Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices

[theSeb]

Right; stuff like EMC does similar things, and faster. The reason Drobos are so slow is because it's allocating data across drives using software, and with the processors they have in those devices, it's just not very fast. Obviously the faster the processor they use, the more it improves the situation.

You can also do a lot of the same "ooh wow, I've got different drive size" deal with stuff like FreeNAS, which will work with ZFS. It's not like Drobo is completely unique.

Thank you. That's exactly the point and I am not sure why many are missing this.


Let's try to sift through the marketing that the Drobo website has put up.

Unfortunately, the complexity of RAID has made it challenging for small businesses and consumers to effectively use the technology. RAID has a high learning curve with many options. There's RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 along with unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.

What a load of BS. Have you seen how easy it is to configure a Synology NAS, even with the previous version of the software? I could train a chimpanzee to do it.

Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR)

Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an intelligent volume type that optimizes volume size when combining hard disks of varying sizes into an array. When set as the Standard volume type in DSM, SHR provides 1 to 2 hard disks fault-tolerance of data protection. It can be expanded to an optimal volume space when a lager or additional hard disks are inserted into the array.

For users who prefer to manually configure the volume type, DSM offers RAID-protected volume types (2-4 way RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5, RAID 5+Spare, and RAID 6) as well as volume types without data protection (Basic, JBOD, and RAID 0).

Oh, so actually it's exactly what Drobo does. But ok, let's keep going and drink the Drobo kool-aid.

Aside from complexity, these are the primary challenges with traditional RAID:
1. Lock-in of RAID levels. To change RAID levels, most storage arrays require the data to be moved off of it, reconfigured, and then moved back on. If you want to move to RAID 6 from RAID 5 for protection against two drive failures, it's a reinitialize and start over.

Ha ha. How can people lie like this? I wonder if the engineers are Drobo cringe when they see what marketing has put up on the website. I hope so. Let's look at what the old version of Synology's DSM has been able to do for ages

Change Volume Type

DSM 3.0 provides the following four types of volume change:

Basic to RAID 1
Basic to RAID 5
RAID 1 to RAID 5
RAID 5 to RAID 5+Spare
RAID 5 to RAID 6

Oh, wait a minute….

Lack of expandability. Once drives are configured into a RAID pool, that is it. If you want to add more storage capacity, the solution is to create a new RAID pool, leaving you with another chunk of storage to manage - or you can just reinitialize and start over.

This is just plain wrong and a lie. Again, how can one not feel ashamed to put this sort of stuff on the internet? Let's take a look what the old version of Synology's DSM can do (quite easily)

Storage Expansion Made Easy

DSM 3.0 offers flexible options for volume expansion and growth. Small volumes can be expanded whenever the need arises by adding drives to the array, replacing drives with those of larger capacity, or adding a Synology expansion unit to compatible models.

To put it into simpler words. Let's say I have a NAS with 5 x 2 TB drives. I can replace one of the drives with a 3 TB and allow it to rebuild. I can then replace the next 3 TB drive and allow it to rebuild... and so forth. This will all happen automatically. At the end I would have gone from 10 TB of total space to 15 TB of total space (usable space will obviously depend on RAID level and number of hot spares)

Hmmmm…. hold on a second…

 

[polaris20]

Having set up Buffalos, QNAPs, Synologys, Drobos, etc. I've never really thought any RAID was that big of a deal to configure.

 

[sapporobaby]

What happens if your house burns up?

Did you read the part about me being able to grab it and run out in a flash?

 

[firestarter]

Did you read the part about me being able to grab it and run out in a flash?

So you never leave the house then?

 

[sapporobaby]

So you never leave the house then?

Didn't say that either. Maybe the best thing would be to string together the question you want to ask and then ask it and I can then answer it.

 

[firestarter]

Didn't say that either. Maybe the best thing would be to string together the question you want to ask and then ask it and I can then answer it.

"RAID/DROBO is not a backup, and even having an extra local copy of your data is not a good strategy given that it won't protect you against fire/theft"

You seemed to imply that being able to "grab it and run out in a flash" was a good mitigation against having all your data in one place.

I'm pointing out that unless you never leave the house, that's not the case.

Over to you.

 

[sapporobaby]

"RAID/DROBO is not a backup, and even having an extra local copy of your data is not a good strategy given that it won't protect you against fire/theft"

You seemed to imply that being able to "grab it and run out in a flash" was a good mitigation against having all your data in one place.

I'm pointing out that unless you never leave the house, that's not the case.

Over to you.

Thanks FS... I'll run with the ball for a moment. As crazy as it may seem, I have one drive that is with me all the time. It is mainly my Aperture Library backed up as a vault. The other stuff, i.e. videos, movies, iTunes stuff does not really matter as I can always download most of it again. In fact, did this once already when a WD MyBook became a MyPoop... That forced me to look at things again and do the following:

1. The next day purchase a WD Share Space (I know, I know WD again) 4TB NAS for immediate storage as Apple allowed me to download all my stuff again.
2. The very same day I ordered a Drobo for a more robust system that has various RAID configurations.
3. The Drobo arrived about 10 days later. I installed it and transferred everything from the WD over to it. The WD became the backup to the Drobo.

With some of the issues that others have reported with the Drobo, I went ahead and ordered a Synology DS 1512 and 5 x 3TB WD Caviar Black drives. As the Drobo is connected via FW800, it will remain the primary and backup to the Synology. The WD may be a dual copy of photos and such as I ran CAT 6 throughout my house.

In short, the 1TB drive has the same data on my Time Capsule, WD Share Space and Drobo. In the event of a fire, I can get out with the 1TB and still have all photos current to the last backup.

Back to you FS...

 

[polaris20]

Did you read the part about me being able to grab it and run out in a flash?

I sure did, but you didn't explain the teleportation device that you have, when your house catches fire when you're not there, or someone breaks into your house.

EDIT

So you carry a drive with you everywhere? That's......efficient. I'd rather just seed a drive, and then take it off-site to back stuff up in real-time over the Internet. Works for me, and it's a lot easier. That way I don't have to answer the inevitable question of "is that a hard drive in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

 

[firestarter]

Back to you FS...

It's really not about you sapporobaby, and nor is it about me.

The only reason I post to threads like this is in an attempt to counteract the marketing BS from vendors like Drobo - or the unthinking 'wow, it uses a spare disk to keep my data completely safe' mentality of people lured by the high tech goodness of RAID.

Data security is about looking at the various risks (fire, theft, corruption, physical damage, power spikes, software errors, disk crash, virus etc.) and deciding what you want to do to mitigate them. If carrying a drive with you all the time works and ticks off enough of those risks then that's cool. For someone reading this who's thinking 'oh ****, my Drobo doesn't protect me against 90% of bad things that could happen to my data' - my work is done!

 

[sapporobaby]

I sure did, but you didn't explain the teleportation device that you have, when your house catches fire when you're not there, or someone breaks into your house.

EDIT

So you carry a drive with you everywhere? That's......efficient. I'd rather just seed a drive, and then take it off-site to back stuff up in real-time over the Internet. Works for me, and it's a lot easier. That way I don't have to answer the inevitable question of "is that a hard drive in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

Darnit... You beat me to it. I was just thinking of something cheeky to say back to you. That Firestarter dude distracted me.

 

[polaris20]

Darnit... You beat me to it. I was just thinking of something cheeky to say back to you. That Firestarter dude distracted me.

All kidding aside, and to be helpful, I use Crashplan, which may or may not work where you at (are you in the States or Europe?), but it's free if you back up to a friend's/relative's house (as I do), and the data can be seeded. I've been using it for over a year now, and it's fantastic. In turn, I allow my mother-in-law to back up to my network. It's pretty cool.

 

[sapporobaby]

It's really not about you sapporobaby, and nor is it about me.

The only reason I post to threads like this is in an attempt to counteract the marketing BS from vendors like Drobo - or the unthinking 'wow, it uses a spare disk to keep my data completely safe' mentality of people lured by the high tech goodness of RAID.

Data security is about looking at the various risks (fire, theft, corruption, physical damage, power spikes, software errors, disk crash, virus etc.) and deciding what you want to do to mitigate them. If carrying a drive with you all the time works and ticks off enough of those risks then that's cool. For someone reading this who's thinking 'oh ****, my Drobo doesn't protect me against 90% of bad things that could happen to my data' - my work is done!

I agree with you. A Drobo is only as good as it's spinning discs, or intact power supply.

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All kidding aside, and to be helpful, I use Crashplan, which may or may not work where you at (are you in the States or Europe?), but it's free if you back up to a friend's/relative's house (as I do), and the data can be seeded. I've been using it for over a year now, and it's fantastic. In turn, I allow my mother-in-law to back up to my network. It's pretty cool.

I am in Europe, Finland to be exact. I work for the US gov't here. The problem with Crashplan is that my friends do not believe in leaving their computers on all the time. Go figure. I will look into Crashplan just to back up my photos. I am not too worried about the media from iTunes as I can get most of it back.

 

[Yahooligan]

This thread has me rethinking my offsite strategy a little bit. My current strategy only deals with hardware failure and not a true disaster like a house fire or similar. As such, I only send my music, videos, and photos offsite and keep system backups local. Since our primary computers are laptops we can easily take them with us, however often times we leave them at home.

The issue then becomes ensuring offsite backups are complete or up-to-date, mainly a concern with Windows and how it does backups along with having to purge backups since Windows is very inefficient when it comes to managing backup data. *IF* CrashPlan would allow me to upload at full-speed then I could send my 2TB of data in less than a week, but it seems I'm lucky to get 1MB/sec on average. That means it would possibly take close to a month and I end up pruning backups every couple of months. Would my CrashPlan backups ever be fully in sync? I guess there's only one way to find out.

EDIT: Ouch, only adding the primary laptop backups says it's going to take more than 2 months. Not exactly something that would be viable should I need to do a full system restore if I lost everything at home. Some would argue it's better than nothing, which is true. It's certainly not hurting anything just letting it run like this.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Having set up Buffalos, QNAPs, Synologys, Drobos, etc. I've never really thought any RAID was that big of a deal to configure.

It isn't. But apparently it's a REALLY big deal to some.

The only reason I post to threads like this is in an attempt to counteract the marketing BS from vendors like Drobo - or the unthinking 'wow, it uses a spare disk to keep my data completely safe' mentality of people lured by the high tech goodness of RAID.

It's not just Drobo, it's all of them. G-Technology for a while offered a dual disk RAID 1 mirror enclosure and advertised the same thing. It didn't sell so well, and IMHO it was because a user could build a simple RAID 1 with the same exact parts for half of the price.

I know exactly what a Drobo does. Drobo has a place in the market to provide cheap RAID devices, running their version of "smart RAID" that hides the details from the user. This is hardly unusual in the NAS world and I am not sure why Drobo owners don't realise this. I guess it's because most have read the Drobo marketing FUD and believe it.

You're not the first Drobo owner in this thread to come out on the defensive with the "You don't know what Drobo is". You'll find that many know exactly what a Drobo is. It's not an exercise in rocket science to find out. Let me turn that argument around now: I think most Drobo owners need to read up on what normal RAID devices can do and find out for themselves why something like DSM 4.0 from Synology is miles ahead.

You misread my point. I know what a Drobo does and I know about smart RAID and many a NAS drive. Take a breather please, I am not arguing against you.

What many NAS users don't realize is that not everyone is looking for a networked drive connected via GigE. Right now, from a media production standpoint, there's no other drive that I see that connects via eSATA/FW800/TBolt that offers smart RAID.

Like I've said, my three enclosures work as advertised, as have many of the 30+ I've had to deal with for the past three years or so. The negative hype around ANY enclosure is in itself FUD.

 

[Yahooligan]

Right now, from a media production standpoint, there's no other drive that I see that connects via eSATA/FW800/TBolt that offers smart RAID.

Not even Drobo offers this. Did you misread the specs?

 

[Digital Skunk]

Not even Drobo offers this. Did you misread the specs?

Of course not, I never said all in the same enclosure. Please reread my post.

 

[sapporobaby]

Of course not, I never said all in the same enclosure. Please reread my post.

I guess it might be better to say that one company offers enclosures that have a number of connection possibilities. Right now Drobo offers the most. I know that Synology will offer TB soon as well.

 

[polaris20]

I am in Europe, Finland to be exact. I work for the US gov't here. The problem with Crashplan is that my friends do not believe in leaving their computers on all the time. Go figure. I will look into Crashplan just to back up my photos. I am not too worried about the media from iTunes as I can get most of it back.

Ah, that's disappointing. In that case, if it were me, I'd get a small, cheap tower from a big bog electronics store, and just reformat it with Linux, and then talk a relative into letting you keep it plugged into power and ethernet; no monitor or keyboard needed. Either way, it's just so much easier than having to remember to have a drive with you.

 

[Digital Skunk]

I guess it might be better to say that one company offers enclosures that have a number of connection possibilities. Right now Drobo offers the most. I know that Synology will offer TB soon as well.

Right, and another anti-flame comment I'd like to add is that I haven't done as much research into it since 2008 when I bought my first Drobo. At that time, it was the best option for someone that wanted the features of smart/beyond RAID in an enclosure that had eSATA and FW800.

I'd like to see every enclosure offer both including TBolt; I'd go back to being a sole LaCie/G-Technology fanboy then.

 

[sapporobaby]

Ah, that's disappointing. In that case, if it were me, I'd get a small, cheap tower from a big bog electronics store, and just reformat it with Linux, and then talk a relative into letting you keep it plugged into power and ethernet; no monitor or keyboard needed. Either way, it's just so much easier than having to remember to have a drive with you.

Yeah.... That probably would be a problem too... However I have 350Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload so Crashplan might not be a chore if I only seed my photos and some other data to it.

----------

Right, and another anti-flame comment I'd like to add is that I haven't done as much research into it since 2008 when I bought my first Drobo. At that time, it was the best option for someone that wanted the features of smart/beyond RAID in an enclosure that had eSATA and FW800.

I'd like to see every enclosure offer both including TBolt; I'd go back to being a sole LaCie/G-Technology fanboy then.

Sounds like you have a Drobo S... I have the same. Never failed or had any problems. I originally had Caviar Greens inside but replaced them with Caviar Blacks. The thing just sits there and runs... Maybe they had a bad batch or the QC monitor was on the popper when he or she should have been testing. Anyway, it will soon be joined by a 15TB Synology...

 

[Sarlacc]

If your Drobo dies you need another Drobo. You have to pull out the drives and keep the order of them the same when putting them into another device. Your drives aren't bricks along with the Drobo.

That's how all arrays work from what I understand.

Yeah...except when one drive fails and bricks your other 3 drives which is happened to me...and after sending all the necessary and asked for data logs to drobo and dealing with socially inept techs, I was told my data was gone and not even their recovery would be able to get it back.

Drobo is great at marketing their ease of use...and it works, until it fails and fails hard. Its just over-priced hype that tries to lock you into their proprietary world.

Luckily I keep multiple copies of data is several places, If I solely relied on drobo I would have been screwed out of years of work.

 

[theSeb]

You misread my point. I know what a Drobo does and I know about smart RAID and many a NAS drive. Take a breather please, I am not arguing against you.

I didn't think you were arguing and I wasn't arguing back. You know about smart RAID, but it seems like many other Drobo owners do not and this was the point of my original post. Trust me, you would know if I needed a breather or was arguing.

----------

Yeah...except when one drive fails and bricks your other 3 drives which is happened to me...and after sending all the necessary and asked for data logs to drobo and dealing with socially inept techs, I was told my data was gone and not even their recovery would be able to get it back.

Drobo is great at marketing their ease of use...and it works, until it fails and fails hard. Its just over-priced hype that tries to lock you into their proprietary world.

Luckily I keep multiple copies of data is several places, If I solely relied on drobo I would have been screwed out of years of work.

You shouldn't solely rely on a RAID enclosure as your working and backup storage. RAID does not automatically mean that you have backup as well. This holds true for any RAID devices.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Sounds like you have a Drobo S... I have the same. Never failed or had any problems. I originally had Caviar Greens inside but replaced them with Caviar Blacks. The thing just sits there and runs... Maybe they had a bad batch or the QC monitor was on the popper when he or she should have been testing. Anyway, it will soon be joined by a 15TB Synology...

Indeed, and an FS at the university, and a 4bay as well. Never an issue, and all function as expected and advertised save for the 4bay . . . which I will NEVER say gets even close to FW800 speed.

I've thought about NAS drives, but they just don't work good as scratch. Avid doesn't play nice with anything NAS/GigE save for their own ISIS chassis, and I don't have anywhere near $12,000 to drop on that.

Yeah...except when one drive fails and bricks your other 3 drives which is happened to me...and after sending all the necessary and asked for data logs to drobo and dealing with socially inept techs, I was told my data was gone and not even their recovery would be able to get it back.....

That just sucks. I've had a LaCie 2Big and a Rugged crap out on me as well. The drives just went bad in a matter of months. I too had a backup.

It's just the nature of drives.

I didn't think you were arguing and I wasn't arguing back. You know about smart RAID, but it seems like many other Drobo owners do not and this was the point of my original post. Trust me, you would know if I needed a breather or was arguing.

Fantastic, I was getting a little worried. It's definitely NOT your track record.

 

[Yahooligan]

Of course not, I never said all in the same enclosure. Please reread my post.

Maybe you didn't mean to, but the way you worded it actually did imply all of those options on a single enclosure. Re-read your own post.

 

[theSeb]

I'd like to see every enclosure offer both including TBolt; I'd go back to being a sole LaCie/G-Technology fanboy then.

I must say that I don't get that. I use what offers me the features that I need at the best performance versus price ratio. I don't understand why people need to defend their purchasing decisions or be fanboyish about it, but I guess that's humanity for you.

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Fantastic, I was getting a little worried. It's definitely NOT your track record.

Meh, I sometimes do have a tendency to try and get my point across a bit strongly. It's all with good intentions though.