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The Drobo

Just ordered the Drobo backup system along with 4×1.5TB drives from Amazon. I currently have 3TB of storage that’s a combination of 5 external drives and it’s fine except for the fact if I lose one of those drives I lose everything that’s on it and its happened to me before. So I’ve been wanting to get a decent backup system and decided to go with the Drobo. The Drobo can take 4 2TB drives and the best part about it is if one of the drives fails you just swap that drive out with another one and you don’t lose any information.

The Drobo works kinda like Raid 5 except with one cool feature, you can mix match a variety of different sized drives together and expand with great ease.

I added all the stuff to my shopping cart and when I checked out Amazon was still using my Aramex shipping address and the Tax was around $70. So I swapped it for my new DHL address and poof no tax. It’s my first time shipping with DHL EasyShop so will post my review once I get the package.

The Drobo costs KD100 on Amazon, here is the [Link]

Also, here is the Drobo hard drive space calculator. Because of the way the Drobo works to secure your data, installing 4x2TB drives won’t give you 8TB of space to use, you get 5.5TB. This link will help you calculate how much space you get with a certain combination of drives. [Link]

72 replies on “The Drobo”

The device generally has good reviews but I hate the fact that it does not come with a NAS solution. This means it needs to be attached to the computer from where you plan to backup.
If you’ve ordered the older version of Drobo, then you need to buy a separate accessory “droboshare” which itself costs around $200.
If you’ve ordered the newer version of Drobo, then it does not have droboshare (as of now) and the older one is not compatible.
The Acer Home server is a better option, in my opinion – as it provides for failover support as well as acts as a NAS and a media server (though I am not sure how nicely it plays with Macs).

I saw one in the pc shop in Baitek tower, it was around 120 KD. Could ask Rayboy about his Drobo, unlike other RAIDs you dont need to match drive capacities and it supports hot-swapping too!

Cajie I was looking for something that offered raid 5 like backup and fw800 or esata since nas is too slow for me. I already have a server but needed a proper backup solution. The acer doesn’t offer raid 5 and doesn’t have fw800 or esata connections so that’s why the drobo is a better solution for me.

Your post actually made me lookup the Acer Home server (which was on my wish list for quite some time). I saw the price has dropped to $299 (it was $399 just a few weeks back). Immediately purchased it.
You essentially saved me $100!!! Thanks.

Yeah. As I said, the drobo device itself is pretty good – if you are looking for what it offers (speed, excellent redundancy) and don’t mind hooking it up to your laptop.

The Drobo is ok but like Cajie I prefer it on the Network.. you could have got the Netgear ReadyNas Pro which has 6 Drives and lots of space.. great product!

The Drobo is good if you just connect it to your machine, the only issue is networking as mentioned..

I checked out the Drobo Pro but its getting a lot of mixed reviews about some lemon machines being delivered dead or inoperable on the spot!

Marzouq the price of the netgear is like 900$, the drobo is 350.

The drobo pro got an update which solved most of the issues people were complaining about, check it out on the drobo website.

I doubt you will pay any Customs on it, but even if you did it might not be more than 5KD. Don’t be fooled by the price shown on the website when the item arrives they calculate volumetric weight however when it comes to Kuwait they weigh it so it’s a different amount.

Also you will absolutely absolutely love one thing with DHL, if you are anything like me you will love how updated their tracking system is. It gives you the exact position of your position every step of the way!

So good luck with it all 🙂

Mathai: That was the first generation Drobo and I am kinda certain it was KD220 and not KD120 because I remember going wow thats a lot more expensive than it is online.

By the way just out of curiosity, Is it really hard for Windows users to share files and drives over a network? With a mac I just drag and drop the folder or drive into a small window under “File Sharing” and just like that it gets shared using AFP and SMB.

Now that I am back home and off my iPhone I can write and explain my decision to go with the Drobo. My home network is 100Mb so NAS wouldn’t be good enough if I am streaming media to 3 difference XBMC units which is usually the case since I have 2 XBMC units at my house and one with my sister who lives next door. Thats why NAS was out of the question for me, it wouldn’t have been able to handle the load of streaming video to 3 different locations very efficiently on my 100Mb network.

Secondly I download all my torrents to a folder called NEW. Once they are done downloading I unrar all the files and then rename them all. For example:

the.simpsons.s21e06.hdtv.xvid-fqm.avi

becomes

The Simpsons S21E06.avi

I am anal like that and I do all that expanding of rar’s and renaming on my server. Before with my Dual 1.6ghz G4 with 1.25GB of RAM the unraring and renaming process used to be a slow and depending on the amount of files I am unraring my computer used to crash. (I like to search my NEW folder for .rar files and then open them all at once). With my Dual 2.3ghz G5 with 8GB of RAM, the process is much more faster and it hasn’t crashed yet no matter how many rar files I open at the same time.

With NAS I would either have to do all this on the NAS enabled device or do it on my server and then copy stuff over the network to the NAS enabled device. Both options are not practical, time consuming and frustrating.

Currently my drives are connected to my PowerMac via Firewire and USB. I had to get extra USB ports (i have 12 in total now) because of all these external drives so I am glad I will replace them all with 1 firewire 800 cable. Which brings me to my point, FW800, I am currently satisfied with USB2 and FW400 so I am really looking forward to seeing how much faster FW800 will be. I am a Firewire fanboy so will always choose it over other connection methods 🙂

Marzouq: I always try to buy the best for less. That’s how I like to do things. The Netgear ReadyNas Pro costs like $900 and the advantages over the Drobo for me would be very little so it doesn’t make sense to spend nearly 3 times the amount. I checked out the Drobo S at $750 and didn’t see the advantages it would offer me for twice the price and I even checked out the OWC Qx2 which was $650 but also saw very little advantages. The Acer Home Server was cheaper but actually would cost me more with hard drive costs because it didn’t do RAID 5 only RAID 1 which meant I would need more harddrive space to equal that of the Drobo. And then the fact that it couldn’t be connected as an external drive to my server didn’t help.

Jacqui: Thats cool can’t wait to try it out

Just called Egghead now in Baitak tower who are the dealers.
They are selling the Drobo for KD165 and the guy wasn’t sure if its the first generation or second.

David: I won’t be using the Drobo to back up my Mac. I will be using it to store all my media files. To back up my Mac I use Time Machine and a Western Digital portable 320GB hard drive.

I usually buy all my drives in Kuwait because they’re cheaper except this time I ordered them online since they were discounted because of Black Friday and the fact that the local shops are closed so couldn’t compare prices locally. Worst case they will be the same price here, best case I saved a few bucks.

I see.
I am planning on a second drobo . the Drobo S is too expensive so I might just buy another drobo.

Closest official provider/dealer/distributor/reseller is in UAE and they sell it for 2600AED (asked over a year ago)

Mark,
How did you calculate that the 100mb network would not be able to handle 3 to 4 simultaneous video streams?
My understanding is that most videos have 3 to 4 mbps bitrates – and even a 1080p videos will have (at most) 15 mbps.
https://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=959
So a 100mb network should have no problem – especially if you add a switch.

I just want to know if my understanding is wrong here.

It’s based on the fact I was having issues with a 802.11g network and 1 xbmc client. Lag buffering issues. 100Mb Ethernet is more stable for sure but I would be putting a lot of load on my basic network if I am going to start moving large files across and stream…

BTW, Thanks Mark for posting the link for the 1.5 TB drive. I think I’ll pick up 2 to fit in the Acer Home server. The price is just too good.

I found this interesting comment while reading user reviews on the drives – in relation to my earlier comment which seems to validate my observation about the 100mb network.

PERFORMANCE:
We are able to watch movies from this drive arrangement on 3 computers simultaneously across a 100mb network from the same drive while adding new files to the drive from a 4th computer.

That’s good to know because my drobo is connected to my mac that is connected to the network at 100mb. The only advantage fw800 will give me is copying and moving files which is still a plus since after I am done unraring and renaming I have to move them to the drobo

I just checked the Western Digital 1.5 TB’s.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0021L9HE6/

The price is the same but user experience seems to be better. I was put off by the number of firmware related problems reported for the Seagates. The WD’s, on the other hand, seem to run cooler and quieter and not much problems reported.

Did you compare the WD’s before buying – and if so, why did you choose Seagate?. I would like your opinion before pulling the trigger.

I saw the two but I’ve had a lot of WD issues and recently converted to seagate. Marzouq and TiVo guy have been using seagate for their servers also. Check newegg and see if the reviews there are the same ( I am on my iPhone) since new egg caters to geeks more

Honestly mark .. I didnt understand a word from your post .. but once i clicked that amazon link and watched that video I got your idea .. lol

Thanks for sharing .. I call this a home server .. its looks and feels good .

Interesting links for the reviews.
BTW, if you ignore the neutral to slightly neutral reviews and only look at the very positive and very negative reviews, here’s what it comes to:
Seagate: Positive 822, Negative 449: Negative Percentage: 35%
WD: Positive 95, Negative 34: Negative Percentage: 26%

Statistically speaking, WD is good.

i Got both the drobo and the Netgear ReadyNAS. Like everyone said. the drobo needs to be connected to a PC/MAC and is not a NAS. but i also got the drobo share, which makes it kind off a NAS..

The droboshare is a messed up product. and cannot in anyform handle multiple network connections, thus slowing down read/write performance of the drobo itself. for 1-3 users it could be great. but in my own home, where i have about 10 devices connected to my share. it wasnt possible.

About the drobo itself… its really good in all ways, where it could handle any size drives.. but if you are going to put all the 4 harddrives of exactly the same size.. it messes up the expansion plans.. for example if you are running out of space. if any of the drives was smaller drobo would tell you to remove the small drive and increase it with a bigger one.. but as in my case. its full and it doesnt give any form of notification..

Another thing which slows down the drobo. is its simultaneous Write issues. Unlike a true NAS. Drobo cannot handle mulitple write, So imagine.. if you are copying 1 season of House.MD and then you open a another copy session of 1 Season of Heroes. One of them will suffer. the reason being.. the amount of data being spread across the harddrive. But in the case of a NAS the procedure of the data distribution is different. i heard this is solved in DroboPRO

Another thing, is that drobo cannot have proper password protected shares. its just got 1 password for all. So if you have a family, friends etc. you need to give them access to everything to allow them to use the driver. which is sad.

I recently got in ZEUS(my Netgear ReadyNAS), the performance is amazingly different. The read/write is extremely faster. Multiple authentication methods. What surprised me is that its got a slimdevices support, which allows my Logitech Boombox, to automatically treat ZEUS as a muisc source, without any Config.

So if i rate this.. for a single user , the drobo would do well. But if you are talking Network, Multi-user, major read-write.. its not built for it.!

Rayboy I think you’re confusing NAS and Raid, you can’t compare the two since they’re not the same. I am referring to your comment which you said “the reason being.. the amount of data being spread across the harddrive. But in the case of a NAS the procedure of the data distribution is different…”

NAS doesn’t distribute data it just carries it.

The Drobo works like a RAID 5 which means when you copy data onto it its getting written to more than one drive which is slower but more secure. NAS on the other hand is just a network protocol and not related to how the data is written. You could have a NAS connection to the harddrives and the harddrives could be writing data in RAID 0, 1, 5 etc.. it has nothing to do with the NAS.

I just checked the Netgear ReadyNAS, its RAID 1 which is why it’s faster. But the disadvantage is if you have 4TB of space, 2TB is for backup and 2TB is available to use. With RAID 5 it would be more like 1TB for backup and 3TB available to use.

it was via USB2. since the Droboshare only supported USB , even though the drobo itself had FW.

i have the ReadyNAS NV+. i actually have 3TB with 1 TB left for backup. supports Raid 0,1 & 5.

Yeah. The droboshare was probably thought up to compete with the highly successful NAS market.

BTW, one of the reason I prefer RAID 1 (or RAID 10 for high availability applications) over RAID 5 is that even though RAID 5 works in theory, my practical experience in the past has been that due to some failure, the entire hard disk array could not be accessed (this happened on multiple occasions), and we had to resort to tape backups. The beauty of RAID 1 is that it’s a mirrored copy, so even if the whole system fails, the contents of the disk can be simply moved into another hard disk controller and the data read from there.

2nd Gen. Got it when it was first laucnhed..

Cajie: having mirrors means more HDs and more space too.. i dont know why you had a bad exp with RAID 5 as many server solutions still run on Raid 4 and 5.

Now a days more reliability is given to SAN storage

Mark about comment # 40. somehow missed it.

Drobo has its own methods of writing data.. Its not built as a NAS. Devices that are built for network usage that know how to Accept Data. im more concerned about the amount of sessions the drive would open and allow to read/write.

Drobo by itself, opens a connection between the pc/mac its connected to and expects proper session management to be handled by the PC/MAC itself. while on the NAS, its different, independant and much.

For example, at my home.. i got the xbox, Entertainment center, torrent server, 8 other pcs, draining data from my storage devices..
ok i blamed the Droboshare here.. for being the traffic police. things did improve when i put directly to a windows server. but not much.

For me, the drobo is perfect for those who want their data safe and dont know how to play with RAIDs. who have a couple of 100Gigs of data.

those looking at Tbs of data.. should consider investing a proper NAS.

Rayboy: NAS is just another method of connection like USB, Firewire, eSATA etc.. Its like saying make sure you invest in a proper USB for a good backup system. That’s not what people should focus on when their important files are at stake. There are a lot more other things to consider in a backup system other than if it has NAS or not.

Another thing to keep in mind with NAS, unless you’re setup with a gigabit network you’re stuck with 100mbs which means FW800 is 8 times faster or eSATA which can be up to 30 times faster. That means if you have large amounts of data that you constantly move or need to backup, NAS would be very slow at 100mbs. Thats why most of the video editors I know swear by FW800.

For those looking at terabytes of data it would make much more sense getting a backup system that uses eSATA, connect it to a main server and have the main server handle all the networking load. That’s why I originally was looking for a backup system that uses eSATA but ended up going with the next best thing which is FW800 because it was more affordable.

NAS is perfect for small homes where the user doesn’t want to invest in a server or get into the complications of networking and sharing.

Rayboy: You got me worried with all this speed talk so i did a bit of googling and found someone who ran an xbench test on the drobo connected to his mac with FW800. His drobo score was a 29.

So I ran an xbench test on my server and my fastest external drive got a score of 27, while the slowest got a score of 22. My internal 7200rpm 32MB sata drive on the server scored a 58. Will run on my own tests when I get my drobo.

One thing about Kuwait market in Hawally , mostly you find junk hardware
the like of all in one MB , cheap slow HDD , cheap VGA cards .
there are few stores that will special order for you .
try getting a Seagate 500GB 7200rpm 2.5″ , or ask for a SAS 2.5″ 147gb HDD and see the looks on those Bhuri or Bangali sales people .
if you are looking for storage give a call to Bufallo agent and ask for thier storage devices .

There are two stores I buy from in Hawalli, The Professional and Soft Island. They usually carry everything I need and for good prices. By everything I need I mean RAM and Hard drives 😀

Mohd, whether you buy from a local guy in Hawalli or a Buffalo agent, its the same. the only difference would be pricing…

there is a saying in Hawalli.. if 1 shop has the particular product you need. that means everyone in Hawally has that product. Its a hand in glove mafia there 🙂

you only need to know what exactly you want. Or could get cheated!

1. Soft Island

2. Proffisional ( isn’t that on a first floor thrown at some corner ?)

3. Personal Computer has good stuff;

and there is some shop called LAMIRA something like that its a small one, but he deals with good brands;

(not related – Logitech Kuwait is still out of stock of my lovely Z-5500 Digital Speaker)

I got my computer case and power supply (ThermalTake Official Retail) from CONTACT shop.

i won’t risk getting an HDD online, shipping can be risky for mechanical stuff, a tiny mistake while handling the shipments will result in a disaster, on the other hand i slept tight when i ordered my Intel SSD’s

I Got the 4 x 1 TB WD 32 MB Cache for RAID 10 / 26 KD each from Soft Island the one who’s shop is located outside the complex.

you can build a cheap backup system your self, might be a bit expensive, but its more fun and easier to maintain.
an intel C2D motherboard with dual Gigbit Ethernets will also have eSata and FW, eliminating all boundaries.
If your ethics is sensitive to pirated softwares, install linux on the system, u’ll be able to do network balancing and unlimited network connection sessions (XP has limit to 10, if you didn’t configure the system to disconnect the expired sessions after sometime, u’ll be frustrated)

Modern RAID Controllers does not require the match of HD Sizes.

I ALWAYS buy my hard drives locally since they’re usually cheaper than the internet and as you said its safer buying it here then shipping it. Only issue is this time around it’s considerably cheaper to buy it online and the fact that my two stores aren’t carrying them. Soft Island carries max 1TB while Professional carries the 2TB but not the 1.5. They’re selling the 2TB for KD80..

seems there is demand on the 2 TB, i was told 2 weeks ago they were available for around 65 or 70;

now i called the Guy “Called Anwar” in Qairawan shop (Softlisalnd located outside) he told me they are out of stock, they’ll bring withing few days..

so you received your Drobo ? how heavy is it (DHL Charges) ? i would like to see a pic in action 🙂

No its still on its way to my DHL mailbox. When everything arrives first thing I need to do is check what firmware the drives have on it since the older firmwares had issues with the Drobo. Since they’re new drives they should have the new firmware but you never know. Only issue is if the firmware is old and I need to update it I can’t do it from any of my computers. I need to have either a PC or an Intel MacPro or iMac which I don’t.

https://support.seagate.com/firmware/firmware_update_procedure_mac.html

Yeah has to be an intel based desktop. I dont think i need to upgrade the firmware but if I do I guess will have to do it from one of the MacPros at work or something.

i’m using the device for over a year now, i connected it to one of the mini eeePC 900 laptops i have running Debian, the setup is perfect for both my PC and MAC Time machine backups. although recently i had lost all my data due to repeated power outages and some missing partitions but that was not Drobo’s mistake i kinda messed it up by running fsck before unmounting the partition DUH!!..
but overall i love my drobo.

Just an update, my drobo scored a 27.75 with xbench which puts it just slightly faster than the fastest external drive I have which is the 1TB Iomega.

Just tried streaming a full 720p HD movie from the drobo over the network while copying 80gb worth of files over and it played flawlessly without any hint of any slowdown or struggle.

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