Drobo and me, a year later; review

UPDATE: A year and a week later, my perspective is even more negative on the Drobo. See here.

I've had my 2nd gen Drobo for about a year now. It's been up and down from how I feel about the product. I wanted to use it with my iMac and the media drive with all the photos/movies/itunes etc on it. That was the goal. We'd gotten a HD camcorder and would be needing a lot of disk space and lets face it, drives fail about once every 18 months as far as I can tell.

So, first things first. I've never lost a byte of data on the Drobo since I got it and I've had two drive failures. In this sense, it's delivered. I've expanded the capacity of the Drobo a couple of times and I ended up with more space.

Now, with the good part out of the way. The biggest problem with it has been that it's slow. Whats slow? It's like having a 27ms access time 14MB/sec external drive. I'm using the results from Toms Hardware, a respecting drive benchmarking web site. It's too slow to use as your main disk. Period. You won't be happy starting iMovie or iPhoto with this or watching HD movies in iTunes. It's really only fast enough as an archive drive, a time machine drive, a drive for backups or a drive with lots of capacity for keeping disk images and so on.

The software supplied with it is poor. The Dashboard (currently on 1.6.7) is buggy. It frequently doesn't detect my Drobo and a full iMac restart fixes the problem. I've attached the Drobo using USB and FW800 and didn't see much difference. The cable isn't the issue here, it's the controller in the unit. The dashboard doesn't provide a lot of information. It tells you the capacity of the drives, how much space there is left and if there is a recovery or relayout then it says how long is left. Recently, my WD Green 2TB drives were both failing and Drobo handled this without losing data. It spotted the bad areas and remapped them to good areas. This causes dynamic relayouts. Random warnings which trigger a relayout but it only lasts a few minutes instead of days. The issue is the Drobo doesnt say which drive triggered it. If a drive is failing then I want to know and I want to replace it before I lose the whole drive. I'd two drives both failing at different times which is super dangerous but the Drobo did not say to replace them.

You really need enterprise SATA drives also. I've had issues with desk top class drives from Seagate and WD. The issues seem to be around head load cycles and long error recovery times causing the Drobo to behave badly.

So, overall, I'm disappointed. Lack of diagnostics, software thats flaky and it's very slow. But, I never lost data. If I'd to do it again then I'd buy a QNAP 4 bay unit or something like that. The QNAP 459 is about the same price as a Drobo S and murders it as far as I can tell. I'm probably buying a QNAP in the next few months.

Comments

[inw]

Have not compared prices, but I have a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro in the basement and like it very much. It lets you log in and treat it as a Linux machine (I run mail servers and a git repo and suchlike). When I had a drive failure it did the right thing and expanded onto the replacement drive when it arrived.

My model does not have iSCSI (didn't want it). I use it as a NAS only, and can stream several HD movies concurrently. I use it as the primary store for everything, including the photos behind Lightroom.

[Billy]

How many drives in your unit?

[inw]

The Pro takes six, and I have it fully populated with a range of 500GB to 2TB drives (mostly recycled from an earlier, larger, home-brew server machine, which is now gone).

The NVX takes four, so appears more comparable to the QNAP 459 -- I haven't tried the NVX, but it seems almost exactly the same, minus two bays.

If you opt for the QNAP, it'll be interesting to hear how it works out.

[RyanT]

It's ridiculous how people don't understand that Drobo is a BACKUP system. It's safe and expandable. I started to read your review and stop just when you said "It's too slow to use as your main disk. Period.".

Please try to learn about the purpose of the products you buy before write a review. You sucks!!! Drobo Rocks!

[Andreas]

RyanT, where does it say that it is a "backup" system? Certainly not on the Data Robotics website. http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

It is marketed as a NAS. It should be reviewed as such.

[Bob]

I have had my DroboS for about 3 months now and am also disappointed. Mostly attached to a iMac (24" with additional RAM etc). If I leave it on for any period of inactivity and the Drobo Dashboard loses connection requiring a re-boot - actual drobo is on the desktop but dashboard will not recognise it. . According to Drobo that is not a good way of working as you're supposed to put into .

Also i agree about it being painfully slow. This is sold as more than just a "time machine" though it does that process very well. Am using FW800 and it is not responsive. I am using Lightroom with nearly 100,000 high res files -Drobo spends a lot of time thinking! - watching paint dry comes close at times!

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