Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices

[Mike Oxard]

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)...

My figures were done using Blackmagic. I hope they have sorted out the speed problems, as they are a good solution for a lot of people. We've moved on now, a mac with a bigger internal drive and external drives getting cheaper meant I could change the way we work, so we don't need a huge storage capability anymore.

And as a reminder to everyone, it doesn't matter what raid system you are using, when your enclosure gets dropped and smashed to pieces, you haven't got any backup. When it happened to our Drobo, I didn't even bother trying it, just reached for the backup and away we go. Make sure everything precious backed up locally and offsite, three copies!!!

 

[sapporobaby]

My figures were done using Blackmagic. I hope they have sorted out the speed problems, as they are a good solution for a lot of people. We've moved on now, a mac with a bigger internal drive and external drives getting cheaper meant I could change the way we work, so we don't need a huge storage capability anymore.

And as a reminder to everyone, it doesn't matter what raid system you are using, when your enclosure gets dropped and smashed to pieces, you haven't got any backup. When it happened to our Drobo, I didn't even bother trying it, just reached for the backup and away we go. Make sure everything precious backed up locally and offsite, three copies!!!

My friends think that I am crazy for running CAT6 in my apartment between my network components but I want as much speed as possible. They also think that I am over the top for having the Drobo backing up to the WD (Synology on the way) and having main backups of my photo libs to various drives...

 

[Mike Oxard]

My friends think that I am crazy for running CAT6 in my apartment between my network components but I want as much speed as possible. They also think that I am over the top for having the Drobo backing up to the WD (Synology on the way) and having main backups of my photo libs to various drives...

Let them mock! My friend nearly got divorced after smashing a portable HDD that had the only copies of their honeymoon and early baby photo's

 

[thederby]

My friends think that I am crazy for running CAT6 in my apartment between my network components but I want as much speed as possible. They also think that I am over the top for having the Drobo backing up to the WD (Synology on the way) and having main backups of my photo libs to various drives...

i have data on multiple raid arrays in-house, but they're all backed up to an offsite location (www.crashplan.com).

 

[alembic]

I use an old Core2Quad server that I originally had collocated, it now sits in a standard desktop case with a RAID 10 setup, and does a nightly backup to a private RAID10 backup server I have over in the US. All data is encrypted locally and remotely, and is sent over a secure VPN.

This way you get the best of both worlds - a local backup and a remote backup that is secure.

I'm looking to set up remote backups. Could you roughly outline the hardware you use; S/W on both ends and their configuration? I've got about 3TB of data on two Linux file servers (D-Link DNS-323). Thx.

 

[polaris20]

I'm looking to set up remote backups. Could you roughly outline the hardware you use; S/W on both ends and their configuration? I've got about 3TB of data on two Linux file servers (D-Link DNS-323). Thx.

Probably the easiest way would be to set up a RAID'd machine at a remote point, install Crashplan on both, and then replicate the data. It's free, and automatic. You could go fancier with VPN tunnels or secured WebDAV, but Crashplan is certainly the easiest.

 

[eucsstamticc]

Has anyone put any thought to the fact that this is being put out in conjunction with a new iMac, "sometime next month" that will also have USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt.

 

[sapporobaby]

i have data on multiple raid arrays in-house, but they're all backed up to an offsite location (www.crashplan.com).

And how long do you think it would take to send somewhere around 4TB offsite over the Internet? Unless Crashplan comes to my house to get the drive their service is a waste of time and effort. I go from Drobo, to Synology, which contain my iTunes library and photos as well as some applications. I back up photos and files to a 1TB external drive that I can grab in a flash if need be.

 

[alembic]

Sorry for being lazy, but with crashplan, you first replicate your data locally, install crashplan on both machines, and then move the duplicate offsite where any deltas are then automatically updated from the local machine? Otherwise how do you send 4TB of data over the wire when the local cable company has a 300GB monthly cap?

 

[sapporobaby]

Sorry for being lazy, but with crashplan, you first replicate your data locally, install crashplan on both machines, and then move the duplicate offsite where any deltas are then automatically updated from the local machine? Otherwise how do you send 4TB of data over the wire when the local cable company has a 300GB monthly cap?

I currently live in Finland. I have 350 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, and no data caps. But still, trying to move 4TB of data over the Internet seems like a futile exercise. Unless of course I am not getting how Crash Plan actually works.

 

[rmwebs]

I'm looking to set up remote backups. Could you roughly outline the hardware you use; S/W on both ends and their configuration? I've got about 3TB of data on two Linux file servers (D-Link DNS-323). Thx.

Basically the specs dont matter too much as its only doing backups, however my local server is:

- Intel Core2Quad (Q6600)
- 8GB DDR3 RAM
- 4x 2TB SATA
- A cheap RAID 10 card (sorry, dont know the make, it was a cheapo one I found on eBay)

This is really overkill for a backup server, even a crummy little Intel Atom with 2GB ram would be sufficient. As I mentioned before, it was a server I used to have colocated, so put it to use as the backup server.

For the remote server, I have a dirt cheap budget server from Burst.net - a word of warning, they are absolutely crap with support, so dont use it for hosting or mission critical stuff. It's fine for a personal backup system however.

The specs for that machine is:
- Intel Xeon E6500 (Dual core)
- 2GB RAM
- 4x 2TB SATA (raid 10 card)
- Remote reboot port (a must with burst unless you're happy waiting upto 48 hours for a reboot)
- Unmetered 100mbps connection (burst offer this very cheap).

I was considering moving to one of their newer 100TB servers, however probably wont do so for a while.

For running the backups I use a custom rsync script. I've basically got it set to keep 2 days of backups. I've basically got it setup so that the local backup server can access the drivers on all computers in our house, and keeps them backed up in their own directories.

Both servers run CentOS. I also have a private web server setup on the remote server for testing (I do a lot of web app development), this is just a standard 'LAMP' setup.

The biggest issue is the transfer time. It's a lot better than it was (my ISP upgraded us to 100mbps last month) but still takes a good 2 hours to perform the backup.

I've been considering moving to a closer server, such as the ones offered by kimsufi in France. If I could, I'd use a VPS, however there dont seem to be any VPS providers that dont mind you using the VPS as a backup server.

 

[radiogoober]

Sorry for being lazy, but with crashplan, you first replicate your data locally, install crashplan on both machines, and then move the duplicate offsite where any deltas are then automatically updated from the local machine? Otherwise how do you send 4TB of data over the wire when the local cable company has a 300GB monthly cap?

Crashplan will only give you 1TB on the seed drives, so you still haev to upload 3TB of data.

 

[Nightarchaon]

ill be interested to see if the Drobo Mini is bootable as your OS drive on thunderbolt equipped iMacs,

i like the idea of a Drobo mini, with 120gb mSATA ssd and 4x512GB drives as my boot drive, leaving the 1TB drive in my iMac for storage

 

[radiogoober]

My only issue with these Drobo, Synology, QNAP, etc, devices is that *EVERYONE* says "RAID IS NOT BACKUP!" And I agree - if the unit or a drive fails, it is going to be a headache to fix, whether you have to buy another empty unit, or move the drives elsewhere, or that stressful 24 hours of rebuilding the array hoping that a 2nd disk doesn't fail.

So what are we to do?

I like this Drobo 5D device, and I considered this possibility:

- Purchase 2 of the Drobo 5D boxes, fill them all up with WD Black 2TB disks, and put it in 1 disk redundancy mode. This would give me around 7.26TB of space in each unit. And then I would simply have unit 1 clone to unit 2 each night.

But... You're looking at 2 x $800 (2 Drobo 5D Thunderbolt units), and then 10 x $180 (WD 2TD Blacks) = $1600 + $1800 = $3,400 for this setup. It would be very secure and reliable, because *most likely* the Drobo could recover from a failed drive, but in the event it didn't, you'd still have an entire backup on the other Drobo device.

Not bad, but it seems pretty expensive.

-

@ rmwebs -

I have never setup or in anyway used a real server before. I have used Linux before - back when the only real way to get it was buying a big book about Linux and installing it off of the CD that came with the book, lol! - and I'm capable of doing very small things in Terminal, I understand file permissions, and very basic bash scripts.

I'm interested in purchasing a file server. I assume it would run Linux, and I've looked up how they install Linux on these servers and it looks like it can be as easy as booting from a CD or USB stick. But I don't know enough about the hardware to know, for example, what the max size HD the motherboard or RAID controller could handle, or if the speeds are fast enough (ever since I've been a Mac user ~10 years I don't follow processor speeds), or it really needs 4 or 8 GB RAM or if 2 is sufficient.

I have a rackmount setup, so I'd like a shallow (< 20") server that can hold at least 4 drives, I don't care if they are hot-swappable or front-loading or whatever.

Question: Is it feasible to build a rack mount 4 drive server, everything included, for less than $1600?

Question: With Linux -> Mac file sharing, (ie, I backup my Mac files onto the Linux box), are there any issues with file names, permissions, etc, because of the differences in file systems?

Question: With a properly configured server, would it just automagically show up under "SHARED" in Finder and allow me to browse it and read/write to/from it as if it were any other external disk or network location?

Question: Should I be looking toward doing something like that w/ Linux, or would something like FreeNAS be more what I need?

Question: On older servers, it seems they have extraordinarily ineffecient power supplies, are there power efficient ones that won't add hundreds of dollars to my energy bill?

 

[imahawki]

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.

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

My Drobo is faster than my single disk Seagate FW800 external drive. I'd be willing to post screenshots of some Blackmagic benchmarks if others are willing to post some external high capacity drive benchmarks.

----------

My only issue with these Drobo, Synology, QNAP, etc, devices is that *EVERYONE* says "RAID IS NOT BACKUP!" And I agree - if the unit or a drive fails, it is going to be a headache to fix, whether you have to buy another empty unit, or move the drives elsewhere, or that stressful 24 hours of rebuilding the array hoping that a 2nd disk doesn't fail.

So what are we to do?

I like this Drobo 5D device, and I considered this possibility:

- Purchase 2 of the Drobo 5D boxes, fill them all up with WD Black 2TB disks, and put it in 1 disk redundancy mode. This would give me around 7.26TB of space in each unit. And then I would simply have unit 1 clone to unit 2 each night.

But... You're looking at 2 x $800 (2 Drobo 5D Thunderbolt units), and then 10 x $180 (WD 2TD Blacks) = $1600 + $1800 = $3,400 for this setup. It would be very secure and reliable, because *most likely* the Drobo could recover from a failed drive, but in the event it didn't, you'd still have an entire backup on the other Drobo device.

Not bad, but it seems pretty expensive.

-

@ rmwebs -

I have never setup or in anyway used a real server before. I have used Linux before - back when the only real way to get it was buying a big book about Linux and installing it off of the CD that came with the book, lol! - and I'm capable of doing very small things in Terminal, I understand file permissions, and very basic bash scripts.

I'm interested in purchasing a file server. I assume it would run Linux, and I've looked up how they install Linux on these servers and it looks like it can be as easy as booting from a CD or USB stick. But I don't know enough about the hardware to know, for example, what the max size HD the motherboard or RAID controller could handle, or if the speeds are fast enough (ever since I've been a Mac user ~10 years I don't follow processor speeds), or it really needs 4 or 8 GB RAM or if 2 is sufficient.

I have a rackmount setup, so I'd like a shallow (< 20") server that can hold at least 4 drives, I don't care if they are hot-swappable or front-loading or whatever.

Question: Is it feasible to build a rack mount 4 drive server, everything included, for less than $1600?

Question: With Linux -> Mac file sharing, (ie, I backup my Mac files onto the Linux box), are there any issues with file names, permissions, etc, because of the differences in file systems?

Question: With a properly configured server, would it just automagically show up under "SHARED" in Finder and allow me to browse it and read/write to/from it as if it were any other external disk or network location?

Question: Should I be looking toward doing something like that w/ Linux, or would something like FreeNAS be more what I need?

Question: On older servers, it seems they have extraordinarily ineffecient power supplies, are there power efficient ones that won't add hundreds of dollars to my energy bill?

What I did was buy a 3TB Seagate and back up critical files to it via Time Machine and then signed up for Crashplan and back up EVERYTHING to them. Right now everything actually fits on the Seagate, so I've got a local and cloud copy of everything. When that ceases to be the case, I'll probably drop my iTunes movies from the backup and rely on Crashplan for them.

 

[mrxak]

I like the idea of Drobo just as a place to put old HDs in a pool to (eventually) die. I have many smaller HDs of various sizes I can pull out of older computers, and a single enclosure that pools them together seems like a useful thing to me. I wouldn't use it for primary storage, but it might work nice as a "continuing" back-up of back-ups that can grow over time.

Lately, it seems, my data storage needs are growing faster than HD capacities, and I've had to add more drives to the mix rather than upgrade to larger drives. I have external enclosures all over the place, now. DAS is very important to me, though. NAS does not meet my requirements and never will.

What I really wish for, is official ZFS support in OS X. It would make things a lot simpler all around.

 

[smithrh]

What's that smell... smells like... astroturf.

 

[miketja]

I have mixed feelings about Drobo. I had a 2nd Gen Drobo 4, with FW800. The first one had a hardware failure in slot 4 that, basically, trashed disks. I ended up killing two brand new disks before I got Drobo support to agree it was a hardware issue with the device itself, but they swapped it out very quickly once that was agreed (sent a new one to me, I shipped back the old one -- nice).

The second one ran well for ages, but performance was always lacking, never getting above 20MB/s over FW800. But, it worked and I liked the no-hassle upgradability. Then, things started getting slower, with simple reads stalling at random, and even though the Drobo Dashboard said everything was fine, I wasn't convinced. I decided I needed a bigger array anyway, and in the end I bought a QNAP one, as I was just 100% confident about Drobo. Seemingly able to sense its impending fate, the Drobo lost the plot quite significantly, claiming a disk had failed (when it hadn't) and that I needed to expand the array with a new disk to keep integrity (even though the data on there could easily fit on the remaining drives, with redundancy, and room to spare). No matter how much data was left on it the device, it still insisted I needed another disk. Fortunately, I was able to copy off all my data (4TB worth) to the QNAP, and only lost one single file, so I still say the Drobo did well. But even when there was no data left on the device, it still insisted I needed another disk, and in the end I had completely reset the array (wiping all data and starting again).

So, on the one hand: beyond RAID works well, makes upgrading disks extremely simple, and hassle free. On the other, if it goes a bit wonky, then you're completely at the mercy of their technical support, as there's almost no way to read logs and fiddle with anything to recover data, should you be so inclined.

 

[derbothaus]

Why does Drobo need USB 3.0 or TB? It can't saturate USB 2.0! Non-buy.

 

[RalfTheDog]

Why does Drobo need USB 3.0 or TB? It can't saturate USB 2.0! Non-buy.

Drobo admits their old hardware was slow. They are claiming, their new hardware is fast enough to need SSD to take advantage of it's speed. Are they correct? I do not know.

 

[firestarter]

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.

This.

I've actually talked to Drobo reps at photo exhibitions who give this exact sales line.

Disk storage isn't expensive these days... if you want better uptime (not backup!) using a multi-disk solution then you need to mirror your data using a regular vanilla filing system. Cheezy low-cost boxes with proprietary RAID style technology means you're putting WAY too much trust in a single vendor, who just doesn't seem to have the customer support to match.

 

[Bartman01]

Why does Drobo need USB 3.0 or TB? It can't saturate USB 2.0! Non-buy.

My Drobo S is consistently at 75-85MBps in and out over USB3. When laying out new data, it falls down to around 65MBps in at times. This would more than saturate USB 2.

 

[robbyx]

Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/

Mine failed. Twice. The second time it could not repair the drives and I had to spend a week using Data Rescue II to recover data, then sift through tens of thousands of media files with generic names. After submitting log data from the Drobo to tech support, they simply ignored me for two weeks, didn't return calls or emails, despite the fact that I was a customer with complete data loss due to their poor firmware upgrade.

They are a horrible company with a mediocre (at best) product. It's slow, proprietary, and non-standard. Why would anyone buy such a thing? Get a real RAID and save yourself the nightmare of dealing with a Drobo when it fails. There's no good reason to buy a Drobo today. Hard drives are dirt cheap and RAID5/6 cases are plentiful. And if your reason for buying Drobo is the ability to mix and match old drives, your data must not be very important to you.

 

[Medic311]

i agree with many, avoid the Drobo all together. build your own server and run your software of choice (whether it's WHS, FreeNAS, or whatnot).

then for an added level of protection install Crash Plan onto the server and buy the 4 year plan when the monthly amount comes out to ~ $2.71 / mo. you not only have your data redundantly stored locally, but everything is encrypted twice and backed up on Crash Plan's servers.

it will take roughly a full year of continuous running to have everything backed up on Crash Plan, but you can start with the important things and go from there. it's well worth it

 

[OCICILIONI]

new drobo

I have had Drobo's and I agree they look really cool and the technology of beyond Raid sounds tantalizing.

However, in reality they are slow and unreliable in my experience.

I had many, many problems with my Drobo.

I have switched to OWC's Mercury Elite Q Raid system and find it cheaper and much more reliable.