brands and now, completely different types. If you don't have those NEEDS, don't buy one. I had exactly those needs.

I can't disagree that they work to improve performance but your floppy disk comment is a huge exaggeration. I encode videos that are on the DROBO to the DROBO and get encode speeds that match what everyone else with my computer (27" iMac i7 3.4) gets according to the Handbrake benchmark threads here. I also process photos from my 5DII and 7D including 20-30 shot panoramas and read/write times have never been a problem on my DROBO S. I understand the original DROBO was extremely slow, but I think they already HAD fixed many of the problems and this new model looks to be a move forward.

 

[HenryAZ]

You can go from thunderbolt to VGA or DVI but not the other way around. Basically they're saying you can terminate the chain after six devices.

Does this mean I can use the tail end of the chain as a mini-display port (to display port)? My MacMini only supports the highest resolution if the monitor comes into the TB port.

 

[ZipZap]

Would be nice if these companies would stop announcing and start releasing.

TB has been out for over a year, and they are only now announcing their intent.

 

[cuestakid]

cuestakid

the 5D will start at $850, per a chat I did with Drobo earlier.


At that price, with the USB 3 and dual Thunderbolt, as well as included thunderbolt and USB 3 cables, I say we may have the first product that is worth its price. I can see me upgrading to this.

Now if I can just live with the perforamnce adjustment for the green drives I have.....

 

[iMikeT]

How much for these from Drobo, $2,000?

 

[lannisters4life]

That video was hilariously Apple-like, but I've got a few questions for any Drobo experts as I'm not sure I completely get it.

Say if I got this Drobo mini, that takes laptop-sized drives, four of them, I'd need to at a minimum install it with two? One redundant and one that I can access? Then I add extra drives to increase my space? The Drobo website has an image showing a configuration of two redundant drives and two storage ones, why would you do that, if you only needed one redundant? If I mixed the type of drive, say two HDDs and one SSD, would that essentially negate the speed benefits of the SSD? Or could I say use two SSDs and one HDD, and use the HDD as the redundant drive?

In terms of speed, are these things used to directly work from or just as storage? With Thunderbolt, would you run applications directly from the drive, say even boot into another OS entirely stored on the drive, or aren't they quick enough for this?

I am not a video/audio engineer, so I don't need this from a work perspective, but I find the expandability and its failsafes against drive failure very appealing. I have had more HDDs, built-in and external, die than not die, and even though I keep time machine backups of my Macs, I hate the downtime that comes with the death of an HDD.

Thanks for reading.

 

[thederby]

it shouldn't really matter whether drobo's methods are proprietary or not... does it work? great!

besides, it's highly unlikely if your "normal raid" enclosure/nas fails you'll be able to drop those disks into a competing enclosure/nas and have usable data.

 

[yg17]

it shouldn't really matter whether drobo's methods are proprietary or not... does it work? great!

besides, it's highly unlikely if your "normal raid" enclosure/nas fails you'll be able to drop those disks into a competing enclosure/nas and have usable data.

If you're using RAID1 and your enclosure/controller fails, you can stick one of the drives in a single drive enclosure or hard drive dock and use it. I've done that on a couple occasions.

 

[lars666]

Would consider a buy if they really manage, as promised, to get the fan quieter. Don't know about current Drobo models, but I own a second generation one and it is unbearable loud for my taste when the fan kicks in ... (which it does a lot)

 

[applemotor]

Happy to see the two Thunderbolt ports. I hope there is not a trend towards making "end of the chain" devices with only one port. The tech companies will save money by having one port and nothing will be able to be daisy-chained. We will be right back where we started, and laptops will have lots of wires sticking out of the sides.

 

[needfx]

the guy in the promo said thrice "designed from the ground up"...

spot the apple marketing (brainwash).

 

[\-V-/]

Been waiting for this. Big Drobo fan. Has saved my bacon a thousand times.

 

[iPadPublisher]

We ditched three DroboPro units at our office after a series of failures caused some data loss. If it weren't for our backing up our backups, we'd have lost much more.

Slapping a new drive in kicks off this 24-48 hour rebuilding process, which in our case didn't work well

Best of luck OP.

 

[nwcs]

I can't disagree that they work to improve performance but your floppy disk comment is a huge exaggeration.

Of course it is an exaggeration -- to make a point. They've had faster interfaces for a while now but haven't lived up to the speed potential of those interfaces. And the fact they have USB3 or Thunderbolt on the horizon doesn't mean anything. You can support an interface and not use it effectively.

 

[Mike Oxard]

OK, so Drobo will support USB 3 and Thunderbolt. What will it matter if it still has transfer speeds approaching 3.5" floppy speeds? They need to address the throughput of the device, the reliability of the device, and the proprietary nature of the device.

Wow, you got throughput speeds as good as a floppy drive, you must teach me your setup The Drobo is ridiculously slow, to be honest it was so geriatric it was a relief when my wife dropped it and smashed it to pieces, put it out of its misery. Unless they've sorted the speed problems out from the start with the new devices I would stay well clear.

 

[polaris20]

If you're using RAID1 and your enclosure/controller fails, you can stick one of the drives in a single drive enclosure or hard drive dock and use it. I've done that on a couple occasions.

That's not at all universally true. If its a QNAP, Synology, Buffalo, or D-Link, they all use MDRAID, which is Linux software RAID. Even if it's a RAID 1 mirror you can't just pop it into anything and read it.

 

[Bartman01]

Wow, you got throughput speeds as good as a floppy drive, you must teach me your setup The Drobo is ridiculously slow, to be honest it was so geriatric it was a relief when my wife dropped it and smashed it to pieces, put it out of its misery. Unless they've sorted the speed problems out from the start with the new devices I would stay well clear.

The original Drobos were slow, but my USB3 Drobo S consistently hits mid 70's - mid 80MB/s speeds over USB3. It is not mind blowing fast, but it falls in between my slowest and fastest internal spinning platter drives from a performance standpoint.

If you needs are geared towards maximum speed (video editing/recording), these are not for you. For general use/backup/video server/etc. the current gen Drobo S works fine.

The two big complaints I always see from the 'I will never buy one' crowd are speed and it's proprietary nature.

They seem to have addressed the speed issue for 'normal' use. I am currently sitting with only 8% free space on mine, and no performance issues here.

The proprietary issue is a tradeoff. The biggest complaint here is that if the unit dies, you can't access the drive data without another Drobo. Kelby's complaint was that a dead drobo was holding his precious photos 'hostage'. So someone as smart as Scott really only had his really important/irreplaceable data on one single device with no backup? So if someone broke in and stole his drobo, or he had a fire, all of his stuff would be gone forever?

For me the convenience and flexibility of the device makes up for the proprietary way they do it. I understand that if the unit dies, I have to buy another unit to be able to access my data. I also don't have anything on it that is not replaceable either from original source media or a backup.

 

[foodog]

That said, I find Drobo draws 90% of its criticism from people who have never owned one and say they never will. There are a few vocal people who have had one fail and are pissed because they were too stupid to backup their data. But most of the actual owners are happy with them in my experience.

I owned two and they were both POS and dog slow.

 

[StrudelTurnover]

I think now that everything is so digital, i.e. photos, video, music, etc. people, no matter their skill level, owe it to themselves to at least understand that data doesn't really exist until it exists in at least two places. From there they can either figure it out themselves, or at least enlist a relative or friend who does know how to get reliable backups going for them in case of emergency. No system, no matter who makes it, is infallible.

I work in Archival/Records Management, and our saying is "three places". "At least two" leaves too much margin for error, though it is the practical reality for most individuals taught to back up.

Here's a good primer for regular folk. If a company like Pixar can have this kind of two pronged data disaster (the textbook definition of mission-critical data, I would say), there's really no limit to the potential FUBAR for anyone else.
http://blog.longnow.org/02012/05/30/how-toy-story-2-narrowly-escaped-oblivion/

 

[Bartman01]

I work in Archival/Records Management, and our saying is "three places". "At least two" leaves too much margin for error, though it is the practical reality for most individuals taught to back up.

Here's a good primer for regular folk. If a company like Pixar can have this kind of two pronged data disaster (the textbook definition of mission-critical data, I would say), there's really no limit to the potential FUBAR for anyone else.
http://blog.longnow.org/02012/05/30/how-toy-story-2-narrowly-escaped-oblivion/

My biggest issue with Drobo is that DR advertises it in a way that either explicitly or implicitly makes the non-technical users feel that it is in and of itself both a storage and a backup solution. It is a good 'grow as you go' storage solution that does provide protection against the most common type of failure (single drive failure) - but it is NOT in and of itself a backup of itself. Almost every 'my Drobo lost my data' stories from irate users come from the fact that they were relying on the device both as storage and as the singular point of backup for critical/irreplaceable data.

The second most common failure is what many users experience. A single drive fails with a second (or third) drive close to failure. The heavy I/O as it relays out the data to the new drive kills the second drive (or even third) that were marginal already.

 

[iPadPublisher]

The heavy I/O as it relays out the data to the new drive kills the second drive (or even third) that were marginal already.

we think this is what happened to our company, as the loss occurred during a rebuild. Second time, we believe files written to it while rebuilding were corrupted. Though they say you can continue using it, truth is that it's too busy. It was a shared working-files repository. Bad idea.

Whole office is on Synology now. So far so good. Haven't had a drive fail yet, so can't make that comparison, though we all see a faster file transfer rate.

 

[sapporobaby]

It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.

You do understand that ALL RAID is proprietary. You can't take a Drobo disk and stick it in a QNAP box, or Synology box, or vice versa. They are ALL running some sort of proprietary system. This is the unique selling point.

----------

Oh I do agree. Ideally
there would be a product that offers RAID 10 data storage, with a remote backup. Something the size of a Drobo or Netgear Stora.

Drobo isnt even designed for the home market though, so home users really need to look elsewhere for a decent home backup system.

IIRC HP did a fairly decent one running Windows Home Server however it was only RAID 1.

WHAT !!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've been using a Drobo at, wait for it, home for almost 2 years. Should I send it back based on your "opinion masquerading as fact"? A Drobo is fine at home, office, or anywhere someone is willing to pay money to purchase it and use it.

----------

the 5D will start at $850, per a chat I did with Drobo earlier.


At that price, with the USB 3 and dual Thunderbolt, as well as included thunderbolt and USB 3 cables, I say we may have the first product that is worth its price. I can see me upgrading to this.

Now if I can just live with the perforamnce adjustment for the green drives I have.....

Hey cuestakid,

Dump the Green drives. Get the Caviar Blacks. The Greens have the power saving thing that makes them go Tang-Uniform... I dumped mine and went all Caviar Black. I was speaking with Drobo tech support to see if I could simply take my drives out of my current Drobo S and put them in the new box but they did not know. They should know in a few days to weeks though.

 

[polaris20]

I work in Archival/Records Management, and our saying is "three places". "At least two" leaves too much margin for error, though it is the practical reality for most individuals taught to back up.

Here's a good primer for regular folk. If a company like Pixar can have this kind of two pronged data disaster (the textbook definition of mission-critical data, I would say), there's really no limit to the potential FUBAR for anyone else.
http://blog.longnow.org/02012/05/30/how-toy-story-2-narrowly-escaped-oblivion/

Sometimes it's not easy for an individual lacking in experience or money to have more than two though, but I do agree. I've got critical data in four spots at the moment.

My biggest issue with Drobo is that DR advertises it in a way that either explicitly or implicitly makes the non-technical users feel that it is in and of itself both a storage and a backup solution. It is a good 'grow as you go' storage solution that does provide protection against the most common type of failure (single drive failure) - but it is NOT in and of itself a backup of itself. Almost every 'my Drobo lost my data' stories from irate users come from the fact that they were relying on the device both as storage and as the singular point of backup for critical/irreplaceable data.

The second most common failure is what many users experience. A single drive fails with a second (or third) drive close to failure. The heavy I/O as it relays out the data to the new drive kills the second drive (or even third) that were marginal already.

I never really got the impression that they're infallible, neither from Drobo nor any other NAS maker. Anyone who thinks all they need is the Drobo (or any other NAS) for storage AND backup, and nothing else, is quite simply ignorant, definition #2.

 

[Mike Oxard]

The original Drobos were slow, but my USB3 Drobo S consistently hits mid 70's - mid 80MB/s speeds over USB3. It is not mind blowing fast, but it falls in between my slowest and fastest internal spinning platter drives from a performance standpoint.

.

Mine gave about 9MB/s on FW800, and a tad less on USB2. Slow enough for me not to bother replacing it with another one.

 

[sapporobaby]

Mine gave about 9MB/s on FW800, and a tad less on USB2. Slow enough for me not to bother replacing it with another one.

I haven't done any testing but I have a Drobo S connected to a Mac Mini via FW800. The Mini is acting as a media server with the libraries (iTunes, Aperture Vaults, etc...) sitting on the Drobo S. I stream videos from the Drobo to the Mini to an Apple TV2 without any problems at all. I have no idea of the speed but I see no problems. My Drobo constantly updates to a 4TB WD Share Space that soon will be replaced with a Synology DS 1512 (15TB)...