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Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

jan.rychter.com

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

#51

Post by cgomez »

archgrove wrote: post #14

I've had my Drobo 18 months without a hiccup - It's not silent, but it's not noisy either. I've never had to contact customer support, so I can't really comment on that. I am marginally concerned by the fact that its death would mean I must have another Drobo to read the data, but this really isn't any different from most other hardware RAID controllers/NAS boxes, where the death of the card almost always means purch…

Ditto. I've been running a DroboPro with eight 1.5TB WD drives and the device has been running fine connected via iSCSI to a Mac mini and shared across the network via NFS. It's not loud, not silent but not loud. Read/write speeds are perfectly satisfactory, although not what I'd get with a software RAID or higher end setup (I get about 25-45MB/s read/writes, but it sounds like I have a different model than he does).

It is a bit unsettling that Drobo advertises these are completely fool-proof in their marketing materials but support, rightfully I may add, recommends routine backups. In the end, it's a JBOD RAID in a pretty enclosure with approachable software. For me, that works.

All I wanted out of my DroboPro was a way to combine eight drives and have an expandable dual-disk redundancy array. It's working like a champ for that.

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

#52

Post by latch »

altano wrote: post #29
latch wrote: post #27

I've been using unraid for a while now and am really happy - especially with its flexibility. Once you get to the Drobo/WHS point of your NAS life, HDD bays and xfer speeds quickly become the biggest issue. (4x2TB - redundancy) can quickly become not enough..and chances are that you'll always be ahead of where HDD storage is.

My WHS has 4 HDs and its transfer speed is still network bound (100 Mbps). Much faster than the Drobo it replaced. My biggest gripes with the drobo were loudness (no really, it sounds like a jet engine), inability to recover data directly off the HD if the drobo dies, horrible transfer speeds, and horrible support. It's one pro was simplicity.

I had a WHS, and the only complaint I have about it is that redundancy is accomplished via duplication. Depending on how much data you have, that can greatly increase your total cost of ownership. To achieve 10TB of redundant storage on WHS, you need 10x2TB disks. To accomplish that with unraid you need 6x2TB.

The downside is that unraid will only protected you against a single disk failure, whereas WHS might protect you against multiple disk failures - depending on which disks go.

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

#53

Post by ajtaylor »

DannoHung wrote: post #41
illumin8 wrote: post #38

I think his problems with the Drobo are mainly the way he's using it. I've had a Drobo for a couple years now and have not had problems with it, but I have noticed a few strange things: 1. Regarding the fan noise - I used to keep my Drobo in a warm house with no air conditioning. Temperatures in my office would regularly reach 78-80 degrees, and anything in the high 70s would cause my Drobo fan to go into "vacuum cle…

Pretty sure that MacFUSE has NTFS support. Or, no, wait... didn't Apple add NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard? Yeah, they did. It requires editing fstab though.

No, no, no! Do not do that! Googling will show you that this generally results in corrupted, unrecoverable drives. Use this: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ It's not the fastest driver (you can pay a small fee for a more performant one), but it hasn't caused me any troubles.

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

#55

Post by napierzaza »

imajes wrote: post #31
archgrove wrote: post #14

I've had my Drobo 18 months without a hiccup - It's not silent, but it's not noisy either. I've never had to contact customer support, so I can't really comment on that. I am marginally concerned by the fact that its death would mean I must have another Drobo to read the data, but this really isn't any different from most other hardware RAID controllers/NAS boxes, where the death of the card almost always means purch…

I'd echo this experience; I have a drobo fs with the new wd caviar greens. It works like a treat and is very quiet. I'm next looking into a tape backup solution for longer term storage, but for now- the drobo is an excellent way to work with. Tip: don't buy the old drobo, get the new one. Don't get the drobo share, use an airport extreme or similar disk-sharing network device.

So buy two things? The fact is that you can find something with a gigabit ethernet port built into the unit. Not a tricky dongle that doesn't offer the real thing, not a sketchy router-based SMB share. It's a bad idea to have two devices when you can have one. Especially if you can get a one-device solution that will transfer files faster over your network.

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

#56

Post by jwr »

I've read most of the comments here and I think people are missing the point. Forget the noise, that's just an inconvenience. More importantly:

The "reliable" data storage device I bought corrupted and lost my data once, and right now is showing the symptoms of corrupting the filesystem again.

I doesn't get any simpler and more objective than that.

And to those people whose Drobos have been working fine so far: I wish you the best of luck and I hope you won't hit the same problems I did. But I would be worried, beause if I'm hitting them, it means they are there, and eventually you might as well.

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

#58

Post by jwr »

imajes wrote: post #31
archgrove wrote: post #14

I've had my Drobo 18 months without a hiccup - It's not silent, but it's not noisy either. I've never had to contact customer support, so I can't really comment on that. I am marginally concerned by the fact that its death would mean I must have another Drobo to read the data, but this really isn't any different from most other hardware RAID controllers/NAS boxes, where the death of the card almost always means purch…

I'd echo this experience; I have a drobo fs with the new wd caviar greens. It works like a treat and is very quiet. I'm next looking into a tape backup solution for longer term storage, but for now- the drobo is an excellent way to work with. Tip: don't buy the old drobo, get the new one. Don't get the drobo share, use an airport extreme or similar disk-sharing network device.

Yes, I think your setup might work much better. The DroboFS is supposedly an improved version. And the DroboShare simply isn't a reliable device at all.

Still, after seeing the corruption and after trying their support, I don't think I'll want to buy any more Drobo products ever again.

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

#59

Post by oomkiller »

cynicalkane wrote: post #45
barrkel wrote: post #7

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.

ZFS doesn't have a repairing fsck because it doesn't need one. The on-disk format uses a transactional design such that its always consistent, even if it fails in the middle of a write. AFIAK the only way to damage a zpool is if some snafu (one more serious than a mere write failure) wiped out a bunch of metadata together with the backup metadata all at the same time, but such an event would do very serious damage to…

And now, you can even fix this with zpool import -F. It will find the last consistent transaction in the array and roll back to it. Saved my buddy's ass a few weeks ago when he went to replace a drive and accidentally pulled out 2 SATA connectors at once (on a raidz1).

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

#60

Post by imajes »

napierzaza wrote: post #55
imajes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd echo this experience; I have a drobo fs with the new wd caviar greens. It works like a treat and is very quiet. I'm next looking into a tape backup solution for longer term storage, but for now- the drobo is an excellent way to work with. Tip: don't buy the old drobo, get the new one. Don't get the drobo share, use an airport extreme or similar disk-sharing network device.

So buy two things? The fact is that you can find something with a gigabit ethernet port built into the unit. Not a tricky dongle that doesn't offer the real thing, not a sketchy router-based SMB share. It's a bad idea to have two devices when you can have one. Especially if you can get a one-device solution that will transfer files faster over your network.

Actually, i disagree it's a bad idea to have two devices; I trust that the apple extreme will work fantastically to share a disk for me; they get the OS and the fs, so it's pretty straightforward.

A one device solution? Well, that'd be a router, switch, hard disk... (can you say, computer?)

sometimes we want stuff that's single purpose, done well, easy on the power/heat/etc. I now have an appletv on a turn-off power strip, enabling me to 'turn on' the tv system and have something running easily, rather than having to get my laptop out, an external disk, try and make it all work. Ugh. madness.

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