Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

I mean, why isn't a company rep here to respond?

That's a catch 22 that can be minimized or even avoided altogether. My main drobo backup is automatically versioned and backed up every 12 hours (to a single external drive, since I don't need to back up everything on my drobo). I've got older backups dating from like a week (work-related) to half a year or more old (for the important docs that don't change that I should keep around regardless...like old accounting/tax stuff) stashed around my home, online, and in a safe deposit box at my bank. And of course occasionally I test whether or not my backup is actually backing up the things I want and that I can successfully restore from it.

If I back up bad data, I have older but good data to recover from. If my drobo catastrophically fails, at the worst I've lost data that is probably not going to be difficult to replicate/replace because of how new it is. I don't have to start ripping my hair out at the idea of having lost an incredible amount of data ranging from irreplaceable photos of my life to work and more.

In the ideal case, raid should increase reliability, and they do, only for one definition of reliability. But freak accidents and poor design happen, and it's silly to rely only on a raid for reliability.

I've owned a 2nd-gen Drobo and now a DroboPro. My experience with it is very mixed. My opinion is that it's a good solution for someone who can't be bothered with mdadm anymore and needs a lot of storage, with some important caveats.

When it works, it's fantastic. When things start to go wrong, there's nothing you can do about it except experiment with switching drives or email support and hope they can diagnose it.

I loaded my first Drobo with Seagate 1.5tb drives. It constantly dropped drives out of the array and was very slow (I then upgraded to a DroboPro as I had outgrown the 4 drive version, which was painless. It was still slow, but not as much. The log is now ENCRYPTED(!!!) so there is absolutely nothing you can see for yourself other than whether a drive is "bad" or "good". If you suspect that one of the drives might be failing, you have to email your encrypted log to Drobo and wait for them to respond. Which is pretty frustrating when you're in another timezone and each exchange takes 24 hours.

Somewhere among switching around drives and upgrading firmware it became faster, and now to me seems acceptably fast. I think I must have just had a bad drive or three, but of course without access to any logs it's a tedious and expensive process of trial and error to figure out.

All was well, and then just shy of a year it stopped booting. I bought it in one country and then moved, so had to ship it back to the original distributor, which is annoying and expensive but understandable, but of course you can only access the drives with another Drobo, and means I'll be without access to my stuff for about a month (except for backups). I wasn't too impressed about what is marketed as a professional product designed to run 24/7 failing after less than a year of light use.

Pros:

* Very easy to use. Auto-expansion is fantastic and works as advertised. You literally only have to shove a new drive in the slot and wait a few minutes. * Don't have to rebuild when you add capacity * Don't lose all your data if you disconnect 2 drives at once, put them back in a different order, or any of the myriad interesting ways you can accidentally kill your entire array with RAID.

Cons:

* Somewhat pricey. But you get what you pay for - at least I did until it died. * Encrypting the log files is outrageous. This is probably the worst thing about it. * No transparency about what it's doing. It's quite literally a black box. * iSCSI on Mac doesn't reliably reconnect if you unmount it. I usually have to restart the device and/or my PC. * No way of accessing data (other than another Drobo) if the device fails. * Not particularly fast. Much slower than a bare drive. 40MB/sec if I'm lucky. No idea how they got VMware certification; trying to boot from it would be agonizing.

Other thoughts:

* Others have said it sounds like a jet engine. It's not quiet, but it's by no means loud. It's just two 80mm fans spinning at maybe 1200rpm or less. Drives always seem cool to the touch. You probably couldn't sleep with one next to your head but in the next room, no problem. * It takes days to rebuild 8TB when you switch out a bare drive. So does normal RAID though.

Why should they be? They have an official support channel--they aren't obligated to have some poor "evangelist" follow up on every reference to their product on the internet.

Some companies might do this, and you might be used to getting a semi-canned response on Twitter every time you mention a company's name, but that doesn't translate into any kind of obligation on their part.

Generally, hardware RAID is good and software RAID is decent. Mobo-integrated and "software hardware RAID" suck.