Comments on: Welcome to Drobo 2.0 — Two Times Faster and Now Offering Firewire Support

By: Andreas Guther

Andreas Guther — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:09:51 +0000

A have a drobo for 6 weeks now and I am starting to see major problems. After adding a third drive drobo was suddenly not able to show folders and at some point windows was not able to recognize drobo as a drive. After three reboots (remove drives, unplug power, plug power, insert drives) drobo finally was able to show my folders with their files. That was yesterday. Today I was foolish enough to try to edit a file on drobo while importing photos into Lightroom which saves files on the drobo. It simply rebooted. I am loosing my trust in the device. I am also waiting for three days now for a response of their customer service. But after reading many reports on the slow (but very friendly!) service I am not surprised anymore.

By: Un robot per i miei dischi | Infoservi.it

Un robot per i miei dischi | Infoservi.it — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:49:56 +0000

[...] chiama Drobo e si trova qua, mentre Thomas Hawk ha già i dati della nuova versione. Lo fa Data Robotics. Salva o segnala il post come [...]

By: kasmador

kasmador — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:36:25 +0000

Hey,
Other than the new firewire ports, what’s the spec difference between the old and new one. If I don’t care about the transfer speed, would the 2.0 be worth the extra cost?

thanks

By: Radiant

Radiant — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:06:00 +0000

I just picked up one of these drives at drobostore.com. I found this code on another review: ACNCHE

it gave me $50 off my purchase. I am planning on picking up 2 1 TB drives and installing them but I called drobo and they said they just certified the 1.5 TB seagates so I may go with that.

I must admit I am a bit scared with 3 TB going bad!! do you need to backup your drobo backup? I've heard some wierd stories.

By: Danno

Danno — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:09:00 +0000

I still think it does too little for $499. A hard drive enclosure that does nothing more than copy data amongst drives should not cost that much. As many people have already pointed out, the kind of people who need this kind of gadget are people who can afford a NAS or a home media server. What they are really selling here is the software that does the clever data moving. DR needs to stop trying to sell this as hardware and sell a software solution that could be integrated into any server. They would be bazillionaires overnight.

By: alberto dottavi - infoservi.it

alberto dottavi - infoservi.it — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:24:00 +0000

Lovely. That’s what I was looking for, but I’m also dreaming of a NAS version… Thnks Thomas!

By: Ben Curtis

Ben Curtis — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:39:00 +0000

The Drobo is a nice device if you want easy storage, but as others have said it is NOT in itself a backup. People need to understand this – like all RAID implementations this just protects you against a disk dying. If you accidentally trash your files, or they get corrupted, it’s not gonna help you one bit. As one previous commenter concisely pointed out “A Drobo is great as EITHER a backup OR a primary storage volume, but you still need both to be secure.”

As for the Drobo vs other RAID devices, the main reasons why the Drobo is less appealing to me is that due to the proprietary nature, I have no way whatsoever of knowing what format the data on the drives is in, so if I ever need to recover the array, I am out of luck. Sorry, but that’s just a killer for me.

Personally I prefer a RAID-1 device, plus 2nd copy, for archiving my photos – that way any drive can be pulled and accessed directly from any machine.
I wrote a blog post on archiving for photographers a few weeks ago, some might find it useful:

http://www.snappertalk.com/index.php/20080604/archiving-photos/

Regards,

Ben

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:32:00 +0000

i) It is possible to move a set of drives from an Gen 1 Drobo to a Gen 2 Drobo.

ii) How many of you "Open Standard RAID is great" people have actually tried to place a set of drives from one RAID system into another?

iii) Multiple hard drive failure is a pretty complex subject. For example, getting a 2-drive failure does not require 2 drives to fail. A failure can occur when one drive fails and another drive has suffered some data corruption. As with most manufactured items, batches of product made together tend to suffer from similar defects/tolerance errors. This can make it much more likely that two drives will fail together than the published MTBF might suggest. I have never seen any published data on this subject. I guess what I am trying to say is that while the figures published by the drive manufacturers are valid, they cannot be applied to a multiple drive system without consideration of a number of additional, poorly defined parameters.

By: needcaffeine

needcaffeine — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:08:00 +0000

drobo is a local mass storage device, I’ve had too many issues with RAID to accept RAID as ’safe’ backup. But then again storage which I consider ‘crucial’ I make multiple copies (digital/paper). Taxes are most important, I’d rather not lose my images/mp3s, etc….but if ‘god forbid’ I lose them, I’m not subject to Audit if I lose them – it will piss me off, but I can live without.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:25:00 +0000

Wow, for about the same price you can get a HP MediaSmart box running Windows Home Server which is superior IMO.

It’s a network-attached headless backup and sharing server with hot-swappable drives, infinitely more functionality, imaged backups, and the list goes on. It’s about3 inches taller, but since it’s NAS you can put it anywhere.