Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Brand: Data Robotics
• Model: DR04DD10
• Platform: Windows
• Format: CD
• Dimensions: 6.30" h x 6.30" w x 10.70" l, 11.80 pounds
• Hard Disk: 1TB

Features

• FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 compatible)
• Enhanced USB 2.0 performance
• Redundant data protection
• Hot expandable up to 16TB
• Mix n match drive capacities

Customer Reviews

A GREAT STORAGE DEVICE
Normally I don't write reviews for all of the products I buy, but based on the bad reviews that people have given the drobo, I felt I needed to offset some of the unfair & misleading comments.

I have had this drobo for about a month. I have had very little interaction with the drobo itself. That is becouse once it is set up you forget it. That is wonderful for this kind of storage device.

It really is as simple as putting the drives in, install the software, and begin using it. I first saw this at Macworld in January 2008, but held out for the firewire version. I am using on a mixed environment network with no compatibility problems. It is very fast, and very easy. I am using mine for all of my videos streamed to our TVs. IT ABSOLUTELY WORKS WONDERFULLY! It can simultaniously stream mp4 videos to 2 TVs while having data copied to it.... all without any hiccups. That is impressive for a device like this.

For those of you have have read (or are about to read) some of the negative reviews here, allow me to comment on them:

First complaint: Add (4) 1TB Drives - only get 2.7TB of useable data space. Understand this, the device says that you can put up to 16tb of storage in it. This means that when 4tb drives are available, you can put up to 4 of them in this device. Does that mean that you will have 16tb of useable storage. NO. Why? Becouse hard drives are sold based on an inaccurate counting system.

While EVERY SINGLE HARD DRIVE MAKER (or company selling storage space) counts how much space you have based on 1gb =1000mb, this is totally false! The truth is that 1gb = 1024mb. This means that they are shorting you 24mb for every GB you buy. I realize that on 1 GB, it is only 24mb lost, but on a TB that starts adding up.

Also the system uses some of the storage to index your drive so it knows how to find the data on your drive. This is why when you buy a computer with a 80gb hard drive and look at usable data it will say about 75GB.

Second complaint: "This is a RAID system" while the drobo does not use raid 5 per se, it does use something very much like it. To get a raid 5 array, you need 3 or more drives that are all the same size. Regardless of how many drives you use, you lose the amount of storage space equivelant to one of the drives. This goes to the protection of the array. In other words, if one drive fails you replace it with another identical drive which will rebuild the array and to prevent data loss.

Most implementations of raid 5 do not allow the storage space to grow, and if they do, it is very expensive for the raid controller card and very difficult to implement. What makes drobo different, is you get the benefits of raid 5 protection, with out of lot of its costs and complications.

For example, you can put in any 4 sata drives, and it works, regardless of there sizes. Also, if you replace a drive you can replace it with any sata drive, not the same ones you used before. Both of these are a big deal because it is what makes what drobo does very unlike raid.

Third complaint: "Drive rebuilds/expantions can take 2 to 5 days". OK, this one is true. But lets think about this, there is a good reason why this is true. You have data on all four drives. But it is writen to those drives in such a way that if any one drive is removed from a system and replaced with a new drive the drobo can rebuild all of that data.

Look, that is pretty impressive. And I would imagine if you had a drive crash you would rather wait a few days to get your stuff back as opposed to losing it all together. But if you are rebuilding data for several terabytes... yes it is going to take a while. And the same is true for raid 5.

Ultimately, the drobo does what it says. It is a very consumer friendly implementation of raid 5 like protection at an extremely affordable price. I would LOVE for someone to show me a raid-5 device (or something like it other then the drobo) that you can buy empty for under $500 that can connect to both USB and Firewire 800.

In conclusion, I have used many types of raid 5 implementations. So I can safely say: if you want raid 5 without the headaches, get a drobo. If you want a mirrored drive (raid 1), a striped drive (raid 0) or JBOD (just a big disk) - then the drobo is not for you. There are other products that will better serve your needs.

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UPDATE 11/18/2008:
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When I purchased the drobo, I initially put in two 1TB drives and two 320GB drives. After nearly filling it up I added another 1TB drive. Shortly there after I decided to add another 1.5TB drive. So this means I have done 2 expansion rebuilds. The process in both cases took about 10 hours and was flawless. Just to be sure I did it at night and didn't use the drive while this was going on. So my statement above about 2-5 days is way off and not true. I am sure that this will be a happier solution.

Also, based on the way that the drobo allocates space for future growth, I wish I had purchased two 1.5TB drives. IF someone is interested in learning more about this, I recommend looking at the drobolator calculator at drobo.com. But otherwise I am still very happy with my drobo.

Someone added a comment to this review that "it fails semi-randomly and takes data with it & that customer service is useless". Well this I can not comment on as I haven't had this problem nor have I noticed that the support was useless. I did have one minor issue and called support. They weren't the best support team, but far from the worst.

Statements like that need to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes people get a bad unit or talk to someone at support who is the bad apple of the group... or juts having a bad day. That isn't an excuse for them, but a reality. But again, I don't have any experience with support being useless by any means.

When it comes to data protection, I am about give the secret to security. You will never hear something more true then this: The more you value your data, the more copies of it you should have. For example, priceless pictures on your hard drive are just begging to disappear. Backing them up to a device like the drobo is a much safer solution. Burning a copy of them and putting them in your closet is even better. Making another copy and keeping them somewhere else (outside of your home) really prevents data loss (think fire, theft, etc). Another backup onto the internet... well you my friend can sleep well at night knowing that your data is safe.

Now, I am not saying that you have to be this paranoid about data. But if you have data that can never be lost, remember this simple rule about backups: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

Ultimately, I stand by my opinion that this is a great device. I am in the process of getting a few more for our company.

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UPDATE 11/22/2008:
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A few things I have thought about since my last update.

First the drobo is not for everyone. If you are concerned about having the maximum available amount of your data as possible, this device isn't for you. As their website CLEARLY explains, the drobo uses a fair amount of data to protect you incase of a single drive failure. It also reserves some storage for overhead and for future expansion.

Second, before purchasing this check out the drobolator (http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html). This is a calculator that shows how the drobo will address the hard drives you put into it. You will see exactly how much storage will be used for overhead, protection, future growth and available to use. If people were familiar with this page alone, it could help solve a large portion of the drobo's misconception.

Finally, I have tried to respond to the questions and comments of this review. So, there may be additional information there.

Performs as advertised, but not quiet
I own both 1st and 2nd gen drobos, so I can do direct A-B comparisons. Note that I've set up both models with the identical hard drives: 3x 1TB WD green 5400rpm. These hard drives are ideal for the drobo: They are plenty fast enough, but spin at 5400 rpm and so are quieter, consume less power, and produce less heat than typical 7200 rpm drives. (Putting 7200 rpm drives in a drobo is pointless.)

The drobo has so far done everything it is supposed to do. I've even yanked out a drive when it's turn on to test the raid rebuild. It rebuilt fine, and I lost no data. The rebuilt on a 2TB volume took almost 1 day, but it did work.

Apart from the slow speed of USB and even Firewire compared to in internal raid array (which is something a lot of people complain about unfairly, since it is not data robotics' fault!), I have just one complaint: The device is loud. Don't believe their marketing materials that say that the 2nd gen drobo is quieter and cooler than the 1st gen. They don't provide any dB measurements, or anything quantitative. I can tell you, qualitatively, that both 1st and 2nd gen drobos are quite loud. The appear to use the same crappy fan, which is probably the culprit. When the fan is off, even with all drives working, the device is silent (those wonderful WD green drives are soooo quiet). But as soon as the fan turns on, the fan noise is annoying. I may be forced to void my warrantee by spending $20 on a proper fan. Whey didn't they fix this problem in the 2nd gen model? It seems like a big mistake to me.

If you aren't putting this device in a quiet room, then I have only positive things to say (so far!). If you're putting it in a quiet room, then it'll probably work but will probably annoy you a bit. I don't think there's a better alternative product out there, though, so I give 4/5 stars.

To Data Robotics: Please, please, please put in a good quality fan. And never turn the fan off: Run it at 1000 RPM at all times, and ramp up the RPM with the temperature. It's such a simple thing to fix!

Drobo Failure. Drobo fried all four drives at one time, having to send platters away.
See note at bottom for update to the story here. Drobo CO did come through and get our data restored. I am impressed by that.

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I will revise this review later if story turns out to be anything other than what it now appears to be. We use a Drobo as main disk array for Apple Mac that we use for video editing.

Everything has worked fine for about 6 months. We have Drobo loaded with 4 WD 1,000GB drives. Everything is top notch equipment, with very strong surge protection and uninterruptable power supply, top of the line Apple computer. Okay, that's background.

The other day, Drobo stopped booting correctly. Called Drobo, and they nicely sent us another unit. Same problem. Now they are saying to run certain software to further diagnose. Problem is that drives have to be recognized of course to run that software. It appears at present that something catastrophic happened in the Drobo unit that caused all four of these new 1,000GB WD drives to fail at the same time.

We are now investigating which company to send them to in order to try to get the data off of the platters themselves. Once we have our data back, if we ever have our data back, and we buy new drives, what are the odds that they are going back into a Drobo unit? We will now spend hundreds of dollars to try to recover what we can at the platter level.

The Drobo techs have been nice enough, but they act like this is some problem of ours other than a major failure of their device. Which I guess means it IS a problem of ours, to fix.

Update number one: There will be more. We had our computer tech expert come over and check everything that we have checked and that the Drobo techs had us check. He concluded there is nothing for it but that the drives are indeed now ALL dead and we have now sent the drives off to the experts in town that recover files from platters. I'll let you all know how that works out. Unbelievable.

Update number two: Got assessment back from recovery company. The drives are all dead. It will cost us $ 8,000.00 to get our data back off of the platters. (That is, of course, on top of the costs of four dead 1 Terabyte WD drives and a Drobo unit we'll never trust again. Nor any replacement, frankly.) We are not sure yet what we will do. Drobo has indicated they may try to do something for us. I'll let you know if they do. (or don't)

Update number three (a couple weeks into this): Nothing really happened since update two except that we are working through our best options for recovering or reproducing the information we lost on the drives.

Update number four: Drobo has offered to check our platters for us and see if they can recover our data. The independent company's bid for $ 8,000.00 is partly that high because of the proprietary RAID algorithm that Drobo uses (would have been a lower cost bid if it was more industry standard). Maybe Drobo can recover the data more efficiently since they will better understand their own RAID design. I'll keep you posted from here!

Update number five: We received the unit back from Drobo today. They got it all working again and we have all our data back. I am impressed that they were able to do this and that they were willing to do this. I wish they had suggested this option from the git go because it would have saved a lot of time and other efforts by our team. But, they really did come through in getting this done for us. I have not talked enough with our team person in charge of this to know if Drobo was able to diagnose what happened but I do know it's working now and we have the data back.