Drobo S looking for owner experience

Hey all. I think the original Drobo might have been a little rushed to market. I see a LOT of horror stories when I google. But the stories I see are often older and many (but not all) relate to the original Drobo, not the Drobo S.

I am in need of an expandable/flexible storage solution. I've got it narrowed down to Drobo S or ReadyNAS which has a similar (but not as flexible) system called X-RAID2 which allows you to use different sized drives, etc.

Thanks in advance.

I've had a Drobo S for about 2 years...maybe a bit less. It's attached via ESATA. Since this was going to be something I would be accessing regularly and not just storage/backup, a NAS didn't seem to be the best choice.

It's not going to have the same throughput as an internal drive. People seem to think the Drobo is somehow slower than other ESATA solutions... it isn't. I also have an ESATA dock and it is no faster.

My Bridge Catalog and LR Library are on an internal drive. My images are on the Drobo. This split works reasonably well. I originally tried putting everything on the Drobo and the performance was just too poor to be useable, imo.

The Drobo has survived hard drive failures without a hiccup although it is somewhat unnerving when it takes forever to redistribute your files over the remaining drives but, you still have access to the unit while it's doing this.

I like the fact that you can use drives of different sizes and replace them as you wish. Currently I have 5 2TB drives bit I started with a more modest capacity and added/replaced as I needed more space.

I have the normal old drobo and love it. I'm using firewire 800. The only problem I had with mine is my wife's cats liked to sit on it and ended up loosening the firewire cable on it, so for a while I was getting some weird errors that were a PITA to track down (they'd never sit on it when anyone was in the house).

Thanks guys. I have a 2011 iMac so my fastest connection for any external drive right now is FW800. I'm hoping that there will eventually be Thunderbolt to eSATA/USB3 connectors created. I may pull the trigger on the Drobo S and just be extremely careful about backing it up until I feel comfortable with its performance and reliability.

Any other comments from other owners?

imahawki wrote in post #13483684
Hey all. I think the original Drobo might have been a little rushed to market. I see a LOT of horror stories when I google. But the stories I see are often older and many (but not all) relate to the original Drobo, not the Drobo S.

I am in need of an expandable/flexible storage solution. I've got it narrowed down to Drobo S or ReadyNAS which has a similar (but not as flexible) system called X-RAID2 which allows you to use different sized drives, etc.

Thanks in advance.

I have had an ORIGINAL drobo since Jan 2008

it started with 2 x 500GB HD's, then 2x 500Gb + 2 x 750GB, then 1 x 1GB + 2x 750Gb + 500GB, and now it has 2x 2GB + 2x 1GB

All that evolution, I never lost a single byte of data and never once it crashed on me

Highly recommend, I assume the newer ones are even better, but the original has done me well.

I went ahead and ordered a Drobo S. Considering some of the difficulties I had finding good, current information. I'll probably write a review after I use it for a while.

If you have thunderbolt why not get a thunderbolt RAID server? That would be the best solution.

imahawki wrote in post #13484002
Thanks guys. I have a 2011 iMac so my fastest connection for any external drive right now is FW800. I'm hoping that there will eventually be Thunderbolt to eSATA/USB3 connectors created. I may pull the trigger on the Drobo S and just be extremely careful about backing it up until I feel comfortable with its performance and reliability.

Any other comments from other owners?

Because I really need expandability. I can't/don't want to spring for a server that meets future storage needs right now. I have some 2 and 3TB drives laying around so I can built out 5TB right now for just the cost of the Drobo vs. paying $2000 for a 10TB system that is fully populated just because once its built I can't change it easily.

They have a calculator on their website that will tell you how much available space you will end up with depending on your mix of drives.

Hi imahawki,

Now that you have had the Drobo S in action - any initial feedback?

My office is a disaster with files split over mutiple drives, and no duplicate copies of a large portion of it. With the price of HDD's starting to fall again, I'm going to make an effort to centralize and consolidate my files.

Has anyone had any MP3 streaming experience from a Drobo?


Jason

I bought an original Drobo about year ago. While it has never truly crashed or lost data, it is unnerving as it automatically disconnects for some reason. I'll be sitting there working on something non-Drobo related, hear a "bing-bong" sound, and the Drobo has self-disconnected. The only was to get it going again is to unplug the USB cord from the laptop and the power cord from the wall, the plug in the power cord, wait for it to start itself up, and then reconnect the USB cord. I have to do this about once a day. There seems to be a conflict between the Drobo and Firefox, as Firefox will sometimes not start up until I disconnect the USB cord from the Drobo, then Firefox starts immediately. And then I have to go through the disconnect-reconnect process all over again. I was going to try to get some help from Drobo on this but I see they don't support the original Drobos any more .

jbedford wrote in post #13702665
Hi imahawki,

Now that you have had the Drobo S in action - any initial feedback?

My office is a disaster with files split over mutiple drives, and no duplicate copies of a large portion of it. With the price of HDD's starting to fall again, I'm going to make an effort to centralize and consolidate my files.

Has anyone had any MP3 streaming experience from a Drobo?


Jason

Consolidation is good. But "no duplicate copies of a large portion of it" is not.

Note that a RAID is a solution to improve availability. It doesn't count as a backup. Having 5 or 10 TB online on a RAID is good since you know where to look for something. But make sure you can suffer a total loss of the data from that RAID and still recover all files. There are just too many ways to lose files - having a HDD failure is just one. And often not even the most probable source of data loss.

I ended up getting the Drobo S and am thrilled with it. I still keep two backups of all critical stuff, so I feel pretty protected. I work in IT so I fully understand that RAID is not a backup.

If anyone sees this thread and wants any particular information, I'm happy to respond.

I subscribe to Carbonite that is slowly moving most of my main machine data to the cloud. I need something to consolidate all of the lose hard drives kicking around on my desk. I bought a HDD toaster - and still think it is a great addition to my equipment, unfortunately this has caused me to split volumes of data over multiple drives.

If I have 4-5 existing e-SATA drives with data on them, can I just plug them into a drobo and go, or do you need to start with at least 2 blank drives?

I've been researching most of this morning, and have also come across the Drobo FS - which has an Ethernet connection. I was thinking I could plug this into my Cisco router in the basement out of site, and allow all of our devices to access this data. The down side to this approach is that Carbonite (or at least what I pay for), will only do a backup of drives enclosed in one machine, which would defeat my cloud backup.

Decisions decisions.....

JB

I've never had it disconnect... strange.