Data Robotics goes large with 8-bay DroboPro
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 7th 2009 8:30AM
posted Apr 7th 2009 8:30AM
Obviously, the DroboPro can physically hold more data than its non-Pro counterpart; eight bays of SATA I/II goodness means you can currently shove up to 16TB in there. If you're looking for more subtle changes, the DroboPro features an integrated power supply (read: no power brick) and it fully supports dual-drive redundancy. On that note, users can switch between single- and dual-drive redundancy with a single (software) button press within Drobo Dashboard, and yes, it works in both directions. Once pressed, the device will calculate how long before it'll take the data to be shuffled around, and we're told it's far, far quicker than any other solution out there in this price range.
As for ports, you'll find USB 2.0, twin FireWire 800 sockets (both of which are compatible with FireWire 800-to-400 adapters) and a gigabit Ethernet jack. Before you start drooling, we'll warn you that said port isn't meant for setting this thing up as a NAS. Data Robotics still insists that its main business is in direct attached storage, though it does leave open the option of connecting the DroboPro to a Windows Home Server or a networked computer in order to provide network-accessible access to it. But yeah, you'll still need a middleman of some sort to get to this bad boy over the internet. The Ethernet port is really there to take advantage of iSCSI, a wicked fast interface that'll mostly be used with servers and workstation rigs. Oh, and OS X users, Data Robotics is tossing in a homegrown iSCSI driver for free so you too will have access.
The device is also compatible with a 3U rack-mount attachment (sold separately), and it can even manage up to sixteen 16TB volumes that pull storage from a common pool. We're told that users can hotswap up to one drive at a time in single redundancy mode or two drives at once when in dual-drive redundancy. In other words, if you decide on a whim to replace that paltry 120GB drive with a 2TB unit, you simply yank out the little guy and snap in the new one -- no other action is necessary on your part. Another huge boon is that DroboPro works perfectly well with mixed and matched drives. If you've got eight random SATA I/II drives laying around, you can rest assured that they'll all be welcome in this home.
So, the big question: can you even afford this? Like we stated earlier, this device is clearly aimed at small business users and consumers with a serious need for some serious storage. If you still don't believe us, just take a moment to digest the $1,299 MSRP on the completely empty DroboPro. From there, you'll find the following pre-stocked options: $1,599 (4 x 500GB), $1,749 (4 x 500GB + 3U DroboPro Rack Mount), $1,849 (8 x 500GB), $1,949 (8 x 500GB + 3U DroboPro Rack Mount) and a top end version for $3,999 with 16TB of capacity. On the bright side, any existing Drobo customer can receive $200 off the MSRP on a DroboPro, though there's a max credit of $200 in case you're looking to double up. It ships worldwide on April 7th.
DAY-UM!
I love it. I want to marry it.
"it's not really meant to be used on networks. Interested to hear more?"...................NO
Leo - c'mon man.
iphones aren't "meant" to be jailbroken, but loads of people still do it.
Just because something isn't meant to do something doesn't mean it won't do that thing and do it well.
what in the hell is jaw iv talking about?
NAS, NAS, NAS, NAS... bloody muppets
That's it. I'm applying for a bank loan.
Damn, I have been looking forward for this, as 4 drives just isn't quite enough, but the price is too high.
unRAID from Lime Technology. Up to 16 drives of whatever size you want expandable from 3 on up as your data needs grow. I have two of these puppies and couldn't be happier. Build it or buy it Best to ask in their forums for pluses and minuses - and there are both - but it suits my video serving needs and backup needs extremely well.
So it doesn't show up as a NAS if you plug it into a router? What about the original Drobo?
The original drobo doesn't have an ethernet port. You had to get an adapter, and it was slow.
Terabytes of useless data spinning in little black boxes - owned by people who can barely read and write. Ah progress...
Little boxes, in the rack mount,
Little boxes, spinning useless data,
Little boxes, in the rack mount,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a black one, and a black one,
And a black one, and yes a black one,
And they're all just spinning useless data,
And they all look just the same.
do want..... but so 'spensive.
Repeat after me...
RAID (or proprietary sudo-RAID in this case) IS NOT a backup solution. Incremental backups are a backup solution. RAID protects against hardware failure only.
"Control - F" "backup" ... 3 results, all your comment.
No one said it was a backup device, no one even said "backup" but ..... if one was to use it as storage to place a backup (eg: a time machine target) then it would be a backup solution... and better than what 99% of homes and small business's do at present.
Repeat after me... stop being so pedantic
NEEDS
BUILT IN
DROBOSHARE.
iSCSI is far better for the target audience. Take your caps lock back to Digg.
*facepalm*
They've obviously got the processing power and technology to build in a droboshare, they'd just like to steal 200 more of your dollars - after you spent $800+ more than a comparable self-built system using freeNAS's multi-level softRAID. the original drobo kind of makes sense in that it makes stuff like this easy for end-users - but the sort of people who use iSCSI and have this many disks are more likely to have an 8-identical-disk RAID 5 array...the Pro seems to be edging too far into a market full of fibre channel and various other technologies.
--neg
Hmmm...the speed increase with the Drobo2 update tempted me last time, but the Drobo Network Adapter thing killed the deal. This looks better, -almost- perfect for my needs, but when are the new transfer cable technologies coming out?
USB 3.0, FireWire S1600 and S3200, and this thing doesn't have eSATA either.
Data Robotics is doing the incremental upgrade thing like Nintendo with their Gameboys. To me, this model is like the Gameboy Color right before the Gameboy Advance. So close, but the next model should really be on top of things.
that's what I was thinking...why no eSATA?
I have a 4 bay Drobo and have had NOTHING but problems with it ! I imagine the 8 bay will be twice as bad . LOL NOT !
what problems? i bought the 4-bay drobo when it first came out and i've had zero issues with it. granted it can be slow at times, but other than that it hasn't had a single issue.
Agreed. I've got two, one on XP and one on Vista and both have had issues. They're incredibly slow, and they have power management issues--they'll go to sleep and the even rebooting the computer won't bring them back sometimes. You have to unplug the power to the Drobo and then power up again. And of course the initial boot is staggeringly long, probably 5 minutes. Not impressed.
i agree with TJ and FanFoot.
I've got a 4 bay Drobo, and I'm not happy with it.
It's slow, but I can live with that - I wasn't expecting it to be all that performant. But some times it's ridiculous - often it takes so long to respond, applications give up and assume there was a file system error!
Once every week or two, the Drobo just stops responding. I have to physically reboot the device by unplug and replugging it, followed by rebooting the server it's attached to (an old Win2k machine). And even then, the fun isn't done - I then have to physically log into the machine (remoting in via Remote Desktop / Terminal Server isn't enough) so the system can see the Drobo again. A *huge* pain on a what's suppose to be a headless server. And it's a coin toss whether the file shares have to be recreated at this point...
iSCSI!!!!
That is so fricken awesome!
For those on windows check control panel and you'll see MS includes an iSCSI iniator. All you need is a CAT5 cable and a dedicated GIG Nic and you have yourself a interface faster than FW800, and much, much cheaper.
As far as I know this is the first consumer device that features iSCSI.
Seriously! When I saw the iSCSI thing, I got really excited - WHS can use iSCSI, right?
Yeah serously, give the normal drobo an integrated gbit lan port and that thing will sell like warm bread!
Hmmm. 50/50 sarcasm/enthusiasm split in the comments.
I'd like to ask in complete seriousness what one would use this for, until I get some reasonable answers it's being filed in the cool-but-useless-gadget section.
Let's see, it's a storage device with fail safe redundancy and expandability that doesn't require you to understand how to setup a RAID or build a Linux server. So I'm pretty sure one would "in complete seriousness" use it to store data... as in data you don't want to lose... is that a simple enough explanation?
I think the big thing here is the ROBO in the Drobo. Allows mildly tech savy people to do stuff usually only IT nerds understand.
Expand capacity or replace a failed drive? Plug and play.
As far as uses, a file server for a small office that uses big files (cad, video editing etc...), or a media server for a home theater that wants to keep the 'backup' dvd's as complete files, instead of compressed. Ripping hundreds of DVD's (again) after a drive failure is a pita.
You must be joking! Photographers, Digital artist and Videographers all NEED this kind of storage. What about when a father goes to best buy and picks up a entry level DSLR? Canons new rebel has a 15 mega pixel sensor. It also shoots video. If that person isn't stingy with what and how often there are shooting, they could easily get to the point were one of these would start to make sense. Maybe the 2nd gen drobo would be more for them but maybe they have teenagers with alot of music and the pro would start to make more sense. That stuff all needs to be stored somewhere right? It they are smart it does.
Newspapers and magazines... what do they do with all the pictures and video that they take? Throw it away? Nope they keep it. Think about your local newspaper and how many pictures they run each week. Now figure that each of those pictures was part of a one, two, three or maybe four hundred photo series depending on the subject. Depending on the camera thats 2-6GB of data on one shoot. Now think about a operation like the national geographic.
A wedding photographer shoots anywhere from 2000-6000 imgages per wedding. Some wedding photographers shoot with two photographers and shoot two weddings every weekend. They keep all of those photos
What about a production house? A medium sized outfit has to make important "what to keep and what to throw away" decisions all the time. Something like this make those decisions a little easier. Any business has tuns of stuff that needs to be stored and needs to be stored safely.
Its important to remember that this is just an enclosure. When 4TB drives become available, this thing would be able to hold 32TB worth of hard drives. Not everyone needs that but a lot of people do.
Well, we have 2x4TB Drobo2s on our development group Xserve running as time machine drives. Works fantastically. 16 folks all doing application and media development chew through a lot of disk space, and with time machine you get a lot of backups!
You aren't going to back up files onto non-RAID media, as you don't want a single drive failure to cause loss of backups. I don't need a giant external RAID solution for backups as it isn't cost effective, I only use the "big RAID" for database and web/application/file serving where the performance matters.
Thanks for the replies, which were genuinely useful to me. I'm still not 100% convinced, but at least I now see the niche market this thing is aimed at.
Niche market? What do you use your computer for? Email and recipe collecting? Get with the times.
Wow..iSCSI is a huge step up for this device as far as usability goes. I can see a lot of small businesses going this route for VMWare servers.
Watch this Technet Video all about iSCSI:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/How-to-setup-iSCSI-on-Windows-Server-2008-11-mins/
Once again, I think their product costs too much for what it does. Sure, it makes it easy to operate, but what they're selling here is primarily the software that drives this thing. The enclosure is just a medium to secure the intellectual property of "BeyondRaid". This thing is no more a robot than a disk defragger program. You're paying for the privilege of using their software.
It's a clever strategy, to be sure, but I can't see myself paying for this or the 4-bay model because I see behind the curtain. I'm not paying $499-$1299 for software that is nothing more than a dynamic RAID system. Maybe you disagree and *need* it. But I would think that for $1299 you could come up with a NAS and 4TB of storage and money left over for an honest-to-goodness backup system.
Also, the price jump between the 2 models is rick-dick-u-lous. The software is exactly the same, the enclosure has twice as many bays, for nearly TRIPLE the price.
I would love to see them sell this as software only, but then it would probably be pirated on day one.
Yeah, they've gone too far into the territory of other adaptive RAID solutions - for the same price as a DroboPro you could almost get three regular Drobos... or a 4Tb fully-redundant open source NAS device with 12 bays (which is what i did...only mine's 12Tb....)
--neg
I have a 4-bay drobo and I love the little thing. All the issues that I've had with it has been a lot to do with windows 7. I do wish it were faster. 15mbps through usb 2.0 and FW-800 around 22mbps (wish some bursts up to 48mbps).
I really like the comment about the built in droboshare. that would rule.
Right now, I'm looking at a back up to this "back up". not sure what to get. maybe a Qnap 509.
"Dynamic" RAID = slow
Hence, all you people with speed issues.
i just have to say, i've had each version of the drobo and i doubt that i would buy another one.
1st gen was great enough for me to to buy second gen. ... but about two months ago, i had a power failure and when it came back online, i lost EVERYTHING. ... it was as if there was nothing on the drives. the drobo didn't do what i paid it to do. (which was backup my computer.)
even though i love the idea. i cannot trust them more than a simple consumer device. i would definitely not pay more for the same technology that is aimed at businesses.
i went to their forum and found that other people have had similar experiences. it's back to a not beyond raid for me.
am still looking for a better, cheaper, more secure system. hopefully one that can fit in my rack! :)
Any type of raid is easily susceptible to corruption from power failure or spike, I've seen 30 disk arrays for enterprises take a dirt nap from a bad power failure. IF your data is that important to you than you should have a UPS on the device so that it can be properly shutdown in the event of a power failure. While Raid arrays or in this case Sudo raid are a better solution than a single disk they are in no way 100% protected. On a lighter note iSCSI SICK!!! Still think I would take the Qnap 809 over the Drobo as it is setup for iSCSI as well as capable of being a NAS target. Might be more expensive but I'm sure the difference in performance is well worth it.
Unraid
http://www.lime-technology.com/joomla/
Much cheaper
I do remember hearing about all the performance issues and some users with data loss. What really helps sells a product is community feedback, but they closed off their forums from non-owners so all I have to go by now is their sales PR.
Im thinking about building a nas/server. I was thinking 4 of those 1tb greed wd hard drives in two raid 1 partitions.
Sheeeesh - that looks like an April Fools photoshoped product anouncement. Impressive - I just don't understand the lack of network options. I can think of plenty or reasons to have a bunch of storage, but nearly all of them involve at least a small network.
iSCSI FTW! that's sick. All I need now is a need for 16TBs of storage... And a nice chunk of change
The lack of performance numbers concerns me.
$149 for the effing rackmount?