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Drobo Hints at Forthcoming Thunderbolt-Compatible Products
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Really? REALLY! Idiot you see lightning, and THEN you HEAR the Thunder.
I hate to be pedantic (insert joke here), but really?
I think Thunderbolt is great, but I wish Intel had stuck with LightPeak, or gone with something else like lightning bolt (at least its a more familiar word than thunderbolt).
Yep, that's all we use it for now. Currently planning on phasing Drobo out completely for a much better solution.
Agreed. I had a Drobo FS and they're terribly slow. I eventually lost my data. Even with Thunderbolt it will just lose your data at "thunder bolt speeds!!1!1". As you can see already from previous posts that Drobo is notorious with slow speeds.
Ever watch the movie Speed with Keanu Reeves? This will be like putting "racing tires" (Thunderbolt) on a "bus" (slow setup), but stuck going in one direction (proprietary RAID).
Even Drobo knows they suck. So much they purchased the domain name. Go to http://www.drobosucks.com
for all.
I have a Drobo, i don't find it slow at all, but then I've never used it on anything other than FW800, i can have two or three HD streams running off it at once, as well as normal data access, so i don't know where the bottle neck your experiencing is, maybe you have selected low speed drives ? stick some 10,000 RPM drives in it, and make sure they were all bought at the same time, and are the same make.
I would imagine that the Drobo is slow with miss-matched 5400 RPM drives on USB2, but then, what else would you expect ?
Not bothered about TB for drives, i still don't know why everyone is banging on about it, when the read/write speed of the fastest SSDs are are approaching 700mb/s FW 800 is still good enough, TB will come into its own IF they start developing things like TB Video/Physics cards and other things that need GB speeds
The big problem is people are treating TB as another USB or Firewire, its not, its External PCI Bus, with a stupid name, they should have just called it E-PCI
I would imagine that the Drobo is slow with miss-matched 5400 RPM drives on USB2, but then, what else would you expect ?
Not bothered about TB for drives, i still don't know why everyone is banging on about it, when the read/write speed of the fastest SSDs are are approaching 700mb/s FW 800 is still good enough, TB will come into its own IF they start developing things like TB Video/Physics cards and other things that need GB speeds
The big problem is people are treating TB as another USB or Firewire, its not, its External PCI Bus, with a stupid name, they should have just called it E-PCI
Agreed. We had two Drobo Pros and three regular 2nd Gen Drobos, and they're all just horrendously slow. We switched to QNAP's (not exactly apples to apples, but still...) for secondary storage and we couldn't be happier. Even over iSCSI the QNAPs are a lot faster.
Promise Technology Pegasus was released last year
Why wait to see if Drobo releases a thunderbolt raid drive? Promise Technology's Pegasus R4 & R6 Thunderbolt RAID drives has been out for almost a year now:
http://www.promise.com/storage/raid...lobal&m=192&rsn1=40&rsn3=47&statistic=pegasus
A friend of mine does a lot of video editing so has the 6 bay unit filled with 2TB drives (12TB total). He really likes it and says it's wicked fast!
Check out: http://reviews.cnet.com/external-hard-drives/promise-pegasus-r6-12tb/4505-3190_7-34855283.html
OWC sells the Pegasus 6 bay unit populated to 12TB for ~$2,500.
Why wait to see if Drobo releases a thunderbolt raid drive? Promise Technology's Pegasus R4 & R6 Thunderbolt RAID drives has been out for almost a year now:
http://www.promise.com/storage/raid...lobal&m=192&rsn1=40&rsn3=47&statistic=pegasus
A friend of mine does a lot of video editing so has the 6 bay unit filled with 2TB drives (12TB total). He really likes it and says it's wicked fast!
Check out: http://reviews.cnet.com/external-hard-drives/promise-pegasus-r6-12tb/4505-3190_7-34855283.html
OWC sells the Pegasus 6 bay unit populated to 12TB for ~$2,500.
Not everyone can afford the pegasus and the Drobo could potentially be cheaper (depending on the drives one puts in it) and some want to see more options before they make any decisions based on literally a handful of Thunderbolt devices.
Yeah I thought my drobo worked great, too, for a couple years. Then, when I really needed it it took a dump.
One drive failed...and magically it took the other 3 drives with it. Drobo's customer service seemed OK until I was handed off to the their "level 3" senior tech who was just a condescending engineer...guy had no social grace. And on top of that...their proprietary software...made it such that data recovery was just never going to happen.
Their software doesn't correlate with their hardware when there is an issue.
After really needing the drobo to do what its designed to do...it not only failed it was just a mess.
And even though, yes I was out of warranty and not owed anything, they offered nothing...they even denied my request for them to simply replace the hard drives.
Which reminds me, i need to sell mine, its been on a shelf collecting dust and Ive switched to OWC products.
I will never touch another drobo.
One drive failed...and magically it took the other 3 drives with it. Drobo's customer service seemed OK until I was handed off to the their "level 3" senior tech who was just a condescending engineer...guy had no social grace. And on top of that...their proprietary software...made it such that data recovery was just never going to happen.
Their software doesn't correlate with their hardware when there is an issue.
After really needing the drobo to do what its designed to do...it not only failed it was just a mess.
And even though, yes I was out of warranty and not owed anything, they offered nothing...they even denied my request for them to simply replace the hard drives.
Which reminds me, i need to sell mine, its been on a shelf collecting dust and Ive switched to OWC products.
I will never touch another drobo.
You make it sound like Drobo is the only option that can do those things.
Double redundancy? Ive got that on my Synology NAS. Ive had it for 2 years and not a single drive failure ever. I can still access my data if a drive fails and its much, MUCH faster than any Drobo. I can stream 4 HD 1080p on 4 screens al the same time and probably even more.
Drobo is ****. Before buying one I googled info and there is people mad at it all over the internet.
Thunderbolt is the least of Drobo's Shortcomings
I have a Drobo S that has failed 3 times in 3 years. The first 2 times it was the power supply and a circuit board in the unit. The last time it was because I didn't partition a drive for Time Machine backups and one of the 5 2TB drives failed. I had to reset the system which meant overwriting all of the data on the raid. I would have thought that a RAID device could find a way to rebukd the data. Isnt that what a RAID device is supposed to do? If this wasn't enough, Drobo specified WD Caviar Green dives for the unit and 3 have failed in 3 years.
This has been a very expensive RAID device that has been less reliable than the single 2TB drive in my 2010 iMac.
Good for you Drobo on the Thunderbolt thing, but if your hardware keeps failing, what is the advantage of your higher data transfer??
I have a Drobo S that has failed 3 times in 3 years. The first 2 times it was the power supply and a circuit board in the unit. The last time it was because I didn't partition a drive for Time Machine backups and one of the 5 2TB drives failed. I had to reset the system which meant overwriting all of the data on the raid. I would have thought that a RAID device could find a way to rebukd the data. Isnt that what a RAID device is supposed to do? If this wasn't enough, Drobo specified WD Caviar Green dives for the unit and 3 have failed in 3 years.
This has been a very expensive RAID device that has been less reliable than the single 2TB drive in my 2010 iMac.
Good for you Drobo on the Thunderbolt thing, but if your hardware keeps failing, what is the advantage of your higher data transfer??
Two different products for two different solutions. A Drobo S can be used as a scratch disk, but I'd recommend using it ONLY as scratch, and not putting your life's work on it.
I am on my third Drobo now, I have a first gen S, a second gen 4 bay, and the job has an FS.
NOT a problem with any of them, and the FS at the job has been on for almost a year straight. My S is my scratch disk connected via eSATA and hasn't bottlenecked FCP7, Premier Pro CS5.5 (now 6) or Avid. The 4 bay is my backup drive which i treat very carefully. I don't expect amazing speeds with the 4 bay.
Maybe I was the ONLY buyer that got enclosures that work as promised. I am on the fence about spending another $28,500 on either 2x 24TB Drobo B1200i devices or just going LTO-5.
A Drobo with TBolt may look a little promising for my home setup, but I'll have to wait and see if my funds allow me pick up something from G-Technology or Caldigit first.
The problem with Drobo is the proprietary RAID they use. They are dog slow no matter what interface they use
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Correction Drobo is ********** ****
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I sold mine on eBay, the company I hate second best.
Drobo is crap. They charge you $500 for the device which has horrendous internals and then you have to buy the drives which are running ~$109 for 2TB.
If you can google "How To Build a WHS" and are literate, you can easily build your own Windows Home Server with 6-8TB of redundant storage and room for more, for $500-$600. You will get more network storage features, more expansion capability, and more backup options. The best thing is that you never know it's there. Just take the tower and put it in the basement somewhere and forget about it. It doesn't need to be attached to a computer to work (Drobo sells a network model but it's even more expensive!)
For people who think buying a Mac Mini and a Drobo is a great idea, take the time to build yourself a WHS (forget that it's running Windows server...it works perfectly). You'll save yourself hundreds of dollars...
If you can google "How To Build a WHS" and are literate, you can easily build your own Windows Home Server with 6-8TB of redundant storage and room for more, for $500-$600. You will get more network storage features, more expansion capability, and more backup options. The best thing is that you never know it's there. Just take the tower and put it in the basement somewhere and forget about it. It doesn't need to be attached to a computer to work (Drobo sells a network model but it's even more expensive!)
For people who think buying a Mac Mini and a Drobo is a great idea, take the time to build yourself a WHS (forget that it's running Windows server...it works perfectly). You'll save yourself hundreds of dollars...
Windows Home Server = dead product. When Microsoft suckup HP decides to stop selling WHS you know the category is pretty much dead.
Good news though is QNAP is going to field a diskless TB enclosure.
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2053
I hope the price is somewhat sane.
Good news though is QNAP is going to field a diskless TB enclosure.
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2053
I hope the price is somewhat sane.
you completely and utterly missed the point. you can put whatever server OS you want. i was debating to use FreeNAS, but i went the WHS route from a slickdeal for $40. if you use FreeNAS, then my suggestion then ends up being an even less expensive alternative to the atrocious Drobo. regardless of what you use, my point was that instead of buying a Drobo you buy a generic $30 tower and stuff it full of the components of your choice (mobo, drives, psu, fans, etc) and you end up saving a heck of a lot of money
going back to WHS... how does the operating system die? even if they stopped supporting it, it runs perfect and does everything that anyone would ever need from a server (and more). WHS will be merged in with a variant of Windows 8 (name hasn't been announced yet).
i have engineering analysis programs for the lab that only can run on Windows 98. Microsoft stopped supporting the Windows 98 platform years ago. did my OS "die" ? nope, it's still running and doing what i need it to do
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? How are you going to use Thunderbolt with a NAS? Isn't these options essentially fast raids/jbods accessed over TB? If you can indeed send tcp/ip over Thunderbolt it seems you server OS and more importantly, your hardware would need to support it.
Yeah...wait til you have a problem and the blinking lights on the drobo tell you one thing...and their software tells you something completely different.