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Author Topic: Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!  (Read 16294 times)

nemophoto

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« on: November 02, 2009, 02:23:58 pm »

I bought a Drobo back in August 2008. Like many, I bought it because, though it was very expensive, I thought I was buying bullet-proof protection for various files used over our network. (My wife is a graphic designer and we work on multiple projects together where I do the photography and pre-press and she works on the layout, etc.) Back in June, I was trying to sync files I have on another NAS drive, a SimpleTech, and the Drobo suffered a horrible crash when it took itself (and the Droboshare) offline in the middle of large-scale copying. With help from tech support, I eventually recovered everything. Fast forward to August. I was working on images in Lightroom, saving them to the Drobo, and doing additional work in Photoshop, resaving, and saving CMYK versions. To my horror, I discovered that a number of the files were corrupt and would not open (something that NEVER happened on the Simpletech drive over the past three years). I ended up having to reconvert some files, and saved everything on my Simpletech. Data Robotics never really solved the problem.

Then, over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on another shoot and doing pre-press on 140+ images. The same corruption happened to the TIFF files. I started working on the Simpletech, and again, no problems. Now Data Robotics is saying, so sorry, warranty expired. You can renew for $130, even though this problem is an extension to what has been occurring over the past few months.

My advise: DO NOT BUY A DROBO! THEY DO NOT STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCT. Instead, buy a Synology DS209+. Much faster, much cheaper, though it's "only" a two drive unit. Now I'm out $800 for the Drobo Gen2 and Droboshare. Anyone want to buy a Drobo REALLY cheap?

Nemo
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collum

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2009, 02:46:32 pm »

have to agree.... mine would require a full rebuild every couple weeks after the disk became unreadable. rebuild would take 72+ hours.  happened even after swapping out all drives. customer support was of no help. It's now an empty brick sitting on a shelf.. i could never bring myself to sell it used.
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nemophoto

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #2 on: November 02, 2009, 03:09:18 pm »

Glad I'm not the only one, though it's a pity. It worked relatively well as an external Firewire 800 drive, but a true disaster as a network drive -- and SLOW. My Simpletech isn't any speedster, but I haven't had the corruption either. I think I'm placing an order for a Synology drive tonight. Then I'll just do a disk copy from the Drobo as an external drive. Good thing I didn't replace the Simpletech, which was my original plan.
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feppe

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #3 on: November 02, 2009, 03:28:29 pm »

First off: RAID is not backup, whether it's Drobo or some traditional RAID.

I'm in the market for a personal 4-8 drive RAID. Drobos indeed have quite high failure rate based on forum posts, hard to say how widespread it is in the real world.

The problem is, there's no comparable product in its price class AFAIK. All the other products are normal RAIDs, which means your entire array will be crimped in size by the smallest drive in the array, and often you will need to rebuild the entire array every time you lose a drive. Drobo solves those both problems - but it's not much use if it fails.

mmurph

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2009, 03:58:34 pm »

http://smallnetbuilder.com/

I have a small Intel SS4200. Really a hackers box, but sometimes in the $130-$170 range w/o drives.

It has a solid Linux 2.6 OS. With SSH access you can assure yourself it is running well. Fast and solid, but the web interface is limited (box is really for OEM's to add WHS, etc. )

Only really makes sense as a fast Raid 10 with 4 drives with the native OS. 4x1.5 TB gives 3x1.5 usable space for about $500 and good gigabit LAN speed. Or add FreeNAS, etc  

M
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alain

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« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2009, 04:17:43 pm »

Quote from: feppe
First off: RAID is not backup, whether it's Drobo or some traditional RAID.

I'm in the market for a personal 4-8 drive RAID. Drobos indeed have quite high failure rate based on forum posts, hard to say how widespread it is in the real world.

The problem is, there's no comparable product in its price class AFAIK. All the other products are normal RAIDs, which means your entire array will be crimped in size by the smallest drive in the array, and often you will need to rebuild the entire array every time you lose a drive. Drobo solves those both problems - but it's not much use if it fails.

Have you checked "unraid" as a system?  It seems to do something rather similar and there are some others to, but I could be mistaken.  

 
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nemophoto

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2009, 05:37:21 pm »

I went ahead and ordered the Synology DS209 and two 1TB drives. Everything I've read points to superior network performance -- reading and writing. I know a RAID is not  "backup" per se. I have additional drives that perform that function. However, a RAID setup is suppose to inherently be more secure in data integrety. Certainly better than a single disk may be. (Personally, though, I'd never use a RAID on my desktop again. I had a bad experience.) It just pisses me off when I waste nearly $800 on a crappy product that's suppose to be excellent. Since the Drobo worked alright in a non-networking situation (on Firewire 800), I suppose I'll keep it as desktop external storage.
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feppe

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« Reply #7 on: November 02, 2009, 06:36:58 pm »

Quote from: alain
Have you checked "unraid" as a system?  It seems to do something rather similar and there are some others to, but I could be mistaken.

I have, and it's just unloading all the dirty work of installing and maintaining to me, with some rather arcane limitations on upgrading and adding drives. I'd rather pay for a box which just works, like Drobo is supposed to.

nemophoto

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Thinking of buying a Drobo? Don't!
« Reply #8 on: November 02, 2009, 10:06:01 pm »

Quote from: feppe
I have, and it's just unloading all the dirty work of installing and maintaining to me, with some rather arcane limitations on upgrading and adding drives. I'd rather pay for a box which just works, like Drobo is supposed to.

Ah, and there's the rub, "like the Drobo is suppose to". One of my reasons for buying the Drobo.
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LA30

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mmurph

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« Reply #11 on: November 03, 2009, 09:51:58 am »

This is a pretty dated article on building a NAS. But it has some good design about, especially about choosing a great hardware inmplementation (RAID Card, instead of software), that is recoverable.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/27840/77/

Personally, I would buy a good Dell Poweredge Xeon quad server on sale for about $500 (300 or 500 series on sale - wait and watch.)

 Add WHS or FreeNAS. Run those on top of MSFT Hyper-V or VMWare and you willl have a full blown ap server for the cost of a Celeron NAS. Then shove in (or buy from Dell) a good RAID card and a stack of drives.
« Last Edit: November 03, 2009, 10:05:22 am by mmurph »
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