Should I get a drobo box?

[md0u80c9]

Firstly, don't buy the 'only inexperienced users would buy a Drobo' nonsense. I'm a very experienced and very computer literate user (I'm not biting by quantifying that!)

I have a Drobo and a Time capsule, for different purposes. The Time Capsule serves for backups to the Mac Pro. I use the data area on the time capsule to store SVN repositories for software development from the Macs and another OS I work with.

I also have a Drobo which is my massive storage media server, and secondary backup device for important / difficult to replace things (like my music collection and photo collections, which whilst not huge would be difficult (in the case of the amount of CD ripping to be done) or impossible (in the case of the photos) to replace.

The Drobo has pros and cons. The flexibility of expansion is a big plus and serves my needs well for its role. I am unlikely to need to use the full 2TB of Time Capsule space for the role it serves. Whilst very slow, I can happily expand the Drobo if I need. It can stream movie files for playback elsewhere in the house, and can perform adequately for backups.

The software is flaky as others have said. For some reason I cannot administer it from the wireless on my Macbook Pro (even though I can access its data from the same machine) and I have to do that from a machine on the wired network. That said you need to administer it rarely - it's not a toy!

So - if you need big, flexible but slow storage with data redundancy - great. If you need faster access or are likely to only need a couple of drives at most - there are better options out there and £500 goes some way towards a second hand Mac Pro with all the storage options you need and a few other benefits besides.

 

[gianthobbit]

Here is what I am thinking:

Local Backup: Purchase another 2TB external HD and mirror the data from the first.

Remote Backup: backblaze allows you to backup even external hard drives, I would just select one of the two as they are duplicates.

Thoughts? What application can I use to keep the two drives in sync?

 

[calderone]

Firstly, don't buy the 'only inexperienced users would buy a Drobo' nonsense. I'm a very experienced and very computer literate user (I'm not biting by quantifying that!)

I never said that, it is a good option for someone who is inexperienced. And mind you, I owned one and I am not calling myself inexperienced.

Drobo actually sold me with the ridiculous ease of use; I don't have to worry about failover and get all the benefits of a RAID array? Awesome!

Except; it is much slower than advertised, if the unit fails you may need to worry about your data as there have been issues taking the disk pack to a replacement unit, getting a replacement unit is a hassle with their support, they keep the logs encrypted so you can't self diagnose, my personal fail rate was far too high for my taste, they keep their forums locked down, good luck with data recovery.

I could go on. There are far too many problems for me to trust my data to a Drobo. Of course, I have other means of backup, however I still want a device I trust and the Drobo is not it for me.

 

[vigorblade]

I am in a similar situation. Years of important design/creative project files as well as other types of files that I can't afford to lose. I have backups on local HDs, but I would stroooongly recommend an online backup service for piece of mind. You don't want all your eggs in one basket as they say. I have been using crashplan (www.crashplan.com) as my online backup for several years now and it has been great for me. There are other great online options I am sure others on macrumors can and will recommend.

What ever you do at least your are thinking the right way, "Get a backup".

 

[Cynicalone]

I have 3 total Drobo's in the office and have had no problem with them.

The first one is a Drobo 2nd Generation FW800 model. It has been running problem free for a little over 3 years.

The second one is a DroboPro it has been running for a little over a year and a half without issue.

And the third one is a DroboPro that mirrors the primary DroboPro.

I have both DroboPro's connected to a switch and then the switch connected to my secondary ethernet port on my Mac Pro. I configured the IP address for each one manually.

I use both DroboPro's for HD video storage, just over 10TB and growing everyday.

 

[dancook99]

Bought my Drobo last November and happy with it. However, like others wrote, it's slow, but enough for my Plex library.

I'm using it solely for ripped movies and TV Shows period; stuff that I can loose with an "Oh well".

My real important data/photos are on multiple external drives and Dropbox. Although, after reading this thread, Crashplan seems appealing too

 

[JamesMay82]

I bought my Drobo in May 2011 and feel like its a bit of a paperweight if i'm honest.

I find it incredibly slow versus a normal external firewire 800 drive. I copied over 1TB in about 8-10 hours (maybe longer but can't remember) to my drobo where is as it takes on a normal external. I also find it noisy when its doing its thing.

I'm just a home user with a big itunes library and I like to mess about editing home movies etc.

If I could do it all again I would buy 3TB time capsule for time machine backups and then I would buy a 3TB external FW800 just for duplicates of my important files i.e photos, itunes & my wedding footage. I would keep this 2nd drive at an offsite location i.e. my parents.

I have 1 question though. How do I use my drobo for time machine, on the website it says I have to partition the drive? Do I have to do that? or can I just use it as part of a normal drive? i.e. no partitions and in amongst my other files etc.

 

[jvaska]

Very happy with my Drobo FS. I store, mostly, tv and movies on it but also as a backup for iTunes and other files.

It is not my primary backup - I use Time Machine and a small USB hard drive to backup my computers. I backup very important works to a variety of places periodically.

I've never had a problem with slowness...everything works great.

 

[lc25]

I was really tempted but in the end built a FreeNas server out of my old PC and since then i have bought WD MyBooks and both have worked flawlessly. After hearing so many random stories about Drobo's I'm glad i didn't buy one.

 

[thekev]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I have one large external hard drive and it has a ton of important data on it. Getting afraid one day it would fail.

Doing research in different options (like raid) I found this product called drobobox. The base model runs $300 on amazon.

I hear complaints about drobo support at times. I've personally avoided them. I think you need a better understanding of backups and Raid setups. A raid isn't actually a backup. In most configurations it provides some amount of fault tolerance, but that can vary based on the quality of the implementation. Some controllers are flakier than others. Whether you're using a Raid or a single drive, you need backups. Drives can fail for any number of reasons, and it can happen at any time. If you read a few reviews on newegg or even the thunderbolt enclosure at the Apple store, you will see reviews mentioning doa drives, reviews mentioning drives dying within months, etc. It's all over the place, and this is the nature of it.

SSDs do not solve the problem. That is a myth propagated by ignorant people and trolls. Don't fall for it. Basically they won't fail due to mechanical wear, and that isn't saying much.

Last thing I want to mention here is that you need to ensure Lion compatibility. Some Raid boxes don't have updated drivers. Even if you don't like Lion, you will go past Snow Leopard one day, and the duty cycle of a Raid box can be quite long if you're just using it for backup. There's no real reason to upgrade them as frequently as a computer unless you're changing drive standards.

As I've already said, I use Drobos as Time Machine drives where the speed is totally irrelevant. I use a 15,000 rpm drive as a scratch disc which will be replaced by SSDs when my new MacPro arrives. My Drobos have NEVER rebuilt themselves or needed to.

Consider the amount of ram you mentioned ordering, you may not need much in the way of scratch drives as your entire history, thumbnails, etc. would probably fit in ram. I understand why you want powerful hardware too. Drawing with any kind of discontinuity sucks. By the way are you using the newer 24" cintiq?

 

[imahawki]

Very happy with my Drobo S. Be sure to read comments carefully and see if complainers have ever actually owned one or just have a negative impression. If they did own one, was it one of the original 1st gen products?

I edit 5DII RAW photos and digital video off my Firewire Drobo and serve up my 1.8TB iTunes library to the rest of the house. Its plenty fast. I never find any major delays in my photo editing work stream. You have to weight the pro's against the cons and not just list off a bunch of cons (many of which some don't consider a con).

For example, it is proprietary RAID. But that's also what allows you to add storage over time. Get a standard "dumb" RAID box and you have to purchase all the drives to build it now. And if you want to expand your storage pool, you have to rebuild the entire array. Or you can use the proprietary RAID of Synology or Qnap and be in the same boat.

Drobo also doesn't have particularly fast direct network attached products. I.e. the Drobo FS truly doesn't score very well in objective speed tests. That's why I got the regular Drobo S and share it from a "server" (my main workstation, a 2011 iMac) which gets the benefit of direct attached storage while the other devices still have access over the network.

And as others have said, RAID is NOT a backup. I backup with Crashplan and to a local drive for faster restorations if needed.

 

[kastorff]

I use my Drobo (via FireWire 800) for media backups. In that role it has worked beautifully for the two years I've owned it. That said, I also back up the same media to other external drives, so I don't depend on any single drive. My Drobo's write speed is noticeably slower than some other drives, but IME does fine for video and music playback.

 

[colinet]

Maybe Drobo is a little bit slower than other systems.

Here's a screen shoot from a few weeks ago -

 

[foodog]

So you have no local backup then?

Can backblaze run backups off external harddrives? That was my issue with Carbonite, it only backs up items on the primary hard drive.

I use timemachine for local backup of some stuff. Backblaze allows you to backup any drive connected... USB, Firewire, eSata... etc

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Maybe Drobo is a little bit slower than other systems.

Here's a screen shoot from a few weeks ago -

View attachment 323265

DO NOT use Drobo as your Timemachine drive.... I had nothing but problems with this setup.

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Here is what I am thinking:

Local Backup: Purchase another 2TB external HD and mirror the data from the first.

Remote Backup: backblaze allows you to backup even external hard drives, I would just select one of the two as they are duplicates.

Thoughts? What application can I use to keep the two drives in sync?

Carbon Copy Cloner

 

[an-other]

+1 for Synology

I'm not particularly experienced with RAID and the technical side of NAS. I purchased a Synology. I'm extremely pleased, and haven't looked back. The interface is extremely intuitive, and I've been able to do a lot of pretty cool things without a lot of effort. I would give them my highest recommendation.

As I've noted previoiusly:
1. Follow the manufacturers recommendations on drives. Putting a non-approved drive is a lottery with your data.
2. NAS's need to be backed up, too. My ISP offers reasonable prices for unlimited storage backups. Plenty of good vendors around. A bucket of water can foil a lot of good backup plans.
3. Budget for an ups (uninterrupted power supply, too.) One power outage, brown out or surge can cause a world of hurt.


I appreciate this is very frustrating to research. Online reviews are not particularly reliable. I know I'd be mental if I lost my key data. I'll venture this is why all vendors have some nasty comments.

Good luck

 

[gianthobbit]

Forgot to update with my decision and what I bought.

I bought another 2tb external harddrive and once a week I make a clone of my primary 2tb drive to it using carbon copy cloner. I also have a 1tb external for my time machine. This is my local backup.

I got backblaze and have that backing up my computer of course but also my primary 2tb. This is my off site backup.

In my opinion this was the cheapest solution and was not tough to setup.

 

[Tekkster]

Agreed agreed agreed

This has already been mentioned several times, but just to reinforce the concept, I am yet another who advocates double backup whenever feasible.

The problem, of course, is that it's expensive. But if you can afford it...

The Synology DS1812+ has dual disk fault tolerance, and is pretty fast, especially if you can do link aggregation (you need a switch that supports 802.3ad link aggregation, of course, but Zyxel and TrendNet both have reasonably priced ones at around $250 including tax and shipping). I can't say enough good things about the Synology right now. Have been using it pretty intensively and it is rock solid. Much much faster than the Drobo I have and since a NAS is a file server in its own right, it frees up resources from my general purpose computer. Either way, if you get the DS1812+, definitely get the extra RAM. I've been monitoring RAM usage both when I had it up as a 1GB NAS and after installing the 2GB extra (totaling 3GB RAM) and there is a palpable difference for file transfers below 50GB. Above 50GB, it still does intermittent slow downs, but I think that's not related to RAM because I never hit the ceiling.

If you can get your hands on an older 4-bay Drobo for cheap, I'd highly recommend that as a backup unit for the Synology. It has single disk fault tolerance, but as a back unit, it's also pretty rock solid.

A lot of people complain about the Drobo having errors and being slow. Actually, the issues are likely related. Because the Drobo's processor is so slow, it takes several days to do things like rebuilds, but in regular use as a backup device, it's really rock solid. I used it as my primary storage for quite a while, and as long as you don't do a lot of rebuilds, you're fine. The only times I ever do a rebuild are when a disk fails. The errors generally occur because you're also moving a lot of data around, or there's a power outage for even a few seconds which shuts the Drobo down without a UPS, during a multi-day rebuild. But if you're Drobo is safe from such activity or power accidents for several days, then errors are unlikely. I've never had an error, and the disk failure alert has saved my butt twice.

The Drobo is slow, no doubt. But it's given me zero problems to date, and nowadays the 4 bay Drobo is crazy cheap for what it is, and more importantly, stupid easy.

If after all that, you still have a little extra leftover, I'd also recommend getting a SATA adaptor with USB. Like the Kingwin versions, or mayber the NewerTech or Aluratek SATA docks. These are great because you can buy cheap SATA disks and use them for tertiary backups of truly important stuff. Maybe you have a DB of your finances, or previous photos you can never get back, or home movies you've made. Maybe you've created some graphics you want to hold onto forever. Whatever it is, for stuff that, once lost, can never be retrieved, a tertiary backup is highly recommended.

Finally, and I say this because you just never know....I'd also recommend getting a sw for recovering data from damaged disks. I use Data Recover from Prosoft and it has saved me on no less than 3 occasions in the last decade, not to mention the help I was able to give friends and family who ran into similar problems.

Add it all up and things can get pretty expensive, so as a step 1, I'd definitely recommend a Synology with at least single disk failure tolerance.

(^-^) Best of luck

 

[primalman]

Rather than deal with elaborate RAID setups, I simply back stuff up multiple times. I back up once to an Apple Time Capsule external USB drive using Time Machine, next to Crashplan's cloud and really vital stuff gets manually copied to the LaCie and the Synology NAS drives. For photos, I keep them on a LaCie Firewire drive, BOTH NAS drives and to a cloud photo backup site. If any one drive fails anywhere, I've got other copies and I simply pop out the drive, replace it and copy everything over to it before another copy fails.

This.

I simply keep a Time Machine of my Mac, then I clone the Mac to another HHD once a week or every other week with Carbon Copy Cloner and keep that disk offsite at my office. On Mondays I bring it home and clone again and it goes back Tuesday, sitting overnight in the car. Soon, I will be getting one more HHD to clone while one is still at work, so in worst case scenarios [fire, burglary, maple syrup mishap, etc] I am out less than one week of work.

I did the same thing in reverse at a former job where I was in charge of the file server, just brought the clones home. If done right, you are never out more than a couple of days or so.

For my home machine as described, I am not using it everyday like a production machine, so the one week lag is acceptable. Just keeps the media and the family photos safe.