Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10
Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10 see short title
Product Rating:
The safe, expandable Drobo storage solution protects your data against a hard drive crash, yet can expand dynamically at any time in just seconds. With nothing to configure or manage, Drobo is now the ideal solution for primary storage as well as backup.
The safe, expandable Drobo storage solution protects your data against a hard drive crash, yet can expand dynamically at any time in just seconds. With nothing to configure or manage, Drobo is now the ideal solution for primary storage as well as backup. « short desciption
User Reviews
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Review Date: 2009-11-24
While I have three of these units, both a USB and two FW800 versions, I give it only 4 stars (and if I could 3.5) because of some issues.
PRO: Very easy to use, small footprint, does give you RAID style protected data in case of single HD failure. Nice enclosure design. Pretty cheap for a RAID system.
CON: When getting full, data rates slow down considerably. When upgrading to higher capacity drives, it can take literally days (2-3) for it to rebuild which during that time, if another HD fails, your data is hosed. A bit loud on the fan noise.
I do a lot of HD video and use this to use as a BU file storage. Every now and then I have to work off the drive and if it is less than 3/4 full, the FW ones will handle it ok (not great, but ok). Once over that 3/4 full, it crawls and is not usable for NLE work.
Like most people, digital data backup overload is an everyday problem. I can produce a 100 gigs of new footage/files a day so handling this is a holy grail many of us search for without having to go a total IT way. The Drobo, is a step in that direction, but we need something better. In order to be safe, you have to have 2 of these backing up each other and one needs to be physically stored elsewhere. I wish we had high capacity optical disks (Blue ray is just not big enough and subject to becoming obsolete.) Maybe the holographic technology will come through...or really fast cloud computing backups, but for now, it's just a drag.
Still I recommend the Drobo for general backup...just make sure you have at least 2 copies of your files in different places, and three copies is really the safest (or 4 or 5 :-).
User: Bob F.
Rating:
Summary: Slow rebuilds, Slow when nearing full
Helpful Votes: 0
Total Votes: 0
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Review Date: 2009-11-16
Most people already know about the Drobo, so instead of harping on the positives, I'll go over my issues with the Drobo.
1) No IEEE 1394, but has two Firewire 800 ports. Huh? This is a big FU to PC users as almost every motherboard has a IEEE 1394 (Fireire 400) connection, but almost none have FW 800. I'll pass on USB thanks.
2) Unit spins down hard drives way too quickly. Seems like I'm always waiting for them to spin up. You can't disable this either. You have to buy the "Pro" model to do that (which was released after I bought mine). Insane that this is a "feature." Microsoft wouldn't even go that far.
3) Slow. I get 20-30 MB/sec over USB2. It's just slow, no way around it.
4) Randomly drops/disconnects under Windows 7. It also "boots up" too slowly under Windows 7. My apps like Media Center are up and running before the Drobo has even finished spinning up the drives.
5) Can't resize partitions. This is the worst. When you first setup the Drobo, you have to create logical partitions to go with your new unit. The default here is 2TB. That was fine for me since I was using 4 500 GB drives. What's lame is that it won't let you resize them to be larger once your disk storage grows. Sure, you can use that new storage if you use up all 2TB, but you'd have to create a new volume. This is absolutely ridiculous and there's no good reason for this other than their laziness. I've never seen a RAID appliance that wouldn't let you resize volumes.
In summary, this thing is OK, but considering how expensive it is, could be much better.
User: R. Hesse
Rating:
Summary: Ehh, it's OK but it could be much better.
Helpful Votes: 1
Total Votes: 2
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Review Date: 2009-11-14
First unit sent back because one of the bays didn't work.
Second unit started failing after I put the fourth drive in - random disconnects from host machine after a few hours of use.
CHKDSK revealed large scale corruption not just once but several times.
It declared THREE disks as dead - that's an astronomical failure rate compared to all the other disks I have in PCs.
The last disk it declared dead was during a rebuild after I switched a disk - since the rebuild was going to take 48 hours (for one 320GB disk!!!) there's a pretty huge window for another failure.
Replacing it with a JBOD disk array - I'll trust Windows to manage my drives rather than Drobo.
User: App
Rating:
Summary: Nice looking product but it isn't reliable
Helpful Votes: 0
Total Votes: 0
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Review Date: 2009-11-12
For over a year I put off buying a Drobo because of the cost. But then I started looking around at all of the hard drives I was storing up. It was getting a bit ridiculous. I could have easily paid for the Drobo with what I had spent. Plus I knew the cost of the information on the hard drives and how important it is and decided to make the leap. I am sooo glad I did. This little black box is amazing. Everyting about it has been great from the packaging (nice touch) to the ease of installation and the speed. My only regret is that I did not make the leap sooner. Don't put it off. Click the add to cart button now and make your life easier...
User: Marcus Neto
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Helpful Votes: 1
Total Votes: 1
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Review Date: 2009-11-12
As an IT/tech geek, I was very excited when the Drobo came out. I loaded up four 1.5tb drives with what was suppose to be newer, supported firmware according to seagate (seagate cc3g.) The unit worked fine. I set mine up as a 16tb partition so I wouldn't need to create new volumes if I upgraded the drives in the future. The unit was very slow at transferring data, about 5-10mb/s (vs the performance of a single drive transfer of about 70mb/s). I even purchased a firewire 800 card and used both native firewire drivers and 3rd party drivers that run at full speed, but the performance remained poor.
However, as I was just using it for data archiving, I wasn't too concerned with the speed. I quickly moved all my important data to this volume. All my music, family photos, family videos, work documents, etc.
Fast forward to two weeks ago. The unit ran fine for about 8 months, though it did need the occasional reboot. I had to power down the unit to switch some plugs around. Upon plugging it back in it was stuck in a reboot loop.
I immediately opened a ticket with Drobo. They tell me the drive firmware's are unsupported, and I need to DOWNGRADE the firmware to cc1h. I said fine, and I downgraded the firmware successfully WITHOUT erasing any data on the drives. I then put the drives back in and the unit again was stuck in the same reboot loop.
I again updated my ticket with Drobo with all the details and attached all the necessary logs. Drobo responded with "you must have a failed drive, do you have your data backed up elsewhere?" !!!! I respond no, they say they will escalate to tier 3. This was was on November 3rd, 2009. I have since sent two emails asking for some sort of update and received NOTHING to date (Nov 12, 2009.)
I've been without ALL my data for well over a week and fear that I've lost all my family photos and videos, as well as business documents. In addition, their response baffles me about having a failed drive. Isn't the whole point of the Drobo to protect you against failed drives? If the drobo doesn't support certain drives, and the unit can detect that (apparently they discovered my firmware version from the debug log I sent them) shouldn't the software warn you before letting you set it up?
Drobo has more or less given up on me, and the unit has proven not redundant at all. So basically, if you want a slow array that can fail at any time, buy this thing. Otherwise, just get a drive case and setup a raid5 or get a windows home server unit.
User: edrock
Rating:
Summary: Drobo Not redundant, unit can fail easily, very slow
Helpful Votes: 3
Total Votes: 3
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Product Details
- FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 compatible)
- Enhanced USB 2.0 performance
- Redundant data protection
- Hot expandable up to 16TB
- Mix n match drive capacities
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