Drobo backup device

nodle

nodle

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I have seen these out for awhile now, but after watching the demo, I want one. They have a neat product on their hands. Just wish the price tag was lower...

http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx

 
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Interesting device... though I don't know what I think of it. He keeps saying it just moves the data to a safe place. So if I have a 250 GB drive and two 100 GB drives in it, and the 250 fails, where does it find space to store all of that data when it doesn't do any striping or anything to allow for data repair... Is this thing just a fancy disk replicator?
 
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Basically a JBOD box, but it handles everything automatically, no having to match pair sizes, toss whatever SATA drives you have laying around in it and it will take care of it automatically, no software to install unless you want to install the dashboard, works on win/macs. I have been reading a bunch of reviews on this thing and it is amazing. I am wanting one real bad now, but at $500 its a tad bit much. If it was around $200 i wouldn't bat an eye. Wonder if i can convince the wife to let me lol. But seriously read some reviews on it. I like how it takes out the hard work out of everything. Easy to understand lights etc.

Read...

http://laughingsquid.com/drobo-a-multi-drive-autonomous-data-storage-robot/

http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/06/08/drobo-review-frickin-awesome/

 
Well this post didn't last too long. I just picked on up. Will let you know what I think.
 
Well I have been purposely trying to hate this thing. But everything is what they said. Is smaller than what I thought. For 5 bays it's tiny. About the same size as a toaster. Metal structure. Thing is ultra quiet.Even with me running it all day. I thew 3 1tb drives in it. Took about roughly 5 minutes to get everything up and going. Nothing like raid 1 or 5 waiting for it to stripe. The software is very simple. Not complex just the basics. I have 2 more 1 Terabyte drives I'm going to toss in later. Guess everything is hot swappable. No need to shut it down. Just slide them in and your done. I also think I am going to enable dual drive redundancy. It can loose one now, but two would even be better for us that are over paranoid. Lights are beautiful to read and understand. Like I said I'm trying to find fault, but can't at the moment. Will post updates as time goes on.
 
Update*

Got all my data moved over. Can't really comment on the transfer speed since I was using an external 2.0 USB drive connected to a Netbook. But it wasn't bad. Transferred over around 2 terabyte of data. I had 4 simultaneous transfers going at the same time. With this going on I was able to stream a HD video just fine. What is really amazing while all this was going on I popped another terabyte drive in while it was running and it just added it to the pool and bam as easy as that it was done. Also when all the transferring was done it put itself in almost a sleep mode. Even me putting my ear up to the side no noise whatsoever can't even tell it's powered on except for the lights. Like I said I am trying to find fault with it, but can't. So far so good!

 
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Update*

The mounting and permission on the folders work great with the Drobo dashboard. Also enabled Dual Disk Redundancy last night. It will take awhile for it to move around, but it's nice to be able to loose two drives without losing your data.

 
Update*

Setup the notification system last night and tested it last night. Worked great!

 
Ordered a 64gig msata for it to put in the hot cache bay. Suppose to help speed it up a little (not that I see any slow downs). Still loving the unit!

The SSD, if present, will hold the Drobo's operating system and BeyondRAID metadata, and then will be used for hot data caching, using methodology similar to Intel's Smart Response Technology. Frequently accessed blocks will be mirrored onto the SSD for faster reading; the SSD is also used as a write cache to catch incoming data quickly even if the spinning disks are busy. And if the 5N is purchased without an SSD initially, it still tracks file system usage data and can immediately begin mirroring its OS and its hot blocks to cache as soon as an SSD is installed.
Click to expand...
knJSBJT.jpg

 
Added my card this weekend. Took about 2 minutes to install. Easy as pie. You can even monitor the status of the ssd from within the Drobo dashboard.
 
Installed 2x 2 terabyte drives this weekend. Pulled one out at a time put the new one in. Each rebuild took about 4 hours a piece. Not bad.
 
Man I have had my Drobo for quite awhile now I see. It's been along time since I updated this. But I must say I have had it for about 4 years now. Still a great little device. Never had any problems with it. The software works flawless on both Mac and PC. They still release new firmware & software updates to it, which is awesome. Overall I know sometimes these things get hated on since you can build your own NAS etc. But they do what they say and are pretty simple. I have 4x 2 terabyte drives in my and a single 1x terabyte drive. I wish they were a little cheaper on their prices for them, that is my only complaint. I think a lot more people would use them if they were.
 
I have been looking into a new NAS lately, nothing wrong with my Drobo, but would like to have something to be able to backup my NAS to the cloud and unfortunately Drobo has never got around to doing this unlike Synology.
 
Been looking at the Synology 416play. This is more expensive than say the 2 drive version, but 4 bays would be better, plus I can pull them straight out of my Drobo and pop in without buying new drives for capacity. I am gonna have to get my data backup up off there first though. The play versions also do transcoding which would be nice to finally get Plex up and running.
 
Well for the first time I had a drive die in my Drobo. I mostly use it for a second backup anyways so I wasn't overly concerned. I head the drive start to click and the Drobo took over, sent me a warning, started flashing lights. About 10 minutes later it told me it was done and ready for a new drive. Pulled face cover off, popped out the drive with the red light, tossed another in and it's provisioning over right now. Pretty smooth, actually lived up to what it was suppose to do. Honestly just have always been lucky with my drives. The drive that failed was probably from 2003 or so, so I can't complain. But ya worked great.
 
R.I.P.




 
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