Drobo?

Cameron · January 23, 2009

I've seen a few people mention Drobo here but does anyone here actually have one? It looks like a very interesting product and a great way to make my on-site backup a bit more secure. I like that you can dynamically increase your storage as you need rather than buying bigger drives only to move the old ones to the shelf. The only thing I DON'T like about it is the price. I could buy 4+ TB of storage for the price of the bare drobo device. Since I can still fit all of my photos and music on a 500GB drive (this will increase quickly shooting all RAW these days), does it make sense to go with a drobo over a single external drive? In either case I plan to continue to maintain off-site backups as I realize drobo alone isn't a true backup strategy.

Any thoughts?

Pupator · January 23, 2009

A friend and I have been drooling over these for months now. But who can afford the thing? :cry

ian408 · January 23, 2009

I like the concept of the Drobo. But too much.

Someone elese to consider are the RAID offerings from Synology. www.synology.com. Nice box. Quiet, easy to manage, supports macs, windows and other *nix platforms. Reasonable price too.

pathfinder · January 23, 2009

I have a new version with 2 1Tb Seagate drives in it, but have removed it from my system, as it began to make my Mac act really weird. I had it formatted as two separate drives - one for a back up for my main HD on my Mac, and one for data. But my Mac gradually began to crash more and more frequently, and once I uninstalled the Drobo dashboard software - which is the software that connects my Mac to the Drobo drives via a Firewire 800 cable - my Mac when back to its pleasant, unflappable, happy Mac that never crashes. From Mr Hyde back to Dr Jeckle

I may have to contact Drobo and see if they can explain this behaviour, but it was strange - long, long, long times waiting for drives to spin up, even when I was not writing to the Drobo drives. And the Drobo drives do not go to sleep when I put my Mac to sleep, they just kept droning on indefinitely. I put up with all that, but the crashing and having to reboot several times in a row, because the system failed to come up correctly from a cold boot, gave me cold chills. That stopped immediately after I yanked the Drobo dashboard software. Now it cold boots like new.

I may just pull the two 1Tb drives and mount them in my Mac, as I still can make room for then as I only have two drives in my Mac itself.

The ads for Drobo looked really cool, and I can use the unlimited space ( up to 16 Tb ) idea, but it did not work that well in my experience.

And yes, the software and firm ware are up to date on my Mac and on my Drobo unit also ( I had to upgrade the firmware and the software before I installed the Drobo the first time)

I am very interested to hear from folks who have had a good experience, or a bad one like mine, with the Drobo units!!

flyingpoint · January 26, 2009

Drobo
I've had one (1st generation) since last October. It's currently running with four 1TB drives.

In my case, it's been an absolutely bulletproof, reliable backup. I've got it in my basement connected to my network through a droboshare. It's saved my butt once already and the best part is that it was incredibly simple and painless to set up.

colourbox · January 27, 2009

Pupator wrote:

A friend and I have been drooling over these for months now. But who can afford the thing? :cry

I want one but will not buy until Gigabit Ethernet is built in without a price increase.

scottV · January 28, 2009

looking to sell that one pathfinder?

cmason · January 28, 2009

Pathfinder...Seagate recently had a major issue with the 1 Tb drives and Mac...not sure if this is related or not...they issued a firmware update for the drives themselves

http://www.macworld.com/article/138390/barracuda.html

Art Scott · January 28, 2009

CSwinton wrote:

I've seen a few people mention Drobo here but does anyone here actually have one? It looks like a very interesting product and a great way to make my on-site backup a bit more secure. I like that you can dynamically increase your storage as you need rather than buying bigger drives only to move the old ones to the shelf. The only thing I DON'T like about it is the price. I could buy 4+ TB of storage for the price of the bare drobo device. Since I can still fit all of my photos and music on a 500GB drive (this will increase quickly shooting all RAW these days), does it make sense to go with a drobo over a single external drive? In either case I plan to continue to maintain off-site backups as I realize drobo alone isn't a true backup strategy.

Any thoughts?

Cameron,

I had looked at them and other solutions like them for quite some time now....I just can't make it a cost effective purchase.....I use a 3 deep hard drive system with SM as my final back up for my finished jpgs and with the cost of externals (seagate 1.5tb extreme freeagent 199.+change including tax) I just can't see the cost effectiveness of it.

pathfinder · January 28, 2009

scottV wrote:

looking to sell that one pathfinder?

I haven't made up my mind yet , and probably will not finally decide until March at the earliest. If it will work on my network that might be all right. One of the problems is that you cannot boot a Mac from a Network backup drive if my understanding is correct.

I saw the notice about the drive firmware and need to look into that further. I have not updated my drives yet - I own 4 Seagate 1Tb drives currently.

Cameron · January 28, 2009

Art Scott wrote:

Cameron,

I had looked at them and other solutions like them for quite some time now....I just can't make it a cost effective purchase.....I use a 3 deep hard drive system with SM as my final back up for my finished jpgs and with the cost of externals (seagate 1.5tb extreme freeagent 199.+change including tax) I just can't see the cost effectiveness of it.

I agree - I think it's a great idea but I too am having a hard time justifying the cost - especially since I keep an off-site backup in addition to my on-site one. Perhaps as the tech matures or as they get some competition the prices will decrease.

aquaticvideographer · January 31, 2009

Good deal on Amazon
I just picked one up on Amazon for $370 after rebate. I'm still waiting on my drives to get here. Seems like an OK deal to me, especially compared to buying and managing lots of externals, which is what I was doing. I do like that it is nice and small-it fits perfectly underneath my desk.

I'm keeping one external for Time Machine use, and then the Drobo for primary storage for all of my video and photos

I've heard good things about them. I'll report back when I've got it up and running.

flyingpoint · January 31, 2009

Drobo
Wow -- I'm surprised by the different experiences.

Mine is about 9 months old. I've got it at the end of an ethernet line in my basement. It's been absolutely bullet-proof and has bailed me out one major problem alread.

I especially appreciate the simplicity of the whole set-up. It really only took an hour or so to get everything running and I've swapped out one drive thus far without issue.

aquaticvideographer · February 4, 2009

I got my hard drives in the mail today, so I set up my Drobo. It was really easy--almost Apple-esque in its simplicity. You just pop the drives in, plug it in, format it once, and you're good to go. It also reminds me of Apple products in terms of packaging (pretty minimal, cleverly designed, easy to unpack, friendly) and with its industrial design. When it's fired up, it's got an attractive but pretty subtle look to it.

It seems pretty fast. I'm currently copying over a bunch of my media, and it's about a 7-hour process to copy 650GB over FW800 (with the source drive daisy-chained to the Drobo). I had Aperture write a vault to it while I was copying stuff over to see how it would deal, and it did OK. I haven't tried scrubbing through a video with it, but I will once I get everything copied over safe and sound.

It's very, very quiet (I got some "quiet", low-power drives for it). It's sitting on a shelf under my desk, and if I put my head next to it, I can hear the fan and some clicking of the drives, but from 2 feet away (where I sit), I can barely hear anything. If anything, my old external, which itself is a low-power, "quiet"-er drive, is louder than the Drobo, and it's sitting farther away from me on the same shelf.

I haven't tried pulling a drive out in the middle of things but I guess you could if you wanted to. Supposedly it can recover from a single drive failure but I'll wait for that to happen organically before I test out the recovery features.:D

All in all I'm impressed so far. I got pretty smokin' deals on the Drobo itself and on the hard drives, so the price wasn't as worrysome as it could have been. My domestic life has also improved since my better half is now looking at a little black box with pretty lights instead of a rat's nest of wires going every which way, leading to 4 separate externals.

So yAy for Drobo.

Drobo?

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