Drobo
Manufacturer: Data Robotics, Inc. Part number: 900-00002-002
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Exp. date: 12/31/2009
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- More product information:
- Editors' review
- User reviews
- Specifications
- Manufacturer info
- Bottom Line:
- Drobo takes the pain and confusion out of data protection and lets you tailor and expand the drive according to your needs. This so-called storage robot works exactly as promised and is the most innovative storage device we've seen in a long time. We want one.
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CNET editors' review
Drobo price range: $318.97 - $499.99
- Reviewed by: Felisa Yang
- Edited by: Matthew Elliott
- Reviewed on: 06/19/2007
- Updated on:05/02/2008
- Released on: 06/05/2007
The good: Protects your data without your interference; can take a 3.5-inch SATA drive of any capacity and from any vendor; hot swappable; your data is available while Drobo is formatting a new drive (even if one drive fails); runs quietly; dashboard lets you track the condition of your Drobo.
The bad: Drobo itself is an USB-only device, and networking capability adds $200 to the bill; we would like to see Drobo bundled with a good backup application.
The bottom line: Drobo takes the pain and confusion out of data protection and lets you tailor and expand the drive according to your needs. This so-called storage robot works exactly as promised and is the most innovative storage device we've seen in a long time. We want one.
Editors' note: Please see our full review of DroboShare for information on adding networking capability to the USB-only Drobo.
Drobo will let you sleep at night. Drobo will make your headache go away. Drobo will put a smile on your face. Drobo is not a drug. Drobo can affect you in the aforementioned ways, however, if you worry about keeping your troves of digital data safe. Drobo is an external storage device that is dead simple to set up and use while offering excellent protection and unbelievably flexible expansion. Specifically, it's a USB drive enclosure with four empty bays that can house any combination of SATA hard drives. It can salvage and rebuild your data in case of drive failure, and you can add larger drives to it as your storage needs grow. Data Robotics calls Drobo a "storage robot" because it automates all those tasks and decisions that RAID arrays require you to make in order to protect your data. An empty Drobo will set you back about $500, but e-tailers will probably offer bundles that include hard disk drives (currently, Drobo is available only in its baseline, driveless configuration). Drobo is the essence of simplicity and user friendliness. We only wish Drobo came bundled with its own backup utility so that the important first step of data backup wouldn't be left to the whims of end users.
The Drobo's all-black body makes it look small and inconspicuous for a four-bay enclosure. While the top and sides are matte black, the front and rear panels are made of glossy, black plastic. The rear panel of the Drobo houses only a USB port and a power port. If you pop off the front panel (which comes off easily without requiring tools), you're faced with four empty drive bays. Each bay can accept a hard drive of any capacity from any vendor, as long as it's a 3.5-inch SATA 1- or SATA 2-type drive. A series of 10 blue LEDs along the bottom of the front panel as the Drobo is filled--each light represents about 10 percent of the drive; the more blue lights you see, the less capacity you have left. On the right side of the front panel are four LEDs--one for each drive bay--that shine or blink green, yellow, or red to indicate the status of each drive. The included user guide offers a full explanation of the light patterns, as does a sticker on the inside of the front panel--saving you from hunting for the manual should you suddenly see the lights blink red or yellow.
Getting your Drobo up and running couldn't be simpler--no tools are required. Insert a SATA drive into any of Drobo's drive bays, connect Drobo to your PC via USB 2.0, and power it up by plugging it into a wall socket. You can start with just one hard drive, but Data Robotics recommends you start with at least two for data protection. You're paying for Drobo's protection technology--there are cheaper alternatives for a single, external hard drive. No matter how many drives you add to Drobo, your PC will see it as a single USB storage device. After you've popped your hard drives into Drobo and plugged it in, you can either use the included CD to format the drive(s) or you can use the native Windows drive formatting utility or Apple's Disk Utility. The benefit of formatting by using the CD is that you can install the Drobo Dashboard, which will help you stay informed of the device's status. The initial formatting will take a few minutes. Drobo supports NTFS (Windows), HFS+ (Mac OS), and FAT32 (cross-platform) file systems, and the separate DroboShare base provides EXT3 support for Linux systems. In order to format your Drobo volume in the EXT3 file system, you will need to purchase the separate DroboShare product.
Once you've formatted the disks, you can install additional disks without going through the formatting process. Simply pop out the full or damaged drive, and slide in a fresh one in its place. The new drive will be formatted automatically, and the data from the removed drive written to it; you can even access your data during this process (keep in mind that any data already existing on a drive will be erased once you allow Drobo to format it). According to Data Robotics, Drobo uses a variety of data protection schemes, including some used in RAID arrays. Unlike RAID arrays, you don't need to choose a protection level or scheme; all of the protection goes on behind the scenes. As mentioned previously, you can use any 3.5-inch drive from any vendor, in any capacity. When choosing drives, however, you should keep capacity in mind, because not all of the installed capacity will be available to you as storage space. Data Robotics' rule of thumb is to omit the capacity of the largest drive and add up the capacity of the remaining ones: for example, if you have three 250GB drives, your usable capacity is about 500GB. If you have two 500GB drives and a 250GB drive, your available capacity is 750GB. Drobo uses the remaining capacity for data protection. The idea is that if the largest drive fails, you'd need equal its capacity on the other drive(s) to store its data should that drive fail.
We installed the Drobo (with two drives, an 80GB Seagate Barracuda and a 160GB Seagate Barracuda) on our Windows-based system, and it was as easy as the start-up literature promised. After the initial formatting was done, we copied over several gigabytes of data, including photos, music, video, and data files. To test the ability to access data during a drive failure, we started a video from Drobo and proceeded to extract one of the hard drives and replace it with another (a 400GB Hitachi Deskstar). We didn't see any hiccups in the video (or any of the other files we accessed), and the formatting of the new disk and the rewriting of the data progressed in the background.
The Drobo dashboard shows a graphical representation of capacity (in the form of a pie chart), which we found useful. In the advanced options window, you can also check the capacity of each drive, set up alerts for various situations, check for firmware updates, and reformat the drive. The dashboard also lets you access instructional videos that show you how to perform various tasks, such as replacing a drive. While the dashboard is useful, we'd like to see Drobo bundled with more software, specifically with a good backup utility. As good as Drobo is at protecting your data, it still relies on users to actively copy files over and let's face it: we are lazy. A backup utility would let users schedule automatic backups during the installation process and let Drobo take care of the rest.
Because the focus of the Drobo is on data protection and not speed, we didn't test data transfer speeds (plus, speeds will vary depending on the hard drives you choose to add to Drobo). So far, Drobo is only available with a USB 2.0 connector, which is the main speed bottleneck, if that's a concern for you. The separate $199 DroboShare adds Gigabit Ethernet networking, but we would also like to see Drobo come in FireWire and eSATA versions for those users who want faster throughput than what USB 2.0 can provide.
Data Robotics supports Drobo with a standard one-year warranty. First-level toll-free phone support is available 24-7; if your matter needs additional attention, the second-level phone support is available 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT. You can also send an e-mail to tech support or fill out the online support form. Drobo's site offers FAQs, documentation, downloadables, and a user forum.
User reviews
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If you value your data, DON'T trust this thing!!!
by tahoerob on April 17, 2008
Pros: Looks slick
Cons: Firmware updates destroy data
Summary: I just read your Drobo review and wanted to share my experience with Drobo. I don't think you should be endorsing it.
I pre-ordered my Drobo, so consider me ...Summary: I just read your Drobo review and wanted to share my experience with Drobo. I don't think you should be endorsing it.
I pre-ordered my Drobo, so consider me an early adopter. At first, I *LOVED* it. Innovative, slick, and a worthy alternative to RAID5, I thought. After applying the first firmware update, the Drobo rebooted and my Mac informed me that the connected disk was unformatted and asked what I wanted to do (Initialize, Ignore, Eject). As you can imagine, I was immediately filled with panic and dread.
Over the past five years or more, I've built a huge (legal) music collection. I'm a music freak and buy between 5 and 10 CDs each month. I had painstakingly ripped each and every one of my 2000+ CDs to the Drobo, both in Apple Lossless format for my home stereo and AAC format for my iPod. I can't even imagine how many hours (hundreds?) I spent doing this. I also took the time to verify all of the metadata (artist, album, etc) and correct any tag errors. As you can imagine, this was VERY TEDIOUS!!!
Recently I've been ripping my DVD collection and converting it to MP4 for my Apple TV. Each rip/conversion takes between 3-4 hours. A hundred DVDs or so and you're looking at another 300 hours of time spent.
So, I called Drobo tech support. They walked me through a procedure that involved removing and re-inserting the drives. At first this didn't work. Then the tech told me to change the position of the drives in the Drobo. Voila! It took about three days to "protect" the data. After this process had finished, my data was back and I was much relieved.
Until the next firmware update.
The most recent update completely hosed my data. This time, tech support's procedure didn't work. It took 12 days to "protect" my data and when all was finished, my data was lost. Throughout this experience, I made efforts to contact tech support. I sent them my Drobo's diagnostic files, as requested. Someone from Drobo sent me the occasional terse email saying "This is a high priority case!" or "Please be patient!" A month later, how patient am I supposed to be???
A few months ago, I contributed a review of Drobo to Macintouch.com. I'm a regular contributor. I praised it and encouraged others to give it a shot. Needless to say, after my recent experience, I wrote to retract my recommendation and explain why. I sent a copy to my Drobo contact's email in the hopes that it might inspire Drobo to actually DO SOMETHING about my problem.
Would you care to hazard a guess as to how Drobo responded?
THEY CLOSED MY CASE (on April 10), despite the fact that:
1) I'm a paying customer.
2) I'm under warranty.
3) I was an early adopter who put my faith in them and their product.
They don't care one iota that I lost 2TB of data that took me years to accumulate and organize. At this point, I've accepted that my data is gone. However, I'm DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED in the utterly pathetic response I've received from customer service.
As you can well imagine, I'm very angry and frustrated. My experience is not unique either. There are others on DroboSpace.com and various forums (I've been searching!) who have all encountered the same problem.
Thanks for listening. I hope my experience has provided another perspective on this troublesome product. More importantly, I hope that it has demonstrated how insincere Drobo is about customer service.22 out of 24 users found this user opinion helpful.
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A well designed/unique storage device
by davidcw on June 29, 2007
Pros: Uses ALL the space on different harddrives from different manufacturers
Cons: Is NOT network-attached (similarly priced NAS support networked servers/applications)
Summary: I own a Drobo and 2 ReadyNAS NVs (what some would cite as a competitor). Both are great storage solutions that support automatic RAID expansion as drives are inserted. What ...
Summary: I own a Drobo and 2 ReadyNAS NVs (what some would cite as a competitor). Both are great storage solutions that support automatic RAID expansion as drives are inserted. What makes the Drobo unique is its ability to USE ALL of the space on different sized drives: On every home-qualtiy NAS unit that exists today, you can stick in 2x 500GB drives and 2x 1TB drives and get 1.5 TB of RAID protected space. What happens to the remaining 500GB on each 1TB disk?... it's wasted. On the Drobo, this space is still accessible, just NOT RAID protected. This might sound like a loss, but let's say you own a NON-Drobo NAS with drive bays occupied by 500GB disks and you want to increase the storage, to do so you would need to buy FOUR** larger disks, before any RAID expansion occured.
The Drobo's firmware also supports 1TB SATA drives out of the box (and provided the LB Addressing scheme doesn't change I think* it can support even larger drives without firmware update). Currently the competitor's firmware (v3) only allows up to 750GB drives, with 1TB support promised in the next firmware release.
The Drobo's file transfer speeds are also better than the (ahem*) competitors.
A disadvantage of the Drobo is that it is NOT networked and is just a storage unit. The similarly priced ReadyNAS supports a variety of network based applications including FTP, UPnP streaming, auto USB-backup, and includes decent backup software.
Which one you should buy is up to your storage, access, and spending habits.10 out of 11 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Version 1.0
by Garlydog on August 2, 2007
Pros: Looks cool, but so what.
Cons: Version 1.0, unresponsive tech support, no recovery options, do you need more?
Summary: Our Drobo failed within three days taking all of our data with it. After a frustrating experience with tech support, it was determined that the data was unrecoverable. Use this ...
Summary: Our Drobo failed within three days taking all of our data with it. After a frustrating experience with tech support, it was determined that the data was unrecoverable. Use this product at your own risk. Make sure that you back it up. When it failed for us, it failed completely. Fortunately we were able to recover from backups. This device is slow and unreliable. I should have known better not to purchase a version 1.0 product. Use this product at your own risk. If you are a consultant, do not recommend this product to your clients.
8 out of 12 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Caused major data loss.
by rpbest320 on February 19, 2008
Pros: The packaging is attractive.
Cons: Does not really perform as advertized.
Summary: After purchasing a drobo and equiping it with 500 gig drives I was quite impressed. Then, when I purchased a second drobo, and added 750 gig drives to drobo 1, ...
Summary: After purchasing a drobo and equiping it with 500 gig drives I was quite impressed. Then, when I purchased a second drobo, and added 750 gig drives to drobo 1, the trouble began. Drobo 1 failed completely, causing a 1.5 terabyte data loss and drobo 2 takes 10 to 15 minutes to boot, during which time the computer is frozen. I'm sorry I switched from raid. I am going back. Additionally tech support in slow answering the phones, and seeming incompetent.
5 out of 6 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Great so far, do think twice though
by sneeka2 on March 10, 2009
Pros: Dead simple, future oriented concept, nice device.
Cons: Does not replace a backup strategy, but pretends to.
Summary: I only had my Drobo for a little while (< 1 week), so I can not comment on the long-term reliability just yet. I can only say so far so ...
Summary: I only had my Drobo for a little while (< 1 week), so I can not comment on the long-term reliability just yet. I can only say so far so good. My first impressions are perfectly positive. The unit works 100% as advertised, is dead simple to set up, looks nice, comes in great packaging and has overall great perceived value.
I have read many opinions about this device in the last week, and initially this made me feel really bad about my purchase. For every positive opinion, there seems to be an equally bad. Here's my opinion on the situation:
The only negative thing I'd have to say about the hardware so far is, that since the drives simply slide in, they tend to vibrate slightly and hum if they're not seated in the 100% correct spot. Turning the unit off and re-seating them took care of that for now. YMMV.
What sold me on the Drobo is the future proof concept. However well you plan your data storage and backup strategy now, three years down the road all bets are off again, since the amount of data you need to store will simply have surpassed the capacity of whatever system you set up now. It's simply the way it works, data grows and grows. So you'll end up buying another disk/setting up another RAID/copying your data back and forth again. This is where Drobo exceeds, with it's ability to keep expanding by simply buying disks with the best GB/$ value when you need them. There may be a few other systems who offer the same advantage, but not at a consumer price point like the Drobo.
What you must not forget though is this:
With JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Drives) you data is gone if the drive fails. Drobo can protect you from exactly that, drive failures. Any RAID protects you from that and only that. It introduces a new problem though: It does not protect you from a failing Drobo itself (no RAID does). If you're lucky you can pop your disks into another Drobo/RAID unit and it will be able to read the data again. If you're unlucky, the unit will have eaten your data while failing.
This is inherent with ANY data storage: You entrust your data to a system (hard disk or RAID or tape or offsite storage or anything else), if the system fails, your data may or may not be gone. Drobo protects you from drive failures, which is a lot better than what JBODs do, but that's it.
If you are paranoid about your data, do not stop there. Get a second, different system to backup your data to. I use a cheap old, slow Buffalo external RAID enclosure stored in a closed that I run backups of my most critical data to on a regular schedule (standard Windows backup tool works fine here). If a hard disk inside the Drobo fails, Drobo will protect me from it. If the Drobo fails, I still have the backup. If my backup fails, I can replace it and copy the data from the Drobo again. If both systems fail at the same time... Well, that's unlikely enough that I don't bother thinking about it, but you may want to.
Keep in mind that this is a relatively new product. It's promise is great and I believe the concept of ever expandable storage is the way to go. But one single system is inherently untrustworthy, new systems on the market even more so. So far I love my Drobo and I'd heartily recommend it. It did make me doubly paranoid about data backup though, and in the end it is not an end-all-be-all solution, whatever their marketing is trying to tell.
If expandable storage + drive failure protection + simplicity + good design is worth the price for you, go for it.
Updated on Mar 15, 2009
- There's some serious FUD being spread about this device by people either out to slander or simply really uninformed and/or ignorant users*. Ignore.
*) Quite a number don't even *use* a Drobo.
- There's some half-valid criticism like complaints about transfer speed or lack of Ethernet port. To me the speed seems about average for an external drive, the feature set may or may not fit your needs. Consider before buying.
- There're a certain number of people who've had genuinely bad experiences (occasional outages, data loss). A lot of these can be seen as normal growing pains every new product goes through. By now the Drobo is in generation 2 and the firmware at 1.3.0 and seems stable enough.
Which leaves only a small, very vocal number of people with failed units.
Updated on Mar 15, 2009Looking around for genuinely failed units, with complete, unrecoverable data loss, doesn't actually turn up too many results. There's a few handful out there, and I really feel bad for those guys.
What one needs to consider is that people become very vocal when they lose all their data. You can be pretty sure that close to 100% of all failed Drobos have been reported on the internet. Especially since Data Robotics' marketing department is going all out with Drobo hype, people will go all out with negative feedback as well.
Simply content and happy users on the other hand won't report how happy they are all the time. If you figure this all in, it seems the Drobo is about on par with other products in terms of failed units. At least as of Gen2 and going forward.
One should be as suspicious of the Drobo as of any other product (ALWAYS have a backup, see above), but so far it seems to be holding up to Data Robotics' claims pretty well.
Not a single hickup for me so far. Knock on wood.
Updated on Mar 23, 2009One comment about noise:
The Drobo's noise level is mainly determined by the drives you put in it. It does dampen the drive sounds a bit, but not much. I have two older drives in there that I used before in another enclosure, and they were and remain pretty audible. A third brand new drive is almost completely quite.
The fan of the Drobo spins up sometimes and does so in stages, it is pretty quiet overall.
Especially since the Drobo sometimes starts to rattle away by itself, you'll really want to make sure you put the quietest drives you can get in there, or have it somewhere were noise doesn't matter.
Updated on Mar 23, 2009A thought on cost vs. convenience:
As written above, I am backing the Drobo up onto a secondary RAID 0 system. Right now I have 2x750GB (old) and 3x1TB drives (new, ~$80 each) in use across these two systems, which gives me 1.5TB of doubly protected storage (1.5TB in the Drobo, 2TB for backups).
By the time I run out of space, 2TB drives should have become very affordable. Buying two of those and swapping disks around would give me a configuration with 2.75TB of storage and 4TB for backups. Close to a doubling of storage space, for about $150(?), and almost no work (put new drives in backup system, let a complete backup finish, slide old backup drives into Drobo).
For the next round I'll look at two 4TB drives, giving me 5TB of storage, again nearly doubled, with virtually no work at all.
The initial cost for the setup wasn't cheap, but the fact that it's expandable without having to copy data back and forth and still having everything in two places at all times is worth it IMHO.3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Drobo rocks
by bbartle on June 20, 2007
Pros: easy to use, easy to expand, it's just easy!
Cons: none. it's just easy!
Summary: I use Drobo as my primary backup target for Acronis TrueImage Home. Additionally, I use it to archive files off my laptop which is my primary computer. I'm very ...
Summary: I use Drobo as my primary backup target for Acronis TrueImage Home. Additionally, I use it to archive files off my laptop which is my primary computer. I'm very happy with the product. I've outgrown three USB drives in the past several years and the process of going out to buy a new one when I filled up the old one was getting old. Now I've got an easy to use, easy to expand, better protected Drobo to use going forward. I've had no issues whatsoever with the unit and highly recommend it. I like the comfort of knowing my data is protected against a drive failure and I'll never again run out of space.
3 out of 4 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Reinventing the wheel
by anarchol on December 5, 2007
Pros: None, really
Cons: Confusion, slow, 1 year warranty on an empty box?
Summary: Considering the value of today's user's data anything that gets people to think about backup, archiving and data safety has some good in it. But this product tries ...
Summary: Considering the value of today's user's data anything that gets people to think about backup, archiving and data safety has some good in it. But this product tries to re-invent the wheel by claiming to improve on RAID, as a result causing confusion in minds of many users.
I have tested and used this product, opened it.
The facts: 24MB/s is slow. Slower than external USB 2.0 mobile hard drives. About 10-12 MB/s slower than the $119.99 500GB USB 2.0 HD you can buy anywhere. The demo video is heavily edited. It is not that fast to configure the unit and to copy data especially if drives are full. It is not that "instant" to have fault tolerance, as the video has you thinking. The amount of data being copied and moved in the demo is very small - not what I would have on my drive for example with my MP3 library and movie library.
Eventually you'll have to populate the unit with drives anyway, making it's entry price point deceiving. And at $500 for the empty box it?s not cheap. 1 Year warranty on Drobo and the fact that box and drives are covered by different parties is a draw back also. You don?t go to one place for service on this unit.
And I don't care how small those bunch of magnets are that hold the Drobo front cover in place, magnets of any sort have no place being that close to my naked hard drive mechanisms being pulled in and out.
The product in my view commits one major crime worse than above. It confuses people and all they already know about RAID. RAID is good. RAID is here and used by many people it is reliable, established - a standard. RAID makes people think of storage needs and risks to data before selection of solution, before final choice of product. RAID with proper hardware RAID controllers for RAID 0/1/5 levels is affordable and very reliable. You can find fantastic hardware controlled RAID solutions with hot swap drives starting at $399 with drives/capacity already present at this price point. No software application or CPU power required for hardware controlled RAID to handle the virtualization like with Drobo.
Don?t ask me what happens should there be a Drobo software issue that handles the virtualization and trickery that makes my computer believe I have 2TB of space with a single 250GB drive installed in the Drobo. Don?t ask me what happens if a partition information on the virtualized partition gets corrupted (as can happen with power outage, HD failure, improper unmount, computer crash, etc). Don?t ask me if a HD Repair Utility tool will know how to fix this virtualized partition to recover my data in case of failure. I can?t answer those questions, but I sure as heck don?t want to find out. With RAID being around as long as it has been, I know my chances of recovery, rebuilt, fix are much better even in the worse case scenario than with a partition that thinks it?s 2TB when I only have a single 250GB drive installed.
Drobo tires to make people think of capacity, performance, redundancy as an after though to what is called "easy" and "simple". But for this lack of making users plan properly ahead for their storage needs and for confusing many users by claiming that RAID is bad, old, outdated, as well as for the poor performance, need for virtualization, for the short 1 year warranty (especially since there are no hard drives present) ? I have to give this product big thumbs down.6 out of 13 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Not A Reliable Solution
by ag2231 on April 20, 2009
Pros: 1) Easy to setup
Cons: 1) Very slow
2) Very noisy
3) Data easily lost
4) No upgrade path to next generation even after all troubleshooting leads to dead end.Summary: While I was initially impressed with the ease with which it took to setup the Drobo, this was the shortest "Honeymoon" of any purchase I have made in sometime. The ...
Summary: While I was initially impressed with the ease with which it took to setup the Drobo, this was the shortest "Honeymoon" of any purchase I have made in sometime. The amount of money lost is considerable, though the hard drives can be reused in another RAID/SAN solution, but not as much as my time and some data that are gone for good.
PS - I would have held of on buying the Drobo if I had read the Reviews completely.
After contacting the Data Robotics technical support line (the makers of the Drobo) on three different occasions for three different issues, the final solution was always to reformat my RAID. The time and effort to copy data back and forth across multiple hard drives (obviously my 4TB Drobo RAID is bigger then my individual drives) gets old really fast, especially at the speed at which the Drobo copies even through the "DroboShare" (which in itself works very well). Let me not forget to mention that the support hold time can be longer than most, and when someone eventually comes on the line, though pleasant and will run through a very thorough checklist of troubleshooting methods, if they can not find the solution will tell someone will call you back; but unless reminded no one will. I waited over a month, I called back twice to remind them of my issue only to have to go through some of the same troubleshooting before the person would conclude that yes my problem needed to be escalated to level three support. Another week later, I have to say a very nice person in level three support, tells me how they understand how frustrated I must be and will try to help, but in the end cannot.
I had had my Drobo for six months and had only gotten about a months worth of use from it; now I need to find a way to discard it without contributing to the destruction of the environment as the Drobo is made, almost completely of plastic; maybe a plant holder for a cactus plant.
I have to recommend that if you are looking for a home SAN/RAID solution, stay as far away from the DROBO as possible. It is by no means ready for someone who wants to actually store data safely.
Updated on Apr 20, 2009
Updated on Apr 20, 2009PS - I would have held off on buying the Drobo if I had read the Reviews completely.1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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works great ,easy to use
by melliott716 on February 23, 2008
Pros: really easy to use
Cons: not as fast as hardware RAID
Summary: I've been using my Drobo for about 2 months, and the drive works great! I've got it filled with 4 500GB drives; it was up and running in ...
Summary: I've been using my Drobo for about 2 months, and the drive works great! I've got it filled with 4 500GB drives; it was up and running in minutes. It's true it's slightly slower than regular USB drives, but the data protection is worth it. I've seen the cons compared to RAID, and I disagree you can find a RAID solution that offers this capacity for less money, especially one that lets you increase your storage incremently without rebuilding the array (which means backing up your data elsewhere in the meantime). I've seen a couple of posts here about failures, but no specifics on what led to/caused the failure. That worries me a little, but right now I'm attributing that to user error rather than hardware problems, since I haven't experienced any problems, though I'd like to see Drobo address these issues (maybe they need some additional warnings). The angst over the magnets seems silly to me. The worries over a power failure screwing up the virtual partition table exist with any multi-drive solution.
I'm ordering a second drive, which I'll be plugging 1TB an 750GB drives into - we'll see how that goes.1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Most Innovative device this year!!
by jwilliam33 on January 15, 2008
Pros: Simple set up, worry free and unlimited capacity!
Cons: No Firewire
Summary: I've read a lot of reviews on this system and all the big complainers are ignorant. This device is not NAS but is much better than a consumer level ...
Summary: I've read a lot of reviews on this system and all the big complainers are ignorant. This device is not NAS but is much better than a consumer level RAID!! I'm currently running a WD 1TB & 500GB externals plus 3 500 GB internals. How much of that do you think I get to use? The 3 internals... that's right... I have 3TB total storage but the externals are used for backups. With the Drobo, if I drop 4 1TB drives in it, I will have access to a total 3TB without wondering if my backups ran last night etc... I'm going to gut the HD's out of my PC and leave the OS/TV 250GB. Throw the others in my Drobo and bada-bing!! No more sleepless nights. Did I mention I had a 500GB drive full of uncompressed ripped DVD's that croaked after 3 months of use? At the time, no backups for those large files. Needless to say, I've learned my lesson but this solution will solve just about everything. You're only fear now is data corruption. I wonder if you can do any sort of "Shadow Copy" with this drive?
Cheers!1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Data Robotics, Inc.
- Part number: 900-00002-002
- Description: As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. Drobo is the first fully automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe. Avoid the hassles associated with managing multiple external hard drives or managing the complexities of RAID. Attach Drobo to your Mac or PC and let it manage your storage so you don't have to.
General
- Device Type Hard drive array
- Width 6 in
- Depth 10.7 in
- Height 6.3 in
Cabinet (Chassis)
- Supported Devices / Modules Qty 4
Storage
- HDD Array External Interface Hi-Speed USB
- Optical Storage None
Storage Controller
- Type Serial ATA - Integrated ( Hi-Speed USB )
- Supported Devices Hard drive
Storage Controller (2nd)
- Type None
Storage Hard Drive
- Type Standard - Internal
- Capacity 0
Storage Hard Drive (2nd)
- Type None
Expansion / Connectivity
- Expansion Bays Total (Free) 4 ( 4 ) x Internal - 3.5" x 1/3H
- Expansion Slots Total (Free) None
- Interfaces 1 x Hi-Speed USB - 4 pin USB Type B
Miscellaneous
- Cables Included 1 x USB cable
- Software Included Drivers & Utilities
- Compliant Standards UL, FCC Part 15 B
Power
- Power Device Power supply - Internal
Manufacturer Warranty
- Service & Support Details Limited warranty - 1 year
Manufacturer info
- Data Robotics, Inc.
- Manufacturer profile
- Browse Data Robotics, Inc. products on Shopper.com
-
- Website: http://www.drobo.com/
- Address:
1881 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 40241 - Phone: 1.866.997.6268
