Data Robotics goes large with 8-bay DroboPro
By Darren Murph 
posted April 7th 2009 8:30AM
posted April 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.
Can someone tell me why is this thing so expensive? Other than, because they can, answer.
It's suppose to be a "business" device and like all prosumer oriented devices, they are over priced.
Photographers will use this, as their digital files often exceed 10TB.
I'm a photographer and have the latest 4 bay Drobo and will soon be switching to another drive because I really don't trust the Drobo. I've had too many problems with it and can't afford to lose my images .
Not network accessible = USELESS!!
I'd rather go with a QNAP TS-809 Pro.
Thanks, but I am not spending that kind of money on some proprietary faux-RAID solution that I have no idea how it works, or how secure it is. I'll get a more generic box and use ZFS and I'll have more reliable, faster, and just as easily managed storage pool.
Just as soon as OS X in the non-server version supports it. Until then, the 3.5 TB inside my Mac Pro and the external backup will have to do.
Drobo+Pogoplug=NAS
16TB of redundant pr0n. *Mmmm*
i have the original DROBO and love it. it works. i have no complaints. the price including my hard drives was twice as much as NAS, but this was too easy for me to set up. plus i can use different sized hard drives. as far as networking i have that set up. i don't think my needs are as great as most, so i'm totally happy with it. if you know how to set up NAS then i don't think you would care about this since you went through the trouble of learning NAS. the setup for the DROBO is painless.
For the same price you could get an UnRaid server with 15 DRIVE BAYS and FULL NAS support.
Or build your own UnRaid for even less for the DIY'er.
If they had priced it similar to two 4-bay units + DroboShare and included out of the box full flegged NAS support I would buy it today.
I'm been watching Drobo since the start. They're either too expensive or don't include what I need at the right price point compared to the competition.
I just don't understand Drobo. It's like they keep on deciding to miss the mark, again, and again, and again. They say their main intention is to make a DAS unit. Who wants a DAS, with a possible 16TB of data storage to be used over USB or firewire? Even with iSCSI, you are still nowhere NEAR eSATA. Give us a frickin' eSATA port finally. And make the built in NIC useful. Let us use this as a NAS if we want. Ponying up 1200 for an empty box, and it still can't act as a NAS?
Not to mention that there is still the issue if this thing fails, guess what? You're screwed. Due to the proprietary RAID solution, you can't get your data off the drives. Only buying another drobo will help you. I'm still pissed at Data Robotics for closing down the forums to only drobo users. No one that doesn't have one can do research with current owners to see what problems exist, and decide if we want to buy this.
If you truly need this much storage, you are a pro, and more than likely are technically savvy anyways. Why spend 1200, when you can use a leftover box, load up freenas, and set up a RAID5 array, and be done with it. Can you expand capacity, unfortunately not currently. But considering the cost difference, how much is this worth it to you? My current backup solution is my freenas box, with a 640Gb RAID5 array, that I backup to an external 640Gb drive. This is kept at my work, so I have a true backup solution. When I run out of capacity,all I have to do is buy a drive that is bigger than my current 640Gb, say 1Tb. Backup everything to that new drive, take that 640 gigger, buy 2 more, and create a 3 640Gb drive RAID5 array.
Not to difficult to do this at all. Freenas is VERY user friendly, and has a great manual to show how to do this. Best of all, all I'm paying for is drives at this point, and I get a full featured NAS, that does pretty much everything. Its hard to justify the value of a drobo, when compared to my current solution.
They need to drop the price, give us eSATA, and a built in NAS, and then they could have a good product.
Drobo is not for nerds, it's for the rest of the world.
Nerds are more than happy to configure FreeNas on an old intel 386 PC, then spend months bragging about how cheap and awesome it is on the internet.
The rest of us have no clue how to do that, nor do we want to learn, nor pay a nerd to do it for us. We just want to 'not lose our shit when the hard drive starts going clickity-clickity.'
That's the appeal of Drobo.
no offense, but 640GB RAID 5?
You're better off w/ 7200.11 1.5TB mirrored, they're no doubt faster than your 320GB's striped in your RAID 5 array. Amazing that you are complaining about speed when you are using 3 drives to get the speed and efficiency of 2 modern drives. You should pony-up for new drives and quit whining about the drobo. I think it is pretty obvious that since you are using FreeNAS, you aren't running SCSI 320.
There's a yearly charge for firmware/software updates isn't there?
And only 1-year warranty on the 4-bay version, is this the same?
No NAS?
And it costs way too much.
And, because it's a proprietary format, if your Drobo fails out of warranty, you have no way of reading your data...without buying another Drobo.
Hmmm...nice idea, but too many negatives.
Never buying another drobo product again, after getting burned by their first gen drobo. Lousy 15Mbps I/O rate, and if you added their expensive "ethernet module" all it did was convert the USB from the drobo module to ethernet, so it was still being bottlenecked by USB - lame. drobo USB Ethernet module.
the boxes are overpriced and I don't see how they're still in business. I couldn't even get $100 on ebay for my secondhand drobo + ethernet module.
DITTO!!!!!!!
I want a DroboPro! Man, 100MB/sec reads and writes sound hot! I have three Drobos and love them.
very very nice, but who the hell can afford it
Oh man! I've got a Media Center computer that is just wet with anticipation for this thing. I'm kinda happy that it does USB 2.0 since Media Center still doesn't play nice with network storage.
And 16TB? I would care less if anyone in the house deletes a show when they're done watching it.
quote:Joseph @ Apr 7th 2009 1:11PM
no offense, but 640GB RAID 5?
You're better off w/ 7200.11 1.5TB mirrored, they're no doubt faster than your 320GB's striped in your RAID 5 array. Amazing that you are complaining about speed when you are using 3 drives to get the speed and efficiency of 2 modern drives. You should pony-up for new drives and quit whining about the drobo. I think it is pretty obvious that since you are using FreeNAS, you aren't running SCSI 320.
Quote"
That's all I need. I have nowhere NEAR 1.5TB of data. I'm sitting around 480Gb or so right now. When I assembled my freenas box almost a year ago, the cost difference between buying another 320Gb drive to my existing 320 and a 640Gb for backup + enclosure, plue a promise SATA2 4 port controller was still cheaper that 1 1TB drive.
I don't care if 2 newer drives are faster than my 3 drive RAID5 array. That is not my biggest concern. It's a storage array. It houses my music collection, pics. and a few movies. It is more than ample to stream anything I have to any computer I have. It didn't have to be very fast for that. And really, why would I even need to run SCSI320 for a storage box? Its not like I'm running an Oracle DB on this thing, and I need the I/O. Its a dumping ground, same as the drobo. The drobo is not meant to be an active disk array. Its always been a place to store large amounts of data and nothing more.
Also, I wouldn't want to rely on a mirror to safe guard my data. Since all it does it copy data from another, its WAY to easy to copy over any bit errors from one drive to another. RAID5 gives you some error correcting in there to help prevent against this.
My complaint with the speed of the drobo however, is in its pricetag. For what it costs, it should be able to outperform an old POS box I put together for a fraction of the cost, but it doesn't. For what it costs, it should be able to be able to handle NAS duties, or DNLA duties, or a myriad of other features that almost all competing devices feature, but it doesn't.
I'm not saying the Drobo is not a compelling product, as it is. But their price point is too high for what you are getting, for a solution that may or may not store your data well. There is a reason the drobo forums were cut off from public access.. You don't want potential customers reading about multiple users having data loss issues, speed issues, OS incompatibilities, stuttering issues, overheating issues, not going into standby issues, and plenty of others that I read about when the forums were public.
If the regular drobo was half the price, then it'd be a good buy. If this drobo pro was around the $700 mark, then it'd be a better sale. for that much money, you pay ALOT for the convenience it offers, weighed against the many shortcomings of the hardware. And not to mention that this is still NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION. You are still going to need to have a duplicate of everything on the drobo if you want to have it truly protected. This was another factor for me to not go the drobo route. Are you really going to fork out the money for two of these things to have a real backup of your data? If so, man I wish I had your job.
The fact that it's an opaque, proprietary scheme to make this work doesn't give me any warm fuzzy feelings. This adds on to my horrible experience with the 2nd gen Drobo.
For that Drobo I was able to regularly get it to reboot in well less than 12 hours or torture. You may say: why are you torturing it? Because the access pattern in remarkably similar to how I was accessing the drive with Adobe Lightroom. When it reboots with Lightroom I LOSE pictures. That's the opposite of what I want in terms of making my data safe.
After dealing with an unresponsive tech support for a month (basically stall tactics I'm guessing) to slowly replace things bit by bit, it still didn't work. Virtually every permutation was tried. It still wasn't reliable.
Things tried to fix the problem:
* Reformat from HFS+ to NTFS
* Attached it to another computer
* Tried a different USB cable
* Tried using Firewire interface
* Replaced power supply
* Replaced the Drobo itself
Save your money on something that can be fixed if it breaks. Drobo locks you in to using only what their tech support can deliver.
My dad used an original Drobo for Time Machine backups until he sold that one to a client and upgraded to a Drobo V2. What's good about it for him is 1. the redundancy as he's had a lot of drives die on him and 2. the easy expandability. When he got his new iMac, it had a 2x bigger HDD, so he went to CDW and bought a bigger SATA drive and simply plopped it in the Drobo and was off.
I on the other hand would like to see a professional Drobo for video editing. I have 5 separate enclosures and would love to have a device that I could just plop new drives into when I need more space.
-Brian