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Drobo Releases Pricing for Thunderbolt Storage Devices, Preorders Start Monday

The price on the 5D is actually relatively reasonable, even if you completely ignore the Thunderbolt interface on the 5D.

The Drobo 5D is a 5-bay "smart" RAID box that can do the equivalent of both RAID5 and RAID6, can hot-swap drives, can do live array resizing, has an additional SATA slot for an SSD drive for caching (big deal if it actually works, software-wise), AND a built-in battery back-up to avoid the write-hole (very big deal). That's a full set of enterprise-grade features for $850, which really isn't unreasonable, or out of line with the pricing of Drobo's other products. That it comes with a Thunderbolt port as an option is just a bonus.

Depending on how fast the 5D is in real-world tests, I'm at least considering one for my home server's main drive (also backed up) or nearline storage of "not quite critical" data--working files for video editing on an SSD-only Mac that I'd want to protect from a drive failure but isn't worth maintaining a full backup of. If they're as slow as some of the older Drobos, no go. If they actually turn out to be as fast as a good, cached RAID box, though, I might fork out for it.

Of course, there's always the question of whether it's worth $850 + ~$850 of drives (cheap 5x3TB drives + 100GB SSD) for 12TB of usable, slightly-protected data versus just getting two cheap 4-bay RAID0 enclosures and mirroring them or backing up one to the other, which would theoretically run you about $100 less for the works and be at least as fast, and more secure data-wise, although somewhat more prone to drive failures and more labor-intensive to rebuild and generally messy physically.
 
auero said:
I don't think some people here understand that this isn't aimed at people who want to store and or backup photos of their cats. This is for people who need massive storage and need it quickly.
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Every single thunderbolt product discussion on macrumors consists of people complaining about the absurd price premium, and other people saying that those people don't understand.

i think the truth is that there is no reason to have a thunderbolt port on any Mac other than maybe the high-end MBP and the Mac Pro. Honestly even the MBP is a stretch. If you are one of the people you're talking about (massive quick storage at any cost), then you aren't going to be using a $1000 form-over-function laptop (11 inch mba).

I was doing video work a few years ago, and we built a fibre-channel system that was pushing 500mb/sec to a 4TB array back when SSDs didn't even exist as a practical idea. Before FW800.

That ran on a dual-proc water-cooled G5 tower.

The equivalent machine that would have the processing power needed to keep up with the thunderbolt interface bandwidth is not available from Apple at all. There is no Mac Pro with a thunderbolt port.

If you want to make the 'well, four years from now...' argument, then look back 5 years ago (TB is now over a year old in mac land) at what Apple as doing (USB 2 and dropping FW400 ports from macbooks) and tell me that the peripherals are going to sit around and wait for prices to come down...

By the time TB products are average-consumer-ready, the 2011 13" macbook pro will be so slow and sad that Apple may not even be supporting it in their upcoming OS. They are dropping support for 2008 models in 2012's OS.

The port itself doubling as a display port is fine, and that was a good idea that makes the concept much easier to swallow, but an HDMI port would have made more sense and probably saved millions of people $50 or more off of a machine that will likely never plug into a real-life thunderbolt device...unless they want to spend as much on an external monitor as they did on their laptop.

Thunderbolt could have been a really elegant and useful docking solution for small Macs. With most announced products being ~50% of the cost of the computer or more, it stops being an "accessory" and starts to become an argument for buying something more flexible.

Can you imagine how many little docking terminals would sell if they were $149 and had DVI, HDMI, Ethernet, eSATA, USB3, FW800, audio in/out and no Thunderbolt out? Just a TB cable that was fused to the box and included in the price.

Basically the updated belkin dock, but at a reasonable price. It would become a defacto standard purchase for anyone with a macbook air or pro.
 
Smart raid, backup battery to avoid data corruption, redundant one or two drives with warning lights, hot swappable and mixing matching sizes and brands out of the box, no complex config

What else is there to compete for a lower price? I agree it's expensive.
 
My professional background is in photography and I store more than just pictures of my (or other people's) cats. I have been waiting for better support for Thunderbolt and holding off in regards to the current offerings.

While I'm glad that Drobo is supporting the technology, their offerings are ridiculously expensive. They release two Thunderbolt equipped products that are just the external enclosure and no drives to go with them. They did this when their offering was only FireWire years ago and the price never went down. I hope that others like OWC can come up with less expensive alternatives to Drobo.
 
kniemann said:
Intel has botched the Thunderbolt launch so BADLY, there is only so much :apple: can do.
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Just because you cannot afford the Thunderbolt products doesn't mean the Thunderbolt launch was botched.

There are plenty of Professionals that are loving Thunderbolt right now. As for the pricing and value of these boxes. I'm going to await their performance first before commenting. The sane thing to do.
 
Kaibelf said:
The real joke is failing to grasp that brand-new technology costs a lot and that the price drops over time. The other joke is ignorantly being dismissive of it based on the initial high price, despite the fact that Dell is about to bring supporting devices to market, and pretending that everything won't change after that.
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New technology? The early adopter window for Thunderbolt ended about a year ago, and also for responses like this. This would have been a fine retort on 7/20/11.
 
I don't think some people here understand that this isn't aimed at people who want to store and or backup photos of their cats. This is for people who need massive storage and need it quickly.
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Massive storage? It may be a lot but I can't imagine it being considered "massive" (unless you are a home consumer which is fine). As for needing it quickly... I take it you have never used one before. They are slow!
 
$599 (not including the price of TB cable) for a Drobo Mini (no drives)

vs

$350 for a NAS that runs off 4x 2.5" 9.5mm-height HDD/SDD just like the above (no drives)
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=59754

Drobo needs to drop their pricing by at least $200 before I'd consider getting one of these.
 
jcpb said:
$599 (not including the price of TB cable) for a Drobo Mini (no drives)

vs

$350 for a NAS that runs off 4x 2.5" 9.5mm-height HDD/SDD just like the above (no drives)
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=59754

Drobo needs to drop their pricing by at least $200 before I'd consider getting one of these.
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It remains to be seen what the performance of these new Drobo's is like, but it should be a significant enough difference that you're talking about a completely different product segment.
 
brentsg said:
It remains to be seen what the performance of these new Drobo's is like, but it should be a significant enough difference that you're talking about a completely different product segment.
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I agree with you. All we can do is wait to see perfomances of these ne Drobo's.
 
Synology

Anyone looking for a NAS should first look at Synology instead of Drobo. Light years ahead.
 
brentsg said:
It remains to be seen what the performance of these new Drobo's is like, but it should be a significant enough difference that you're talking about a completely different product segment.
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For the prices Drobo intends to charge, relative to their potential performance, they are a difficult value proposition.
 
rmwebs said:
If initial demand was great there wouldn't be a need for such an obscene price. I get it...Thunderbolt is new technology, but in this day and age, licensing aside it costs pennies to produce the components used in these products.

Thunderbolt will continue to be a failure until they get real on pricing. It's simply too expensive for even a pro user to consider over the alternatives.
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You lost me there. It's one of the cheapest options at that speed, and the only one available on a Mac using a portable kit. It exceeds the express card slot on the old 17" macbook pro. I don't think the pricing is that excessive if you use it for work purposes. It's more that there aren't many desirable configurations available for such use. Any peripherals marketed by Apple tend to be pure junk from past experience (ratings on replacement batteries, raid cards, etc. on the Apple Store agree with me) and third parties haven't kicked out enough good storage products based on thunderbolt yet.
 
I feel like I'm the only one that knows about the ~$260 external thunderbolt drive. Perhaps because there wasn't a MacRumors article about it. Look it up, it's called GoFlex. Works great. Pricier than other drives, but not majorly so. The drive itself was cheap, it was the adapter and cable that cost, but I expect those to last. I think it was a pretty good deal.
 
There are quite a few people in this thread who seemingly have no idea what is going on here. Drobos are expensive. They've always been expensive. There's no "early-adoption" tax here.

Ethernet 5-bay Drobo FS: $699
USB 3.0 5-bay Drobo S: $799
Thunderbolt 5-bay Drobo FD: $899

When you consider how much faster and more reliable Thunderbolt is than USB 3, I don't think paying an extra $100 is a kick in the nuts.
 
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Lindono said:
I feel like I'm the only one that knows about the ~$260 external thunderbolt drive. Perhaps because there wasn't a MacRumors article about it. Look it up, it's called GoFlex. Works great. Pricier than other drives, but not majorly so. The drive itself was cheap, it was the adapter and cable that cost, but I expect those to last. I think it was a pretty good deal.
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Cheaper than Seagate and includes a TB cable.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1400221/
 
jcpb said:
$599 (not including the price of TB cable) for a Drobo Mini (no drives)

vs

$350 for a NAS that runs off 4x 2.5" 9.5mm-height HDD/SDD just like the above (no drives)
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=59754

Drobo needs to drop their pricing by at least $200 before I'd consider getting one of these.
Click to expand...

You're joking right? They're two completely different ends of spectrum.

The NAS will max out at 1Gbps or 125MBps. Maybe 90MBps if you're lucky when considering the overhead. eSATA will likely top out at 80MBps and USB 2 at 20MBps. The wireless speed will halve it as well if you're doing it in that way.

Thunderbolt will max out 10Gbps with little overhead. That's 800-1000MBps easily directly connected to your laptop assuming you have all fast drives populated in RAID-0.

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Lindono said:
I feel like I'm the only one that knows about the ~$260 external thunderbolt drive. Perhaps because there wasn't a MacRumors article about it. Look it up, it's called GoFlex. Works great. Pricier than other drives, but not majorly so. The drive itself was cheap, it was the adapter and cable that cost, but I expect those to last. I think it was a pretty good deal.
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Not because nobody knows it but because almost everybody knows it has nothing to do with Drobo or this thread.

We're talking about a setup that holds 5 hard drives, not a single-drive enclosure.
 

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This thread illustrates there's a WIDE dynamic range of knowledge around storage in this thread.

I'm seeing confusion about NAS, DAS and more.
 
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