Drobo Review
Engadget’s got a great review of Drobo, Data Robotic’s storage array / external hard drive enclosure. If you’ve already watched the Drobo demo video, this review might answer some of the questions the video raises (but doesn’t answer):
However, Drobo isn’t without issues. As advanced and advantageous virtualized storage is, for most users it’s going to be a pretty confusing experience, and that may never change. The guy who thinks his Drobo can handle having two drives yanked out at the same time is going to be in for a sad surprise. We thought our 1/3rd-full 1TB array would be totally happy about us yanking the smallest drive and upgrading it to something a bit larger — and it was, 7 hours later after rebuilding. Unfortunately, only adding new drives to empty bays is a fast process — upgrading existing ones can take a while, and be nerve-wracking if your array doesn’t have enough space to keep things redundant during the rebuild. And that’s when you’ll most notice the bright, blinking lights on the front of the unit, which can’t be shut off, even during normal use.
Overall it sounds like Drobo is a great first-generation product; really nifty, but not without its share of problems and missing features.
Spent the cash… wasn’t worth it. The device is SLOW! If you are copying a large file, forget about trying to access anything off the thing. the usb is much slower than a single drive.
Decided to take advantage of the money back guarantee… that was a royal hassle.. took a month to finally get my money after numerous phone calls.
overall result… not worth consideration.
We had two DROBOs in our lab and they turned out to be notoriously unstable. One was run from an iMac, and it was the first one to fail. It reported that one of its 4 HDs failed. I couldn’t access any data on it and DROBO support told me to buy a new drive to replace the defunct one. However as soon as I plugged the new one in, DROBO reported that another drive was failing. I never got the data back… (I thought the whole point of the DROBO was to protect you from drive failure.)
The other DROBO was connected to a PC running Windows XP. Although it didn’t outright fail, its connection to the PC proved somewhat instable. From time to time it would just disconnect.
We decided to sent out two DROBOs back to Newegg. For the price of a DROBO I do expect it to work flawlessly. (And the USB-2 connection is a drag…)
Overall impression: product was released too early. Too expensive for the instability it delivers.
WOW- I have V. 2.0 ethernet version— 3 1t barracuda drives (the quality of your drives makes ll the difference).
THis is an awesome new product- saved my bacon! Seamless setup, all my data is secure, took a drive out to see what would happen, nada- everything worked fine, tossed in a new drive, again, no problem, wrote backup flawlessly.
Not sure what the others had issues with, sounds like they were using cheap drives- as I said earlier, you HAVE to use quality drives in this thing- but if you do- its freaken awesome!