DroboPro RAID array causes reviewer to fall madly in love (video)
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted November 25th 2009 11:12AM
posted November 25th 2009 11:12AM
Data Robotics' RAID solutions have always been a cut above the rest -- and a little more expensive, and better looking, for that matter. As one clearly ecstatic reviewer at PC Perspective will attest, the DroboPro even does you one better, sporting eight bays of storage, extremely effective cooling, and support for FireWire, USB and Gigabit Ethernet connections. Of course, no product is perfect -- and here the lack of eSATA and nearly $1,500 price tag leave something to be desired. Your inner gadget hound (sadist) will surely delight in the insane amount of torture testing this device endured for this appraisal, and you'll be pleased to know that the array came out on top. Hit the read link to get started -- but not before you check out the video after the break.
See more video at our hub!
@aiiee: why don't you buy one and let us know how it goes, bro. the people being neg about it are actual owners.
@(Unverified)
I think you misunderstood my post. I don't know what else to say here.
Why are engadget comments so broken :(
@cornbread that's not unique at all. It's called hot-swap and there's a shit load of em out there.
test. I too think comments are broken. My post is not appearing. It was a reply to cornbread comment on hot-swap drives and I can't find it.
oh wow. I sweah I hit the 'submit' button at least 3 times before my 'broken' comment. I guess that kind of indicates comments may be brokened.
BEWARE drobo crap - it's all garbage. I was a victim of the first gen Drobo 4-drive box, and all I can say is never again. Crap speeds, the thing crashed and lost data even though all drives were physically fine, and their "USB to ethernet" adapter was nothing more than literally a $200 POS USB-to-ethernet adapter - think 1.1MB/s transfer speeds.
Maybe things have improved in their latest products but it's way overpriced for what it does. There's better turnkey stuff out there for half the price, and you can roll your own solution for 1/10th the price
Three words:
Proprietary RAID Algorithm.
Drobo drives can only be read by drobos, if the thing breaks, you're stuffed.
Get a different box that uses RAID 1.. it's the easiest way to recover from the controller dying.
And yeah, they do die, check the drobo forums for all sorts of complaints.
I was a beta tester and am a current owner of a Gen 1 Drobo. I would definitely NOT recommend this thing based on my experience with the 4 Drive Gen 1 Drobo.
For simplicity, it is awesome. Entry level data protection without even having to think about it. However, as others have commented, the performance tends to be significantly lower than you would expect for that kind of money. That and the build quality of the G1 Drobo is questionable. Mine makes quite a bit of noise because when the fan spins, the aluminum chassis rattles. That, and if I left my computer on for days it would just randomly drop the connection between the Drobo and my PC.
For $1500 you could almost build a tower with tons of room for drives and run a TRUE enterprise-class iSCSI storage system with HP/Lefthand P4000 VSA software. Included in the cost is the ability to replicate data to another P4000 VSA in real-time, among other things.
@RaZ0r Sh4Rp Just curious - I'd LOVE to use the Lefthand software - but I'm seeing it costing over $4K. http://www.macmall.com/p/5485092?dpno=7811952&source=mwbfroogle
I'm seeing free trials - but the software is PRICY!
Aaron
@aaronbooker
take a look at openfiler, thats a open source storage server solution capable of iscsi among many other things, and its free!
also has a nice webadmin interface, so you dont need to be a linux nerd ;)
looked like trash when they played it on the show. he like leaned forward and it did tricks
All Drobo is, is good marketing. They are expensive, buggy and therefor likely to fail while using propretary tech so when it dies you cant get onto your data without another drobo, which might not even take it if its different firmware.
People defending the drobo say things like "but hey, its easy to use, its made for us, not for you nerds"...Yeah, but modern NAS Systems arent exactly hard to use, more feature rich, and most important of all faster!
The drobo (even v2) is horribly slow, you get a max of 50MB/s over firewire and around 10-20mb/s with the DroboShare Addon on Gigabit Lan, many much cheaper NAS can reach those speeds.
The only real advantage is that you can mix up different drives, which in times where you get 1.5TB for under 100 EUR (dont know US prices) isnt really worth much.
So yeah, they know how to marketing their product, using all the social channels like twitter, video reviewers like geekbrief rooting for it and building up hype, but theres not really much more to it than hype.
I read dozens of comments from people returning theirs because they had problems of drobo reporting failing drives which were actually ok, losing data etc etc
@kayoone you can mix different drives on other NAS products too. And this isn't even a NAS
Man, people LOVE to talk *** about Drobo. There's a great audience out there for Drobo.
In terms of all the comparisons there's better and much worse. I'm NEVER a fan of rebuilding RAID arrays, I can say at least that much. Barring a Drobo hardware failure, I find Drobo a seriously nice piece of hardware.
You want to rebuild an array (and find a replacement, exact model drive you're using) or do you want to just get a new Drobo, pop your drives in and go?