Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#1

Post by jwr » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 9:09 AM UTC

Here's why you should not buy a Drobo
jan.rychter.com

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#2

Post by hyuen » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 9:43 AM UTC

I had a similar experience with an AirNas, which is basically an enclosure for a hard drive that exports a samba share. Performancewise, disappointing, all I could transfer was around 2Mb/s, convenience, maybe, streaming mp3's is fine, but there is no way you can stream movies from it. Noise wise, I think I wasn't as unfortunate as the author of the post, but you have to keep in mind that these systems are more suited for data centers, maybe the Drobo is just a poor implementation of a NAS box. If I were to get a NAS, I would probably look for something that does block storage, such as iSCSI or FCoE, not sure if there are home appliances for that, but with that you can ignore annoyances like unsupported character sets for filenames and similar stuff.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#3

Post by jmah » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 9:53 AM UTC

I've had my Thecus N5200 running solid for around 3 years now. When I first saw the Drobo demo videos I feared I'd made the wrong purchase, but having the Thecus as an open platform (Linux installed on a CF card; you can SSH and run whatever) has proved a win. Support lately has gone by the wayside (they had a new beta firmware a few months ago that was later pulled), but the community is strong.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#4

Post by josh33 » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 9:53 AM UTC

I was considering buying one of these to back up media files. Thanks for saving me cache and a headache!

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#5

Post by tomstuart » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 9:59 AM UTC

Stories like this are why I didn't buy a Drobo. Instead I got a ReadyNAS NVX and have been incredibly satisfied with it. It's been rock solid so far and hasn't given me any hassle at all.

(Incidentally, Netgear UK are doing a "free 2 x 500GB drives" promotion until the end of June: http://www.netgear.co.uk/freedrives_nvx.php)

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#6

Post by arethuza » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:03 AM UTC

hyuen wrote: post #2

I had a similar experience with an AirNas, which is basically an enclosure for a hard drive that exports a samba share. Performancewise, disappointing, all I could transfer was around 2Mb/s, convenience, maybe, streaming mp3's is fine, but there is no way you can stream movies from it. Noise wise, I think I wasn't as unfortunate as the author of the post, but you have to keep in mind that these systems are more suite…

If you have a spare PC to turn into a SAN-lite, OpenFiler supports iSCSI http://www.openfiler.com/

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#7

Post by barrkel » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:09 AM UTC

I'm running Nexenta / Solaris zfs with samba, but it supports accented characters just fine. Perhaps this is a limitation of Mac smb support. zfs also doesn't have a repairing fsck as far as I know, but I have more faith in its monitoring and scrubbing features. It also bulk reads and writes at about 100mbytes a second, approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#8

Post by phsr » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:15 AM UTC

To counter this, I have a friend who uses two Drobos with his Mac Mini and loves it. I don't think he's had a single issue. I'll see if I can get him on here to comment

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#9

Post by silencio » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:15 AM UTC

I'm not sure on how to reply, because experiences with a Drobo seem to be extremely hit or miss and it is all very anecdotal.

My drobo with all WD green drives is as silent as my Mac minis and MBP are, while a friend of mine has one also with similar drives that's so loud it's very difficult to sleep in the same room with it (and yes, it rivals his Mac Pro in terms of noise).

I've not had a single problem with my drobo since I got it almost two years ago, while others keep having them fail repeatedly and replaced repeatedly until they give up and find something else.

I've also come across people that think their drobo is great and infallible, and then go and realize they have no backup for the file they just deleted off their drobo. And come across people like me that back up their drobos because a drobo is purely redundant, which doesn't cover cases like accidentally deleting files off it and losing the drobo to fire/flood/theft and more, only situations like a dead hard drive or two.

I love my drobo to pieces and recommend it to anyone that wants a solution they don't have to manage...with the caveat that it's their data and therefore their responsibility to take care of it, and a drobo can only be one part of the solution. data robotics customer support definitely has a bad reputation that is probably warranted to an extent, but not many NAS manufacturers, nor you if you roll your own solution, can do much when things go very, very wrong with your device for whatever reason.

(Note that I use my drobo only as direct storage. The drobo NAS solutions always seemed a bit hacky to me...)

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#10

Post by jwr » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:34 AM UTC

Thanks to everyone for advice on what other devices work. That's exactly what I was hoping for — I'm tired of the Drobo and I can't trust it with my data.