What the heck is a Drobo?!

Hey Guys,

I can't comprehend what the heck a Drobo is or how to use one...

One of the most dangerous things that I've been doing is not backing up ANY of my stuff. This can prove to be a HUGE problem if a hard drive were to ever fail. A friend owns a drobo and he recommends it as a back up system so that I can sleep easy at night knowing that my clients'/family photos are safe from a hard drive failure.

Now, I have a few questions to those who own/know about this product.

1) Does this work as an external hard drive that keeps backing itself up?
2) Would you recommend a normal drobo or the drobo S? The drobo S is QUITE expensive but I'm sure that if it's that much faster, I can definitely muster up the $$$$.

Sincerely,
Marlon

http://datarobotics.co​m/
http://photonotes.org/​reviews/drobo/
http://photonotes.org/​blog/?p=638

You could build a Raid yourself.
Drobo uses it's own proprietary format.

yes it works as an external hard drive, I would not recommend either of them, I have one (original version) and I hate it, countless problems, crappy support, overpriced, and ridiculously slow and I mean ridiculous ! this thing maxes at 35Mbs which is slower than a CF card !

the idea is cool but outside of using this for backups I wouldn't use it for primary storage, even for backups its so slow I am still contemplating buying a different system

oh and their claim that when you lose a hard drive you can still access the data is a load of crap as well, 2 times now this turd thought my hard drive was bad and rebuilt it and I could not access some of my data for over a day

I use it now for my time machine backup, and a backup of my photos from another HD, then I back all of it up to the cloud because I don't trust this thing

do some google searches on drobo performance you will see tons of complaints like mine

I have no idea how you have your Drobo S hooked up but I use an eSata port and monitor large file transfers (I get bored, sometimes). I don't think I've ever seen less than 60mbs and typicaly it's in the low 70's for big file copies.

I have a drobo at home and my students/staff have another 6 or so. No problems at all, we find them very reliable. When I load a folder into Bridge that has several hundred pictures, it takes a bit of time but not enough to ruin my day.

I didnt say I had a drobo S I said I had the original drobo the S is faster but I think the S stands for Slow

60-70Mbs is still really slow, a std 5400rpm laptop hard drive can do that

I have a 5 year old IDE 4 disk raid with 5400 rpm hard drives and its capable of doing 180Mbs and its cheaper than a drobo

a single run of the mill 7200 rpm desktop hard drive can do 80-90MB, a 1TB WD black is 110MB

if I am paying that much money I expect something fast

It's supposed to be backup. Loading a 25 meg raw file on either one into CS5 is hardly going to be noticeable.

And I am not talking what it is capable of such as burst speed. I was referring to sustained speeds.

The one thing that a Drobo offers that no other system does is single/double redundancy along with the ability to use drives of different sizes and change them on the fly. All of these things have a value to me, they may not, for you.

first drobo doesn't market it as "backup"

yes it supposedly does have that redundancy but read around and you will see many people complaining about how it lost all of its data, it never lost all of mine but it did it 2 times where I couldn't access it for a day, so if they are going to claim it can do it at least make it work

if you think there is no difference in the load time of files on the drobo vs another disk your kidding yourself I moved mine from the drobo to 2 SATA drives and the pictures open at least 5 times faster now, lightroom is like a different application!

Whatever

remember that thread of you complaining of LR performance, I bet you still have it right? I had it to and I solved it by removing the drobo

I moved the library to internal drives but kept the images on the Drobo. Having both on the Drobo was too slow. Now it works fine. Not as fast as internal drives but satisfactorily, for me. My library has about 60,000 images. Just guessing.

PS: No matter how fast the computer, they all idle at the same speed.

lol yes at idle it makes no difference

I found moving the images to the internal drives made a massive difference, now I only use the drobo for a backup which its good at

I put the os / cache / catalog on a SSD and then put the pics on a raid0 and the difference in performance was like going from a 286 to the fastest computer in the world

I'm sure but I don't care. My setup works well for me. I have no need to upgrade anything.

just so you know where I am coming from... I've been in the IT business since 1977. Hardware and now, developing software, originally for the chemical industry and now for the financial industry.

When I was younger and had less money I was far more nerdy than now where I am considerably more comfortable and pragmatic. I'm not into "stuff". I learned the difference between need and want. I rarely fall for the want.

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for your help! i decided to buy the 2nd gen drobo S for it's E-sata connection. I brought it home with a smile in my pocket and a hole in my wallet. I loaded 2 2TB green drives into it.

Now this is where I am embarrased and in need for anyone's help. When I got home, I decided to move ALL of my 2009 RAW files into it. The drobo took it and wanted to do an update. I updated it, and it rebooted. The next thing I know, the drobo dashboard shows "320GB of used space and 1.68TB of UNALLOCATED SPACE. It says that in order to reclaim the unallocated space, I have to reformat the drobo which would lose ALL of my 2009 Work. I am glad that I didn't copy my other raw files into it. I am considering returning this damn thing. It was pricey and I am now at risk of losing my files. This thing was suppose to SAVE my files, not EAT IT UP. I cannot access the drobo and ALL of my freaking files are in that DAMN thing.

Now my questions...
- How do i get my raw files out?
- How do I reclaim the data on it?
- How do I reclaim the unallocated space without losing the data? Is that possible?
- Do you encourage me to call their tech support? I heard that I'll have a horrible experience.

HELP! PLEASE!!!! AHHH. i am so stressed out!!!!

Just read this on one of the review links posted above...

OMG WAHTHTHT!?!??! WHATHH!H!?!?!?