The amazing Drobo (disk storage unit)

r9jackson · December 14, 2009

I would like to do a review on the Drobo storage robot, but can't figure out how to submit it. Can someone point me to the instruction page.

ziggy53 · December 14, 2009

We are not a formal review site. If you want to post a review here, feel free. It is only self-serving reviews to promote one's self or to sell something that we discourage or even delete. (Spam is deleted. Vendors have to be pre-approved.)

r9jackson · December 14, 2009

ziggy53 wrote:

We are not a formal review site. If you want to post a review here, feel free. It is only self-serving reviews to promote one's self or to sell something that we discourage or even delete. (Spam is deleted. Vendors have to be pre-approved.)

Thanks, I can do that. I was wondering about the review in the section titled "Reviews" on the ribbon bar at the top of the page.
I will start working on a review to post here in the meantime.

r9jackson · December 16, 2009

The amazin Drobo (disk storage unit)
I recently had the opportunity to purchase a Drobo. What the heck is a Drobo? It is a Drobo Storage Robot which is a huge (in capacity, not footprint) desktop storage unit with the capacity to house up to four hard disks. It is configured with something the Drobo people call "BeyondRAID" storage technology which protects against a hard disk failure. This little unit is expandable up to 16 terabytes of raw storage space for your documents and photos. My photo workflow has me keeping at least three copies of every photo: original, working (in DNG format) and production which might be PSD, Tiff or JPG files.

I purchased the unit through a third party Amazon partner J & R Music and Computer World. I bought the unit with four Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA drives. With the proprietary RAID configuration it gave me 3 TB of usable disk directly attached to my PC with a USB cable. The total cost was under $800.

The box arrived shortly after our order and I started the put it all together.<o:p></o:p>

It arrived with all the proper padding expected. The instruction were amazingly simple: place the SATA drives in a drive bay, attach the power cable and USB cable and install the software from the supplied CD. No tools were required.
<o:p> </o:p>

This picture shows all the parts assembled on my table (one drive is propping up the box with the instructions). Yes, it really is that small. Those are 3 1/2" SATA drives in the green boxes.
The drives slipped in the bays with no trouble at all (well I did have to figure out which side was up). I then proceeded to attach the unit to my PC and ran the Drobo Dashboard software. It quickly detected the Drobo unit and recommended that I format the drives. I did and a few minutes later I had 3 terabytes of disk added to my system for use as primary storage or backup.
<o:p> </o:p>
The ease of installation belies its features and technology. The RAID-like internal software lets you mix and match drive sizes and is hot swappable (not possible with traditional RAID technology). You can upgrade by adding a larger capacity drive and it will self rebuild the drive while adding capacity. I am impressed. It works just like they said it would. It is very easy to manage and looks like regular disk storage to my Vista 64 operating system.

After several weeks of use the unit is still running strong. The USB connection is a little slow (it also supports Firewire 800 and that would be a good option. They have other models that use iSCSI and those would probably be a little faster. The unit is very quiet, but occasionally powers up the fan (not a bad noise, just little whir).

<o:p> </o:p>
The company has other products that increase the capacity from my four drive bays up to 8 rack mounted drive bays in their Drobo Elite unit. I foresee the possibility of using one of these units as part of our business continuity process to place near real time data backups at a remote location using VMWare. See more information at the Data Robotics, Inc. web site.
<o:p> </o:p>
I do note that I don't receive any consideration for reviewing products. I don't work for Data Robotics. I bought the product from dealers available to all consumers and paid the same discounted price available to all of you. Most of this review first appeared on my blog "Random Thoughts of a CIO" (http://randomcio.blogspot.com).

ziggy53 · December 17, 2009

I moved this to the Digital darkroom Gear, where i think it's more appropriate.

Carry on and thanks Randy, for the review.

dixonduke · December 20, 2009

So the proprietary DROBO software takes up 1 TB of space?

How come 4 drives at 1TB ea only give you 3TB of usable space?

Thanks for taking the time to share this, as I am currently trying to decide what my best solution for extra space/back up is going to be.

r9jackson · December 20, 2009

dixonduke wrote:

So the proprietary DROBO software takes up 1 TB of space?

How come 4 drives at 1TB ea only give you 3TB of usable space?

Thanks for taking the time to share this, as I am currently trying to decide what my best solution for extra space/back up is going to be.

Actually, that is the way the RAID works. It protects your data from a single disk drive failure. When you save your photos to a Drobo unit the software spreads the photo data across several of the physical disk drives. The process takes some additional space to provide this safety net. A more detailed explanation about the Drobo process can be found at:

Explanation of Beyond RAID

You can also find other conversations about RAID in Google or BING. Hope that helps with your decision making.

Photometric · December 21, 2009

You probably are losing 200gb of data just for the formatting of the disks, and using the remaining 800gb for raid and temporary buffer space on a 4tb configuration is not out of the question. The system needs to store the data while it is writing and doing checksum's on the files it is pushing and to speed things up, it's better to store them locally then transfer over the usb connection multiple times. I'd be really interested to know what kind of recovery utilities if something happens (sector dies after commits are done) are available and what is the chance of recovery on files in bad sectors. Harddrives are cheap, the data is not.

ivar · December 21, 2009

See: http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobocalculator.php

funkytaco · December 24, 2009

This is more efficient than RAID 1
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_01.html
It has 100% disk overhead, since the drives are mirrored.
The advantage is that if one drive dies, the other is an exact mirror.

Having worked in several datacenters, I've seen this happen no less than 30x, so it's saved the butts of 30 setups at least. The people who cry are the ones who do not monitor their RAID.

Now that Drobo calculator shows 25%-30% overhead, so I'd be happy with that. Thanks for the review!

gecko0 · December 24, 2009

funkytaco wrote:

This is more efficient than RAID 1
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_01.html
It has 100% disk overhead, since the drives are mirrored.
The advantage is that if one drive dies, the other is an exact mirror.

Having worked in several datacenters, I've seen this happen no less than 30x, so it's saved the butts of 30 setups at least. The people who cry are the ones who do not monitor their RAID.

Now that Drobo calculator shows 25%-30% overhead, so I'd be happy with that. Thanks for the review!

it's basically a watered down consumer level SAN...RAID 5 on steroids.

nice feature set and looks like a good option for people that just want something that is simple with little administration needed. all of our production servers at work use mirrored arrays for the OS and apps...then RAID 5 for data. of course, the enterprise critical data goes on various SANs and not on local storage.

i'm a fan of iSCSI (and VMware), so i could see where a small business would like this solution for offsite replication. i can't see it performing well with any significant amount of VMs on it, of course...just not enough fast spindles in it to functional at that level. if it's just for DR though, then it's fine in the short term.

(ok, that was all a bit off topic...hahaha)

happy holidays!

aquaticvideographer · December 26, 2009

I have had one for about a year now and it rocks! Solid performance, very reliable, runs quiet and cool. I've got a mix of WD Green drives and a Samsung EcoGreen drive in mine. It doesn't care about drive brand or speed.

Really easy to administer: you just pop drives in, if they fill up or fail, you pop them out and replace them (one at a time) and the box rebuilds itself automagically.

I keep my video archives and Aperture vault on mine.

I wholeheartedly recommend Drobo.

SamirD · January 12, 2010

I worked with RAID technology for years. I even had a SCSI-to-SCSI RAID on my desktop in the 1990s (not cheap at all).

The main problem with RAID levels 4 and above is that the controller becomes a critical piece in the puzzle. If the controller dies and the drives are all fine, you still don't have data availability.

And since RAID is designed to prolong a catastrophic failure by making the data immune to hard drive failures, a RAID lasts a long time--many times longer than the RAID controller manufacturer. How are you going to get data off that proprietary RAID without the controller?

Case in point, see if you can find any information on a Mylex DAC960SUI or SXI. This controller was even used on enterprise class IBM hardware in the late 1990/early 2000. Less than 10 years later, poof! all gone!

I wonder where the Drobo will be in the next decade? Where will your data be? Things to think about...

dixonduke · January 13, 2010

SamirD wrote:

I worked with RAID technology for years. I even had a SCSI-to-SCSI RAID on my desktop in the 1990s (not cheap at all).

The main problem with RAID levels 4 and above is that the controller becomes a critical piece in the puzzle. If the controller dies and the drives are all fine, you still don't have data availability.

And since RAID is designed to prolong a catastrophic failure by making the data immune to hard drive failures, a RAID lasts a long time--many times longer than the RAID controller manufacturer. How are you going to get data off that proprietary RAID without the controller?

Case in point, see if you can find any information on a Mylex DAC960SUI or SXI. This controller was even used on enterprise class IBM hardware in the late 1990/early 2000. Less than 10 years later, poof! all gone!

I wonder where the Drobo will be in the next decade? Where will your data be? Things to think about...

So what would you recommend as an alternative?

aquaticvideographer · January 13, 2010

SamirD wrote:

...The main problem with RAID levels 4 and above is that the controller becomes a critical piece in the puzzle. If the controller dies and the drives are all fine, you still don't have data availability.

And since RAID is designed to prolong a catastrophic failure by making the data immune to hard drive failures, a RAID lasts a long time--many times longer than the RAID controller manufacturer. How are you going to get data off that proprietary RAID without the controller?

...

I wonder where the Drobo will be in the next decade? Where will your data be? Things to think about...

Point well taken. FWIW, everything that is on my Drobo (and on my Mac's hard drive, for that matter) is backed up elsewhere.

But I do worry about how to future-proof my data. If you or anyone else have any suggestions about the best way to do that, I'd love to hear them.

I think if you think about Drobo as a (somewhat) fault-tolerant, infinitely expandable "external hard drive", then it puts things in perspective. As external hard drives go, it's nice to have some level of fault tolerance, and to be able to expand easily and cheaply as newer, larger hard drives become available.

bloomphotog · January 13, 2010

SamirD wrote:

I wonder where the Drobo will be in the next decade? Where will your data be? Things to think about...

I agree. I am currently looking to overhaul my data storage and backup - DroboPro was a VERY appealing product but the proprietary nature of the system kept me from pulling the trigger.

The CalDigit HDElement is my current pick, and hopefully I'll be implementing it within the next few months. Besides the standardized RAID there is a massive performance advantage when coupled with the CalDigit PCI-E card.

SamirD · January 13, 2010

bloomphotog wrote:

The CalDigit HDElement is my current pick, and hopefully I'll be implementing it within the next few months. Besides the standardized RAID there is a massive performance advantage when coupled with the CalDigit PCI-E card.

Interesting product. It uses serially attached SCSI (SAS) for the interface card, which is lightning quick. And with 3 channels each capable of 300MB/sec transfers would make it very fast when all 3 channels are being used simultaneously. This actually reminds me of my old Mylex controller, which used 6 different SCSI channels, 5 for the drives, and 1 for the host. With 40MB/sec on each channel, I was able to theoretically get drive transfers of 200MB/sec back in 1998. Realistically it was about 10MB/sec on a Cyrix based 166mhz system under DOS, but this was still very quick for the time.

I still see problems though if the controller hardware on the HDElement failed. There is some proprietary stuff going on with the ability to add various cabinets and drives to the different channels. The drives probably can't be moved from one cabinet to another without problems, depending on how smart the controller is. And if the controller failed and was no longer available, I doubt that the data, even if intact, could be retrieved by another controller. It would just be a call to a data recovery specialist. :cry

bloomphotog · January 13, 2010

SamirD wrote:

The drives probably can't be moved from one cabinet to another without problems, depending on how smart the controller is. And if the controller failed and was no longer available, I doubt that the data, even if intact, could be retrieved by another controller. It would just be a call to a data recovery specialist. :cry

I don't know about that. It's just a standard RAID 5 array...you could move the drives anywhere you like(new HDElement, for instance) so long the structure of the array stayed the same.

SamirD · January 13, 2010

bloomphotog wrote:

I don't know about that. It's just a standard RAID 5 array...you could move the drives anywhere you like(new HDElement, for instance) so long the structure of the array stayed the same.

In theory this is how it should work, but I've seen too many RAID systems that rely on proprietary ways of storing even the RAID configuration, many specifying where a drive is exactly in relation to its logical assignment (SCSI ID and Bus location). It would be a good question for their tech support.

RAIDs are all pretty much proprietary (except RAID 1). Many manufacturers have problems migrating existing RAID structures from one controller family to the next. Going between manufacturers is something I've never heard of being done successfully. It's why I opt to just manually mirroring a set of drives.

CatOne · January 15, 2010

bloomphotog wrote:

I agree. I am currently looking to overhaul my data storage and backup - DroboPro was a VERY appealing product but the proprietary nature of the system kept me from pulling the trigger.

The CalDigit HDElement is my current pick, and hopefully I'll be implementing it within the next few months. Besides the standardized RAID there is a massive performance advantage when coupled with the CalDigit PCI-E card.

RAID 5 is not "standard." There is no guarantee that if you take drives that are in RAID 5 in enclosure A and move them to enclosure B by a second manufacture, that they will be readable. Heck, in many cases you may not be able to move them among different enclosures from the SAME manufacturer. IMO, RAID 5 is not any more "standard" than the Drobo's approach to this -- both should be dealt with the same way.

The way to move your data is NOT ever to "move the drives." It is always to move the DATA. Copy the entire volume (or critical files from the volume) via your chosen means -- be it Finder copy (probably worst approach), command line, some cloning tool, or equivalent Windows or Linux "data mover" tool.

I have a Drobo, and I find it it OK. Frankly, I quit using it and am now using a Promise DS4600 which is a 4-disk RAID 5 enclosure. I did not do it because it's any more "standard" than the Drobo, because IMO it's not. What it is is GROSSLY faster. It will do ~80 MB/sec reads and writes over Firewire 800, and I've heard reports from others that it does upwards of 150 MB/sec when connected via eSATA (I don't have it connected this way right now). It is HUGELY faster than the 2nd generation Drobo connected over FW 800. Seat of the pants, maybe 3x as fast? Actually probably more than that, because the startup latency is better. Given the enclosure for the Promise DS4600 is like $350, which is $150 cheaper than the Drobo, IMO it's a better approach.

The ONLY nice thing about the Drobo is that you can use it as "ghetto RAID." By this I mean, you can buy one, and then scrounge all the old drives you have lying around and slap them in there, and call it protected storage. You can start with a couple drives, and add more later, without having to expand or otherwise spend a lot of effort in the expansion. And you can fairly easily replace a smaller drive with a larger drive down the road and just get more storage available. This is the ONE advantage that Drobo has over conventional RAID, and that's it. Given the price of drives these days, and the lifespan of drives and enclosures, I frankly think buying a DS4600 and 4x1 TB or 4x2 TB drives, using it for 3 years, and then buying a NEW enclosure with 8 TB drives, copying your data over, and using the old unit as a backup, is a much more sensible approach than a "ghetto RAID" approach.

CatOne · January 15, 2010

bloomphotog wrote:

I don't know about that. It's just a standard RAID 5 array...you could move the drives anywhere you like(new HDElement, for instance) so long the structure of the array stayed the same.

No, you can't. You need the EXACT SAME RAID controller. This is not practically possible.

Again, though, the lack of this being a viable option doesn't mean RAID 5 is not a good approach. It's so much more manageable than RAID 1.

aquaticvideographer · January 15, 2010

I agree that Drobo v2 isn't the fastest thing going. In my experience, for example, it's not fast enough for video editing. However, it--the enclosure, without HDs--is selling for about $350 (or less AR) right now.

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Robotics-FireWire-Storage-DR04DD10/dp/B001CZ9ZEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1263612696&sr=8-1

If you need speed and/or dual-disk redundancy, there are newer (more expensive) products, such as the Drobo S, Drobo Elite and DroboPro.

SamirD · January 17, 2010

CatOne wrote:

...a Promise DS4600 which is a 4-disk RAID 5 enclosure.

Wow! What a great piece of hardware! OS independent, hardware based, plenty of connection options.

For data integrity and availability, I would get two of these and run each RAID 5 and manually mirror the two. Data integrity should be maintained by each unit in RAID 5 since they should be running regular integrity checks. And for some reason if one controller fails, rendering one RAID useless, the other RAID exists and can be used to make a new copy to a new RAID or other storage medium.

Even for just data availability, I really like this unit. You can run two drives in it RAID 1 and not have to worry about any issues except a two drive failure. You could even take that a step further and run four drives, which each drive being a mirror of the others. You could have multiple drives fail and the controller fail and you could pull out a working drive and still have your data. But whether that data is bit by bit correct would be unknown. RAID 1 doesn't do any integrity checking (as far as I know). If some bits got 'skewed' over the years, you wouldn't know until you try to access file that's corrupt.

Data integrity seems to be a new problem. I've found files not correctly comparing on my mirrored drives in my server and on my backup USB drive sets. Apparently as drives have gotten bigger, this becomes a real issue. Probably explains why enterprise class drives are limited to 300GB.

And the new crop of RAID devices like these are going to have to address this issue of data integrity. If a RAID 5 has a 2 out of 3 bits corrupted, the data's corrupted. And this can be a serious issue since nothing is reported on the hardware level at all. The controller won't even know the data changed.

CatOne · January 17, 2010

Enterprise-class drives are limited to 300 GB because they run at 15K RPM. If you've looked inside a 15K drive, you'll see the platters are MUCH smaller in radius than they are in a conventional 7200 RPM drive. I mean, they're both 3.5" enclosures on the outside, but the physical platters are maybe 2/3 the radius in the 15K drives that you find in the FC and SAS enclosures.

I'm not sure of the reason for this -- it could be that spinning the large platters at 15K RPM gives a linear velocity that is too high to be reliable or shakes too much or whatever... but I'll note the 15K platters are MUCH smaller and thus you simply can't put as much data on there, as there's a lot less surface area. That said, the 300 GB SAS drives came out when a 750 GB SATA drive was "state of the art," so given the increases of storage density to 2 TB now in a 3.5" drive I wouldn't be surprised if 600 GB SAS drives weren't available soon.

SamirD · January 17, 2010

CatOne wrote:

Enterprise-class drives are limited to 300 GB because they run at 15K RPM. If you've looked inside a 15K drive, you'll see the platters are MUCH smaller in radius than they are in a conventional 7200 RPM drive. I mean, they're both 3.5" enclosures on the outside, but the physical platters are maybe 2/3 the radius in the 15K drives that you find in the FC and SAS enclosures.

I'm not sure of the reason for this -- it could be that spinning the large platters at 15K RPM gives a linear velocity that is too high to be reliable or shakes too much or whatever... but I'll note the 15K platters are MUCH smaller and thus you simply can't put as much data on there, as there's a lot less surface area. That said, the 300 GB SAS drives came out when a 750 GB SATA drive was "state of the art," so given the increases of storage density to 2 TB now in a 3.5" drive I wouldn't be surprised if 600 GB SAS drives weren't available soon.

Interesting to know. There probably are also issues related to angular velocity with the larger platters. A 15k platter at the size of the SATA drives would probably be moving too fast under the heads to do accurate reads/writes. But I think you're definitely onto something with the vibration. I recently read an Intel white paper discussion enterprise vs desktop drives that mentioned this:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-029229.htm

BradfordBenn · January 19, 2010

The other thing to consider is that I am now starting to see Gigabit or 4Gigabit (via fiber) Ethernet to provide the network storage/server that is RAID configured. I had the opportunity to use one connected via a direct network cable (no switch just direct connect) it was as fast if not faster than my internal hard drive. It was also not cheap; good thing it was a client's system I just had to try it.

SamirD · January 19, 2010

BradfordBenn wrote:

The other thing to consider is that I am now starting to see Gigabit or 4Gigabit (via fiber) Ethernet to provide the network storage/server that is RAID configured. I had the opportunity to use one connected via a direct network cable (no switch just direct connect) it was as fast if not faster than my internal hard drive. It was also not cheap; good thing it was a client's system I just had to try it.

There is a small a inexpensive device by SimpleTech that plugs into a USB hard drive and a network and immediately shares the volume with the network via samba. I've looked into it as a possible replacement for file servers. In theory, you could plug this into the Promise RAID mentioned above and have a very fast and reliable network attached storage device.

CatOne · January 19, 2010

SamirD wrote:

There is a small a inexpensive device by SimpleTech that plugs into a USB hard drive and a network and immediately shares the volume with the network via samba. I've looked into it as a possible replacement for file servers. In theory, you could plug this into the Promise RAID mentioned above and have a very fast and reliable network attached storage device.

It's not typical that you will get great experience from a quick and dirty NAS device.

Frankly, if you want to go NAS instead of DAS, you could look at Promise's NS4600 which is the NAS equivalent of the DS4600.

However, frankly it's not that common to approach theoretical network maximums. Sure, it's GigE, but if you get > 60 MB/sec you're doing pretty well. Whereas with direct attach over eSATA and something like the Promise you can get > 150 MB/sec. Also, there can be issues with file storage on NAS devices if the file system on the NAS doesn't support the file names the host OS supports (Mac OS X has very rich file names and can tolerate stuff like /@! in a file name, and Aperture actually uses names like these :-P ).

As was mentioned, Fibre Channel is also an option but you need a desktop computer, a Fibre Channel Card, and probably you want an enclosure that's in the $10K range. Yes, it is FAST (With a dual-port 4 Gbps fibre card you could pretty easily get 700 MB/sec) but we're talking about a totally different price point. Most often if you are editing uncompressed HD video you will _need_ this kind of storage, but otherwise, it's really for those with budgets that aren't quite like the rest of us. Also, these RAID enclosures are usually server-class which means LOUD, so you'd want to store them in a rack and run glass to them.

SamirD · January 20, 2010

CatOne wrote:

It's not typical that you will get great experience from a quick and dirty NAS device.

Frankly, if you want to go NAS instead of DAS, you could look at Promise's NS4600 which is the NAS equivalent of the DS4600.

I agree with you. NAS is more about availability versus speed. And thank you for the link to Promise's other offering. I didn't see it earlier. Looks...Promising...

CatOne wrote:

However, frankly it's not that common to approach theoretical network maximums. Sure, it's GigE, but if you get > 60 MB/sec you're doing pretty well. Whereas with direct attach over eSATA and something like the Promise you can get > 150 MB/sec. Also, there can be issues with file storage on NAS devices if the file system on the NAS doesn't support the file names the host OS supports (Mac OS X has very rich file names and can tolerate stuff like /@! in a file name, and Aperture actually uses names like these :-P ).

As was mentioned, Fibre Channel is also an option but you need a desktop computer, a Fibre Channel Card, and probably you want an enclosure that's in the $10K range. Yes, it is FAST (With a dual-port 4 Gbps fibre card you could pretty easily get 700 MB/sec) but we're talking about a totally different price point. Most often if you are editing uncompressed HD video you will _need_ this kind of storage, but otherwise, it's really for those with budgets that aren't quite like the rest of us. Also, these RAID enclosures are usually server-class which means LOUD, so you'd want to store them in a rack and run glass to them.

The main problem with NAS is the network bandwidth. Ethernet is not efficient when compared to other protocols, especially on a busy network. If I needed speed and availability, I'd directly connect my storage subsystem and then share that via the computer that it's connected to. Of course, this may slow down the host computer's local operations during peak network load, but at least that system will still have lightning quick access to the storage.

Fibre Channel is awesome, and I also had to move to that when building my SCSI RAID back in the 1990s. It was hard to find enterprise-class hardware that didn't use FC. FC speeds blew standard SCSI out of the water.

The amazing Drobo (disk storage unit)

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