Drobo Releases Pricing for Thunderbolt Storage Devices, Preorders Start Monday

[Chupa Chupa]

Buy that marketing. They probably paid handsomely for it

There's only 1 reason they charge that much, lack of competition. It's no more unique than early Firewire drives were.

Sure, but the first FW800 drives were unique & that's what you paid for if you needed the speed (time is money and all that). Everyone else waited for prices to drop or ignored FW800 all together... Mostly the latter.

 

[BiggAW]

Buy that marketing. They probably paid handsomely for it

There's only 1 reason they charge that much, lack of competition. It's no more unique than early Firewire drives were.

It's a new connection standard based on 2 existing connection standards that have ample controller chips and existing hardware built for them (PCIe and Displayport). It's barely more than the controller circuitry of a PCIe RAID card in a case with Thunderbolt instead of a PCIe connector.

??? BeyondRaid is totally different than RAID. Normal RAID can't handle differently sized drives, and can't do a rolling upgrade to larger drives while staying online the whole time like Drobo can.

 

[barkmonster]

Sure, but the first FW800 drives were unique & that's what you paid for if you needed the speed (time is money and all that). Everyone else waited for prices to drop or ignored FW800 all together... Mostly the latter.

Early Firewire drives offered drastic increases in speed over USB. Even when USB 2.0 came out Firewire/Firewire 800 was still the standard for external storage for multi-track audio work because it's simply far closer to the stability of a secondary internal drive than USB/USB 2.0 because it's full duplex, has little to no CPU overhead unlike USB and the Oxford Semiconductor based drives and enclosures remain the standard for just that reason.

This is why Macs still have Firewire 800 and why Apple brought out a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter.

The fact all Macs now come with Thunderbolt AND this adapter is available is fantastic! Add the Belkin Thunderbolt Dock into the picture when it's released next year and you can literally use any Macbook, even the Air as a portable multi-track recording system with just an inexpensive adapter cable and then make full use of a second screen and non-portable peripherals like secondary storage systems or additional USB devices with just 1 thunderbolt cable!

I agree that the uptake of Firewire wasn't as drastic as USB because for most people a USB 2.0 drive is sufficient but Firewire has it's niche as does Thunderbolt but the price difference is almost criminal!

??? BeyondRaid is totally different than RAID. Normal RAID can't handle differently sized drives, and can't do a rolling upgrade to larger drives while staying online the whole time like Drobo can.

But the Drobbo Firewire 800 equivalent DOES offer BeyondRAID and a quick google search reveals the enormous premium they charge when the Firewire 800 version is £299 compared to £629 for the Thunderbolt version. NOTHING can justify such a large markup.

Incidentally, Oxford Semiconductor not only make the Firewire/Firewire 800 controller chips common to external drives but they also make the chips in Apple Thunderbolt cables. This makes the pricing of Thunderbolt storage all the more excessive and unjustified.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Early Firewire drives offered drastic increases in speed over USB. Even when USB 2.0 came out Firewire/Firewire 800 was still the standard for external storage for multi-track audio work because it's simply far closer to the stability of a secondary internal drive than USB/USB 2.0 because it's full duplex, has little to no CPU overhead unlike USB and the Oxford Semiconductor based drives and enclosures remain the standard for just that reason.

This is why Macs still have Firewire 800 and why Apple brought out a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter.

The fact all Macs now come with Thunderbolt AND this adapter is available is fantastic! Add the Belkin Thunderbolt Dock into the picture when it's released next year and you can literally use any Macbook, even the Air as a portable multi-track recording system with just an inexpensive adapter cable and then make full use of a second screen and non-portable peripherals like secondary storage systems or additional USB devices with just 1 thunderbolt cable!

I agree that the uptake of Firewire wasn't as drastic as USB because for most people a USB 2.0 drive is sufficient but Firewire has it's niche as does Thunderbolt but the price difference is almost criminal!

I think you misread my comment. It was only to suggest FW800 drives & enclosures were hella expensive when they first arrived on the scene. Only pros could justify buying them.

But at any rate FW800 is a slow turkey compared to TB & FW800 isn't on any current Mac other than the mini & relatively unupdated, 2 year old Mac Pro. I'd bet it won't be on the next pro Mac desktop. It's not b/c it's obsolete, just that Apple is moving on. It's the new kid on the block, & they are always expensive as adoption moves down the buying chain. What is really criminal is how USB 3 reliability on Macs when TB isn't really a viable alternative for most Mac users right now.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I agree that the uptake of Firewire wasn't as drastic as USB because for most people a USB 2.0 drive is sufficient but Firewire has it's niche as does Thunderbolt but the price difference is almost criminal!

It's called supply and demand. No demand = high prices. Right now there's a $200-300 premium on the same size hard drive with a Thunderbolt interface instead of USB 3.0 and for single drives absolutely no speed difference. That creates NO demand on an average consumer level. I'm afraid that will leave Thunderbolt as a high-end niche format forever and prices very high for a long time. You can buy a PC computer for $300 and that's what you have to pay EXTRA just to get what would be a $99 drive otherwise in some cases. Hubs for $300? WTF?!? The only thing I'm doing with my Thunderbolt port is buying an adapter so I can use with a real-world monitor (since hardly any outside Apple have Mini-Display Port, let alone Thunderbolt extra support).

 

[zzLZHzz]

It's called supply and demand. No demand = high prices. Right now there's a $200-300 premium on the same size hard drive with a Thunderbolt interface instead of USB 3.0 and for single drives absolutely no speed difference. That creates NO demand on an average consumer level. I'm afraid that will leave Thunderbolt as a high-end niche format forever and prices very high for a long time. You can buy a PC computer for $300 and that's what you have to pay EXTRA just to get what would be a $99 drive otherwise in some cases. Hubs for $300? WTF?!? The only thing I'm doing with my Thunderbolt port is buying an adapter so I can use with a real-world monitor (since hardly any outside Apple have Mini-Display Port, let alone Thunderbolt extra support).

are you sure hardly any device outside apple has mini-display?
HP and Dell already has a couple of laptops with mini-display port since 2010. even Microsoft Surface has one.
and as of now, HP, acer, dell, asus, lenovo has certain notebook with thunderbolt support.

even dell monitor has mini display port because it support a higher resolution

 

[khongaeng]

It's hard for me to find a single good thing to say about my experience with Drobo products.

First, the FW800 products are S_L_O_W...as in USB2 slow. Will the thunderbolt Drobos also perform below expectations? I would definitely want to see some benchmarks before dropping any cash.

Second, "failure rates" are high and it's a proprietary system so your data is held hostage. Of course, Drobo offers a recovery service. Ka-ching. $300 please. See Scott Kelby's public declaration from a few weeks ago "I'm done with Drobo!" and the 100's of comments generated. Just to be clear here, I'm not talking about a drive failure, but the drobo itself failing. Data on the drives is fine, but you can't access it.

Drobo customer service sucks.

By the time you put some drives in the new 5D, you can buy a 4TB Pegasus for less.

Drobos might be fine for Time Machine BU's, but that's it.

I just wanted to repeat this earlier comment because it is spot on. I have two Drobos 2nd Gen and would never buy another one. I got screwed. The company's concept is great, but implementation and support is not worth a pile of turds.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

are you sure hardly any device outside apple has mini-display?
HP and Dell already has a couple of laptops with mini-display port since 2010. even Microsoft Surface has one.
and as of now, HP, acer, dell, asus, lenovo has certain notebook with thunderbolt support.

even dell monitor has mini display port because it support a higher resolution

I was referring to monitors that support it. Most still need some kind of an adaptor.

 

[zzLZHzz]

I was referring to monitors that support it. Most still need some kind of an adaptor.

that true because only high res monitor warrant the use of mini display port

 

[GHouse]

Drobo is overpriced and overrated. Their speed is sub par and I've had several of them fail on me over the last 4 years. They start rebuilding their library/structure for now reason whatsoever and call out perfectly good drives as being bad. Never again will I use Drobo.

 

[BiggAW]

But the Drobbo Firewire 800 equivalent DOES offer BeyondRAID and a quick google search reveals the enormous premium they charge when the Firewire 800 version is £299 compared to £629 for the Thunderbolt version. NOTHING can justify such a large markup.

Didn't realize there was such a huge markup between models. I thought the post before was referring to Drobo as opposed to something like FreeNAS or a traditional appliance NAS with RAID.

 

[bogatyr]

I have a 5D, mini and now I have an 800i. The 5D and mini work extremely well over TB and USB 3.

The 5D is hosting 4TB of data on 7.9TB of usable drive space as a temporary solution for our engineering department. We only had time to transfer the data to the Drobo and move it to another office so for that week they accessed their data over the network via a laptop connected to the Drobo with USB 3. 30 users - no complaints about speed compared to their previous EMC iSCSI setup (was only connected via 1Gb Ethernet as well, same bottleneck). Data will be moved to a DS3512 from IBM with 10Gb over the holidays.

After the move, the 5D will be used for data transfers or temp storage. Not really a good fit for long term use in any specific setting for our company since it is missing iSCSI.

The mini is used by me daily on my rMBP. I use it to manage 5-8 VMs over thunderbolt with VMWare Fusion. I store ISO images on there with the VMs. As it doesn't support FDE, I used a sparse bundle to encrypt the data on the unit (work sensitive). Speed is 150-250MB/s using 4 7500RPM 750GB drives in single drive redundancy.

The 800i hasn't been put into service yet. We have a custom built archive server with 45 drives (Backblaze design) that we are decommissioning. The 800i is a testbed for partially replacing it. 8 drives will go into it and we will try using the iSCSI connection with a couple Hyper-V VMs that we use for archiving data. If it works well, we will buy more due to the price ($3k) and expected ease of use.

I would use the 1200i but the cost difference from the 800i doesn't seem worth it right now. $3k vs $12.5k

 

[Makosuke]

But the Drobbo Firewire 800 equivalent DOES offer BeyondRAID and a quick google search reveals the enormous premium they charge when the Firewire 800 version is £299 compared to £629 for the Thunderbolt version. NOTHING can justify such a large markup.

Are you comparing the 5D to the current-model DR04DD10 (the 4-bay FW800 Drobo)?

If so, while the DR04DD is less than half the price, that's really not a very good comparison; leaving TB interface aside entirely, the 5D has 5 bays over four, and has an MSATA caching SSD slot available which, if it works, pushes it into a substantially higher tier of storage.

Now that the 5N (the NAS version of the 5D) has been announced, we can say more or less exactly what the price premium for Thunderbolt is: $250. The 5N, which is identical so far as I can tell other than having a NAS interface instead of TB/USB3, lists for $599, the 5D for $849.

You're free to argue whether that's an early adopter cost ding, whether it's because it actually can push data faster than the NAS version when fully provisioned with an SSD and 5 HDs, or whether it's just overpriced, but we're not comparing $350 to $850, and as I pointed out before, you would be very hard pressed to find any other RAID solution that includes 5 drive bays, live provisioning, and a caching SSD for a lot less than that.

 

[res08hao]

Drobo

So, I get to spend $600 for the shell, and then hundreds more for the mini drives that it needs. Hmmmm....