Drobo 4-bay storage robot now $100 less for dad, mankind

It's no secret that we're smitten with Drobo's storage "robots." But they're expensive, especially compared to direct-attached or NAS storage devices built on a traditional RAID architecture. But if price is holding you back then you'll be happy to hear that for a limited time, you can take 20% off the list price of the 4-bay array. If you're lucky, you already have a handful of loose drives to plug-in else why not stuff it to capacity for 8TB of disk this Father's Day? Granted, still no built-in Ethernet without the optional DroboShare, but at least you've got an extra paper hundie to dry your tears.

[Kraken @ Jun 9th 2009 6:18AM]

Why would I give my dad a Drobo? He doesn't know anything about technology.

[OneLove @ Jun 9th 2009 9:52AM]

tell him he can hide his pron in there.

[stu @ Jun 9th 2009 6:29AM]

Maths = Fail! $100 off of a $500 box is 20% ;)

[Andrew Fujimura @ Jun 9th 2009 6:26AM]

Put all of your dads stuff on a drobo!

[AMiSH PiRATE @ Jun 9th 2009 3:56PM]

the cute, marketable "robot" that loves to fail? why doesn't this guy have a saturday morning cartoon, yet!

[EGOvoruhk @ Jun 9th 2009 6:36AM]

I still think it costs too much. I was looking at them, but opted to build a PC instead. Now I've got a server with 12 HDDs. The price I saved in Drobos paid for half of the drives!

[mendydo @ Jun 9th 2009 12:13PM]

Most people don't want to deal with putting together their own solution. Also, what happens when one of your drives fails? Does your custom built PC automatically take care of the problem or will you need to spend a bunch of your time fixing it?

[EGOvoruhk @ Jun 9th 2009 3:27PM]

All my drives are redundant, so yes. I just RMA it back to Seagate, throw it back in, and get my data back on it. It's not like drives can't fail in a Drobo

[David Kimmerly @ Jun 9th 2009 1:40PM]

My buddy has a drobo, I hear they are charging a fee for performing updates to the firmware....WTF is with that?

Can anyone confirm?

[Asher69 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:20PM]

the fee is for a maintenance contract. while under contract, updates are free. the fee is minimal, though, and I'd personally rather have the protection of the contract than not.

[mfuccio @ Jun 9th 2009 12:22PM]

David, firmware upgrades are free. There is a charge for extending hardware support beyond its base period. Please ask your friend to call or email Data Robotics support is s/he has questions.

[Fanfoot @ Jun 9th 2009 12:34PM]

Not my experience. Once I went out of contract, the firmware updates stopped. Could be I misread the mumbo jumbo they threw in front of me, but I'm sure that was on purpose on their part.

[Bad Beaver @ Jun 9th 2009 6:43AM]

Wait, this doesn't come _without_ any drives installed? $400?

[Prokanda @ Jun 9th 2009 7:05AM]

Apparently the beaver is very bad when it comes to constructing a sentence.

[Apreche @ Jun 9th 2009 6:56AM]

As long as the droboshare is an extra add-on, I will never buy a drobo. If the ethernet was built-in at no extra cost, I would buy it in a second. Until then, the Acer EasyStore is looking about a zillion times better. It has four drive bays, ethernet, and it comes with Windows Home Server for the same price of $400.

[Noel @ Jun 9th 2009 7:08AM]

I bought 2 drobos and a droboshare. Performance from the thing was terrible.
I was using it as a media server. It couldn't manage more than one video
playing at the same time.

I put the lot up on eBay and bought a Synology DS508 and a pile of 2TB HDs.

[ray k @ Jun 9th 2009 8:43AM]

+1 for the Synology

sad to hear about the drobo performance, I was under the impression they were supposed to be quite good :(

[Michael Scrip @ Jun 9th 2009 2:22PM]

>> "I was under the impression they were supposed to be quite good :( "

I think they are still good for a backup solution and because you don't have to think about it. It's easy to use and easy to swap out a failing drive.

It just doesn't have built-in networking and isn't as fast as other solutions (which matters to some people)

[Fernando @ Jun 9th 2009 7:27AM]

Amazon has it for cheaper. I think $346 plus a $75 MIR!!!

[Fernando @ Jun 9th 2009 7:28AM]

NVM they put the price back up. Last week they had it for $346 plus a $75 MIR.

[Calagan @ Jun 9th 2009 8:22AM]

WD World Edition 1TB: 200$ 1TB HDD included.

That's more than enough for most dads and with a simple hack, you can easily customize it to suit your needs (DLNA server, print server, IRC bot, Bit torrent client, etc...)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136346

[Jules Lauve @ Jun 9th 2009 9:13AM]

The concept is (1) all about butt-loads of relatively fail-safe configurable archival RAID storage, (2) self-healing diagnostics so that pilot lights warn the user when a drive fails so the user can hot-swap in a fresh drive without losing data, (3) notification that the RAID is getting full so that the user can hot-swap in one or more large drives, (4) not intended for real-time heavy-lifting production work like video or music editing, and (5) the device that delivers all of that indeed comes unpopulated so that the user can pop-in any size drives they so desire or can afford.

I don't have one though, so I may have it all wrong.

[Asher69 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:24PM]

Nope, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I have two and wouldn't trade 'em in for nothing. Ever as always, what works best for you depends entirely on what you're doing in your particular setup. For me, storing a gigantic iTunes archive for use with my AppleTV, the Drobo is the preferred answer. Your mileage may vary. That doesn't make it a bad machine... just perhaps ill-suited to what you want to do.

[TJ @ Jun 9th 2009 9:21AM]

I'm a commercial photographer and this thing has caused me nothing but problems. Some have had luck with it, but as my livelihood depends on keeping my photo files safe, this thing scares the shit out of me ! I'm literally packing it up this morning to sell on ebay.

[D. Dub @ Jun 9th 2009 9:46AM]

Great only a couple more hundred to go before someone can afford one of these things!

[MimeisCrime @ Jun 9th 2009 9:59AM]

I have a 4 bay Drobo and have really enjoyed it. Requires no thinking on my part and has worked flawlessly. I am just upgrading to the 8 bay, wiring to my network.

I can see why some of you out there would want to assemble your own box from parts, but to me it's just about a no-brainer storage device.

[dan2600 @ Jun 9th 2009 11:38AM]

no eSATA? no thank you.

why does everyone still ride on this stupid firewire800 BS? just because apple makes it?

throughput on eSATA = 3Gb/s
Throughput on Firewire800 = 800Mb/s

seriously? like...am I missing something here? No firewire devices support S1600 and S3200 yet right? Are firewire800 ports going to support S3200? or are you going to have to buy a new mac (since you can't get an expresscard anymore...haha)

[Fanfoot @ Jun 9th 2009 12:39PM]

I've got two and don't really recommend them. I'd go with WHS. The performance is very slow, the drives don't handle low power modes properly, and I've had the drive image just disappear and require reformatting. I wouldn't use it for anything other than a backup system.

[David Kimmerly @ Jun 9th 2009 1:40PM]

I dont think anyone should use something that loses drive images and has poor performance for backup...

Stick with a traditional open backup solution guys...

The deal is, storage is very very cheap now, and getting cheaper by the month. The average user will not need 1TB of storage for music and whatever they will have. And prosumers are willing to shell out a few extra bucks for the latest drives. 1.5 or 2TB drives are rather cheap, and an array of 4x 2TB will most likely suit 99% of the prosumers out there.

[BrownBear @ Jun 9th 2009 5:19PM]

Acer Easystore H340...enough said.

[marc @ Jun 9th 2009 8:44PM]

STAY AWAY FROM DROBO THEY ARE NOT RELIABLE.

Except they don't work with OS X 10.5.7. First they blamed it on the Seagate drives I had. I replaced them then they said, Oh we were wrong it's Apples fault not Seagates and sent me a link to a buffalo thread on a discontinued drive that does not work with OS 10.5.7.

[michael @ Jun 11th 2009 7:44AM]

too bad the drobo sucks. I have one. . . it killed a 1gb drive, always goes offline and if it's full, it locks up the machine it's connected to or just doesn't report as a drive at all. Scrapping the Drobo, built a Windows Home Server. . . MUUUUCH Better. . . though it does need more HD space for fault tolerance. But for $130 / 1.5tb. . . who worries about that.

[Bill @ Jun 24th 2009 2:10PM]

Don't buy anyone this thing. Any price is expensive. They should be paying people to beta test these things. Terrible. I lost 2 years of work on one. If you get one you need to back it up. So whats the point? COMPLETE POS.