Review request: Drobo FS

[abedinthehouse]

I would like to request a review for the Drobo FS NAS.

Here is a link to an article about it on Engadget.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/06/drobo-fs-finally-data-robotics-releases-a-drobo-nas-drive/

 

[thiggins]

We're in the review queue. Don't know when it will come in.

 

[vnangia]

Tim do you have any previous experience with the Drobos, particularly reliability-wise? The reason I ask is that both on the web, and amongst friends who have it, they seem to fail fairly regularly about a year or so in, and since Drobo uses a proprietary striping algorithm, it's nigh impossible to recover the data without sending it in to Drobo to recover the data. Unfortunately, since the plural of anecdote is not data...

 

[thiggins]

No. This will be my first Drobo test.

 

[iwod]

$699 for an NAS that only perform 30 - 40MB/s range?

COME ON!.

I hope the performance can be enhanced through software upgrade. A Dual Core ARM 7 CPU should do better then that.

 

[Unregistered]

We have many drobos at our clients for backup/archive units. The oldest one is 2 years, and we have about 30 in place. None have ever failed. Drives have failed in them, but the units themselves have been rock solid.

They are slower than most (usb, fw, or iSCSI) so we only use them for backup or archive use. They are perfect for that (especially for Online Archives, as by the very nature of archive it is meant to increase. And the Drobo (BeyondRAID) is absolutely perfect for that).

 

[flamaest]

IMHO, DROBO has had a performance-feature vs price problems since day 1.

Other NAS options from Synology and QNAP have always been light-years better than getting sucked into the DROBO proprietary, slow, and generally none competitive data-silo solutions.

I had to laugh when I saw in 2007 when DROBO was asking $199 for their network accessory [essentially a simple USB-NIC], which itself was nearly the same price as a whole driveless NAS from other companies. This sort of backwards pricing model should be a sign to steer clear of this company and let them just fade away.

If you want a NAS, I recommend one should buy NASes from companies with long term NAS histories. DROBO is a "wannabe" NAS company which probably hired a few NAS engineers to get this new NAS product out so they could get something to market before their customers realized how dated their family of products has become.

BTW: $699 for an unproven drive-less NAS is too high and all you have too look at to prove this is the great NAS charts on this website.

2 cents,
F.

 

[beq]

I wonder how the NAS performance of an ARM architecture CPU compares to the Atom in general?

 

[thiggins]

I wonder how the NAS performance of an ARM architecture CPU compares to the Atom in general?

there are plenty of reviews you can look at. But, in general Atoms are faster (and more expensive) than Marvell-based ARM machines.

 

[IanGW]

I picked one up for my father a week ago to consolidate his 7+ USB drives into one storage location. I've loaded in 3x WD Greenpower EARS (Advanced Format) 1.5TB drives, and the setup was fairly straightforward. I used my macbook to configure the device, and it self-updated the firmware a couple of times (each requiring a restart of the device), and then it automatically created a 16TB thin-provisioned volume and shared it. The drobo utility on my mac automatically mounts the drives when I am at home, which is a nice feature for my dad.

In terms of performance, I connected my video editing station (which has a 4x750gb sata RAID10 array with about 100MB/s avg read performance using hdtune) over gigabit to the drobo, and am able to write to the Drobo FS at about 25 MB/s (unscientific) of a single AVI file. In turn, I am able to read the same file at about 25 MB/s (unscientific).

Client machine running Vista Business x64 with a onboard broadcom 1000baseT nic. (Mobo Supermicro X7DVLE dual xeon board) If you guys would like any specific tests done let me know, I have the unit here for another week or two.

 

[twwen2]

Ian, I'm interested how the WD Green drives fare in the Drobo unit. I'm aware that they are listed as a compatible model, but I also understand that because they don't support TLER, they are generally not recommended for use in RAID environments.

Does Drobo's BeyondRaid system negate the need for a TLER-like function?
I'm considering getting one of these to store my growing blu-ray collection, but am concerned about performance and price.

 

[TheAncient]

Echo review request for Drobo FS

I would like to echo the previous requests for a review of the Drobo FS (and/or the more recent DroboPro FS and Drobo B800FS). Supposedly this request has been "in the review queue" since June of last year. What is the status of this review? Thanks!

 

[thiggins]

The Drobo review is not going to happen. Drobo wanted too much control of the review process.

 

[TheAncient]

Red flag

Thanks for the quick response! I can understand that this is not acceptable to you. Trying to influence a reviewer or review process - that's a red flag for me.

 

[teknojnky]

last I checked, you can not even view, let alone post, to the drobo forums unless you register with a valid device serial number.

I also do not have any first hand experience with a drobo, but a friend at work has/had one of the usb DAS (direct attached) models and it (I don't know the specifics) lost all of his video data archive within a few months of use.

He was using it as primary storage and did not have any backups, essentially resulting in a total loss.

 

[thiggins]

He was using it as primary storage and did not have any backups, essentially resulting in a total loss.

That was not a smart thing to do with any vendor's NAS.

 

[teknojnky]

agreed, but people will be people and continue to choose the easiest/least expensive route, at least until they get burned.

 

[corndog]

I have a DroboPro that has been running in my basement for over a year now. At the beginning I tried to push it through all kinds of hoops that it wasn't really meant for (such as connecting it from 3 different iSCSI clients simultaneously) and it didn't like that very much. However, once I got over that, and settled down, I hooked the DroboPro up to one Windows 2008 R2 server via iSCSI and it has worked flawlessly since then. My read and write speeds are roughly 40MB/sec when pushing it hard.

The DroboPro is not a fancy multi-talented device like a ReadyNAS or a QNAP, but it does one thing VERY well - store and protect LOTS of data.

I'm happy enough with it that I'm getting the new Drobo B800fs Business-Line File Serving model. And if that works out well, I'm looking to get a B1200i model for our VM lab at the office. The B1200i has 12 drives, redundant power and cooling, and is "claimed" to be an enterprise-capable iSCSI SAN. And it's probably a lot cheaper than our EqualLogic...

 

[TheAncient]

Drobo FS

I bought a Drobo FS and over the first 3 weeks it flagged two brand new 3TB Hitachi drives and one 1.5TB Seagate drive as bad. Drive failures do happen but at a rate of one a week? I was unable to test the 3TB drives but SeaTools pronounced the 1.5TB drive perfectly healthy. The Drobo is currently being tested out by the technician at my retailer and he informed me that a complete re-set of the Drobo 'cleared' its memory and it now accepts a drive it had formerly flagged as "bad" (The other 2 "faulty" drives were replaced under warranty). Conclusion: Drobo must be "touchier" than other devices as it flags drives as "bad" that pass other tests and are accepted by other devices. The technician also confirmed that the Drobo was very slow (Drobo claims that this was due to the use of a D-Link router). I do not know if these issues are repairable "one-off" problems or if it is something common to all Drobo FS models but I, for one, cannot live with a device that rejects a drive per week.

 

[teknojnky]

http://arstechnica.com/business/raising-your-tech-iq/2011/03/drobo-review-1.ars

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/04/drobo-review-part-2-day-to-day-use.ars