Gizmodo
We told you guys about Data Robotics Drobo storage robot a few months back. The little hard drive enclosure that will hold up to four 3.5" drives. Well we've been trying out our very own demo unit for the last week or so.
What do we think? It's expensive, for starters, and the port list leaves something to be desired.
First things first, what didn't we like?
Price
It's $500, and it doesn't come with any storage-only the enclosure. Now just for fun let's go over what else we could get for $500:
• 4GB iPhone
• Xbox 360 Elite or PS3 20GB or 2 Nintendo Wii's
• Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD Player
Ok, so it's either one of those guys or the Drobo. But if money's no object or you really like hard drive space then that won't be a problem. But if you're like us, we personally would have to think long and hard about this purchase before we dropped that much cash on an empty hard drive enclosure.
Ports
Drobo is USB 2 only. While many people claim that USB 2 is plenty fast enough, if you're plunking down a couple hundred dollars you'd expect at least USB2, Firewire 400 & 800 or even an Ethernet port.
The good news is that Data Robotics confirmed that they are going to at least implement Firewire into future revisions. But for now it's a big ol' deduction.
Startup Lag
If you have four drives installed, waiting for all of them to spin up seems like an eternity. We can't tell you how many times we went to save a file and the computer seems to freeze, only to hear the familiar wrrring of four hard drives ramping up slowly, one after another. This gets very annoying at times. But, unless you want to have your drives constantly running it was unavoidable.
Software
One of the claims Data Robotics makes is that Drobo requires zero software for use. While this is technically true, Drobo is plug-and-play, and on a Mac it leads to an interesting problem. OS X lists Drobo as a 2TB drive no matter how much storage has been installed. To alleviate this problem they do include an application called the Drobo Dashboard that will tell you how much space you really have. However, it has been pretty spotty. Many times it couldn't even tell that there was a Drobo attached. Also, this could have easily been turned into a widget for Dashboard or a Sidebar gadget.
Unstable
One thing we encountered was the unstableness of the Drobo. While it must be difficult attempting to maintain multiple drives of different speeds and capacities, this is what Drobo is supposed to do. However multiple times during our tests our computers would claim that our Drobo was unreadable and that the only options were to eject or reformat. This simply cannot happen to your storage on a regular basis. Which we found out the hard way, as our Drobo video review was wiped out.
However, that's about as bad as it gets (although the last one was pretty bad). We know you're all dwelling on all of this right now, but the Drobo is actually a pretty amazing piece of hardware when it is running like it should be. Now on to what we love about it.
Drive Virtualization
No longer do you have to worry about a file that is 100GB when you only have 2 80GB drives. Drobo does a fantastic job of instantly mashing your drives together into one large virtual drive. No more keeping some files on one drive and others on another. Drobo moves all of the data around in small packets, so that it can be dispersed over all of your drives. Basically it acts like a RAID setup, but without all of the technical setup that's typically required.
Drive Installation
This is where Drobo shines, it makes installing a new drive as easy as popping in a tape into a VCR. Just take any 3.5-inch SATA hard drive and pop it in. you don't need any tools and it doesn't matter what speed or size each drive is. Just toss it in and let Drobo go to work, instantly you'll see your available storage space increase.
Backup
We know none of us backup our data nearly as much as we should, or at all for that matter. But who can blame us when it's such a pain to have to keep on balancing external drives or install yet another internal drive.
Drobo is the first backup solution that I've seen that might actually work (Aside from Time Machine), and that's because it does it without even asking. It is always making backups of your data. However this comes at a price with storage space. For instance if you installed 1TB worth of drives, you really are only getting 509.9 GB of pure storage before Drobo starts telling you to go out and look for a bigger drive to pop in.
While it does take its toll on available space, how nice is it knowing that all your pictures, files, songs & movies are all safe for once.
Convenience
One of our computers is a Mac Mini that is covered in external drives- two 80GB drives, one 250GB drive, and one 300GB drive. That means there are four enclosures, four power bricks, and four fans spinning and they aren't even in a RAID array, so they're independent storage spaces.
Drobo thankfully gets rid of all of that. You have one box, one power cord and one intelligent fan system that only runs when it gets warm. And when you live in a tiny apartment every inch counts, so getting rid of all those extra parts is quite a luxury.
Style
Compared to most hard drive enclosures the Drobo looks like a piece of art. With its simplistic black outfit and glossy magnetic cover, it definitely will grab your attention, while still being simplistic enough not to stand out too much.
While the storage monitor lighting is well done, we do wish their was an option to turn it off since it's pretty damn bright (You can see it glowing all the way down the block) and you can get the same info from the Drobo Dashboard application.
Final Verdict
We suggest persuading your friends to pick one up so that the price drops faster. That way when you go and buy one after a revision or two, not only will some of the flaws be worked out (Stability/Ports), but it should be more reasonably priced as well. Because once they get the growing pains straightened out this will be a great storage solution. However given the current price and stability issues we say pass on the Drobo for now.
Okay, reader, now that we've got that out of the way-what do you want to know about the Drobo? What questions are still lingering around that head of yours? Let us know and we'll post a follow up for you.
Comments
I just bought two. After reading this I am a little concerned. I hope they will be able to adress some of these issues with a firmware update.
If there's an ethernet port next time, I'm in. That's the only reason I'm staying away this time. Otherwise, it sounds awesome.
good to know, but the grammar in that article is terrible :D
I thought drobo was supposed to avoid such disasters as the one experienced with the video review...? hmm...
definitely hope they work it out.
Seems a nice little device, but the lack of Ethernet port 100/1000 is disappointing!
The price is a little steep, I've built a small server with minit-itx components for less then 500$ and it can hold up to four drives, and does torrents!
But i like the enclosure!
I bet this guy's can come up with something much better!
The case-less drive design is very nice, but other than that, I think my ReadyNas NV is a more complete unit - with gigabit ethernet even.
I will buy it if its less than $100. $500 is hard to swallow.
One thing I'm liking big time nowadays is network storage.
Anything this massive (and pricey) should have multiple connection options OR do the ones they have REALLY REALLY well compared to other products of their type.
-or follow you around on two stubby legs. (GoNK GoNK)
Poor Drobo ends up being one of the nondescript robots in the back of the Sand Crawler.
Bummer.
Not sure about the review unit but I have a Drobo at home for about two months and have nothing but good things to say about the hardware. I am using the Drobo to store music and video for iTunes/Apple TV without a problem.
Installed two new 320GB hard drives when the unit arrived. the Drobo found the drives the second they where installed. The Drobo formated them and made the space available within a few moments.
The comment that you need to run the Dashboard software to see how much drive space is in use on a Mac is alittle off. There is a set of 10 blue LED's that give an indicator of how full the drive system is. Allot like the gas gauge in you car, it wont tell you exactly how much drive space is used but will give you an idea as to how full of empty the Drobo is. If you need exact info on storage used then the Dashboard software is available.
The cost of the unit while high dose offer value to users who want to have there data protected from every day hard drive issues and and easy way to grow storage space without the need to move data and replace outgrown external storage.
For the average non tech user this is a storage dream come true.
For $500.00 it better have a "special orafice"!
They claim that their data redundancy system is "better than RAID," but you can bet your ass I'm skeptical.
They do, at least, include a "Drobolator" page which tells you how much space you're actually getting out of all those hard drives. (Hint: if you select 4 x 100 gig drives, you're getting 372.5 gigs of actual storage. The remainder is used for "protection" or overhead.)
To echo sammy baby, "better than RAID" means exactly what? RAID 0? RAID 1? RAID 5? Better than RAID 5 would have to be having the little robot stored in a little robot bunker deep inside Cheyenne Mountain? If it doesn't walk, roll, or at least pour, how is this better than an ancient P4 linux box off the salvage heap with a massive RAID array and some decent networked backup daemons? I can probably do that for $200 and get the Wii as well.
why stick to lousy interfaces when they could use eSATA?
I'm just curious how you lost your video review if it's supposed to automatically back up your data?
Trust me on this one, peeps:
If you have any technical skills at all, go get yourself a nice 4-port eSATA enclosure like the Icy Dock + an eSATA card, and skip the slower USB products that corrupt your data....
Use Windows to make a dynamic volume that spans all four disks. (Or set up RAID.) Backup in Vista is a one-button affair (and will be in Leopard).
You can thank me later.... ;-)
This review was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. I think a new requirement for Gizmodo job applications should include knowing the difference between "their" and "there", learning how and when to use a comma, and that apostrophes are not always needed when a word ends with an "s".
I will definitely be getting one of these Drobos when they get the kinks figured out; it has a ton of potential. I also love the case.
For ~$100 more you can get an Infrant/NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ with 100/1000 Ethernet, USB device support (flash drive, external USB, and printers), UPnP, and 5 licenses for EMC Retrospect if the integrated backup doesn't float your boat. No eSATA though; that'll probably be on the NV++ ;)
This Drobo offering isn't very compelling with such a lackluster feature-set, nor at the current price-point.
I think I'll stick to my Dlink DNS-323. Had it for several months and not a problem.
I can understand the price if it does everything it's touted to do, consistently. But it's still too high a price to pay for this product. Now if they throw in 1 TB storage PLUS the device (and 2 empty slots) then it becomes much more attractive.
I'd third the recommendation that if you're looking to put down $500 for Drobo then you should really take a good look at the ReadyNAS NV or NV+. It's a NAS unlike Drobo but has a much better feature set for the $$.
Positioning is the problem. Or, more specifically, people's perception of the Drobo positioning. It's not meant to be a NAS competitor. It's not meant to be cheaper than build-your-own DAS. It's meant for people who want redundancy but don't want to worry about the care and feeding of it.
You're paying for the convenience of easy operation and easy upgrades. You pay attention to idiot lights to tell you when a drive has died and when you need to upgrade. You don't have to worry about reconfiguring the array or matching drive sizes.
As far as interfaces, setting aside Data Robotics marketing stance that USB is more ubiquitous than FW/eSATA/Ethernet, I think it has more to do with the internal data protection throughput of the box such that you wouldn't see a huge performance increase by going to a faster interface.
I've had one of the units for about a month, and haven't had any serious issues with it. Nor have I seen issues about instabiliy on the user forums at drobospace.com. The two biggest complaints are about the lack of NAS or faster direct connections, as well as high fan noise. There are also some concerns about the speed of the unit when it gets really full, as well as the rebuild times after a failure (although you do have access to your data while the redundancy is rebuilt).
For a better understanding of why the Drobo is novel and the target userbase, see the ZDnet review at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=508
I might also add:
- I bought my Drobo and am not associated with Data Robotics in any way.
- While this product fits my needs, the facts this is a start-up company and that it's their first product did weigh heavily when I was deciding to purchase.
- The virtualized storage model worked for me. My PC only has 2 hard drive bays (both are in-use), and I had 3 old SATA drives lying around (2x 300GB and 1x160GB). With Drobo, that gets me 420GB of protected storage. Sure beats throwing these small drives in a drawer or stacking them in a growing pile of external USB enclosures.
- Performance is on-par with other USB 2.0 drives I have, about 20MB/sec.
Comments on the review:
- It's something like 6 sections down in the review before it's even mentioned that Drobo's main mission is to provide RAID-like redundancy. I too would be thinking of buying all of the other crappy technology you have listed at the beginning rather than pay $500 for an empty JBOD or spanned hard drive enclosure. I shudder to think how brutal your price assessment would have been under their original MSRP of $700.
- Software: As ssmurphy mentions, there are LED's on the face to show you the percentage in use. While I agree that a widget would be nice, I have no issues with the Dashboard app on Windows and how it shows a little pie graph of usage when minimized to the system tray.
- Unstable: This would be a show stopper if true. "This simply cannot happen to your storage on a regular basis." Try: "this can't ever happen" -- otherwise what's the point in buying it? I don't know if it's an OS X thing, or you got a defective unit, but I haven't had a problem in Windows. I've unplugged it, moved it to other computers, powered it up and down, upgraded the firmware, shared the drive, and written/read hundreds of GB of data, and it's never corrupted on me. And if it did, it would have gone back to them under their 30-day guarantee.
Drive Virtualization: Actually, you can't store a 100GB file if you only have 2 80GB drives. Drobo won't allow you to store data that is not protected. So in this configuration, Drobo acts like RAID 1 - a mirrored pair of 80GB drives with <80GB (minus overhead). Now, if you had 3 80GB drives, you could store that 100GB file, even though each of the individual drives are 80GB.
- Backup: Not the best term to use. "Data protection" or "redundancy" would be better. It's not "backing up" data like creating snapshots of your system drive or key files. Drobo's volume protects the data saved there against drive failure or block-level corruption. It can be a backup target, but it doesn't do backup automatically. It's a subtle distinction, yes, but an important one. You can lose your data even when using Drobo (file system corruption, multiple drive failure, theft, act of God, accidental deletion, etc.) That's why you're still advised to make backups of the data stored on this redundant disk system.
- Convenience: Right on. Not to mention that it draws about 40 watts in active use. Not only a space savings over a DIY RAID PC but a power savings as well. Seems to be more energy efficient than most RAID enclosures.
I can sweeten the pot a little - Thru July 31, use the coupon / reference code REFDANA at the drobo store, and you'll save another $25 on a new drobo.
For the same price buy an Infrant NV+. It uses something called X-RAID, which is a cross between RAID 5 and JBOD. You don't have to think about the drives, just put any SATA drives in you like and it will make them into one big virtual drive. One dies, or you pull it out to add a bigger one, and it automagically builds the new drive into the array. No data lost. And it comes with gigabit ether.
Skip the roboboob and go with NV+.
Bought it. Installed it. Watched it fail after three days, taking all of our data with it. At least it looked great while it was failing.
I love drobo concept, but
this version 1.0 device is not reliable enough to be considered for production or backup storage.
Besides the flawed product, tech support didn't get back to us for two days after calling and saying we were down. My return phone call came in at 8:30PM central time. I think the tech was stunned that I was still in the office and he had to talk to me.
The verdict: All of the data on the Drobo was lost.
We finally were forced to recover from backup.
Drobo has since been returned to Tiger Direct.
If you are a consultant, I would be cautious about recommending this product to a client.
If you are already a Drobo owner, make sure you back it up. When it fails, there isn't much you can do to recover.
@Windhawk: Check out Data Robotics' assessment of X-RAID at [www.drobospace.com] (link to forum thread)
I love my drobo. I bought one for my residence and one for my office. I use foldershare to sync them. That way I always have off-site redundancy.
We had two DROBOs in our lab and they turned out to be notoriously unstable. One was run from an iMac, and it was the first one to fail. It reported that one of its 4 HDs failed. I couldn't access any data on it and DROBO support told me to buy a new drive to replace the defunct one. However as soon as I plugged the new one in, DROBO reported that another drive was failing. I never got the data back... (I thought the whole point of the DROBO was to protect you from drive failure.)
The other DROBO was connected to a PC running Windows XP. Although it didn't outright fail, its connection to the PC proved somewhat instable. From time to time it would just disconnect.
We decided to sent out two DROBOs back to Newegg. For the price of a DROBO I do expect it to work flawlessly. (And the USB-2 connection is a drag...)
Overall impression: product was released too early. Too expensive for the instability it delivers.
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