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DROBO Storage device

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
FWIW, I have had the new firmware installed for a few days now and it seems very stable and does appear to have alleviated my drive reading problem. Also noteworthy is it does appear to have sped things up significantly(!) I'll run a test later this week to confirm, but definitely seems to be transferring files about 30% faster than before.
 

cjlacz

Member
A little update. I've decided to forgo a Drobo or Raid box, partially because of the prices here. I'm going to build a storage box using ZFS. It's quite nice from what I can tell and should be considerably cheaper. I'm looking at a 9TB server for less then $1500. It can offer protection against either a single or double drive failure and supports hot spares. It's more reliable then a cheap RAID solution and actually looks really easy to set up. It's also really easy to recover if your OS dies for some reason.

Hopefully I'll build it within a couple weeks. If anyone is interested I can either post more about ZFS or how the system build goes.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hi Charles,

Your project sounds very interesting, so please do start a thread outlining your experiences setting up the ZFS box!
 

JimCollum

Member
FWIW, I have had the new firmware installed for a few days now and it seems very stable and does appear to have alleviated my drive reading problem. Also noteworthy is it does appear to have sped things up significantly(!) I'll run a test later this week to confirm, but definitely seems to be transferring files about 30% faster than before.
this only works if your support 'contract' is in effect. if not, then it will not allow you to update firmware (or anything else for that matter).
 
R

Ranger 9

Guest
People planning their storage needs might want to read this white paper (PDF format) from Wiebetech. It discusses the various ways that disk mechanisms can be configured in an enclosure (irrespective of how they're accessed) and gives a statistical treatment of the various configurations' risks of unrecoverable data loss purely as a result of hardware failure.

One key finding is that some multi-disk configurations are more reliable than a single disk, while others are drastically less reliable. And since hard drive manufacturers often don't advertise what drive-mechanism configuration is inside the enclosure, you may not find out you've got the drastically-less-reliable variant until you suffer complete, unrecoverable data loss. (Ask me how I know this...)

Naturally the examples in the white paper mostly reference Wiebetech drive enclosures, but since the statistics deal solely with mechanical failure, they should apply to any type of enclosure. A few factoids are out of date since the paper was written in 2006 (for example, at that time 500GB was the size limit for drive mechanisms, while 1TB mechanisms are widely available now) but the basic principles are still worth understanding.
 

jklotz

New member
I'm about ready to add storage. I thought the Drobo might be a good choice, but after reading the entire thread I'm not sure. I really don't like it that you are charged for updates, it's a friggin' hard drive!

Now that you guys have had yours for a while, what are your feelings? Still happy with it?
 

fotografz

Well-known member
My 1.5 TB issues were sorted out and Drobo gave me a free 1TB drive for my trouble.

The fee is not only for updates, it extends the original warranty. Don't know if it's worth it or not, but I just did it ... at least for this first time.
 

carstenw

Active member
I have had an original one for quite a while now, and didn't have to pay for firmware updates so far, although I have updated. Is that a U.S. thing only?
 
C

curtd

Guest
My Drobo just updated it's firmware this morning, for free and it was easy.

I have 4 1TB's in a 2nd gen Drobo and it works flawlessly, without my having to know how to setup RAID, etc. and it seems to be very stable and secure. So it's not just hard drives, it's a system that works and I gladly pay for anything that flat works! (Like the Mac for instance, I pity anyone stuck in Windoze)
 
D

ddk

Guest
I'm about ready to add storage. I thought the Drobo might be a good choice, but after reading the entire thread I'm not sure. I really don't like it that you are charged for updates, it's a friggin' hard drive!

Now that you guys have had yours for a while, what are your feelings? Still happy with it?
I think that I've had mine longer than most people here, which means that my Drobo is over a year old and I have to pay for firmware updates which I wasn't told about at the time of purchase; and refuse to do so. Specially when its really for bug fixes under the guise of feature enhancements. Like you said its only a hard drive what new tricks is it going to do?

Recently I posted another thread complaining about the time it takes to rebuild 600 gigs of data when I was informed by Drobo's software that I was running out of space and had to replace a drive with a larger one. At the same time I needed to upgrade my in warranty DroboShare but couldn't since the Drobo unit was out of the free service period. Anyway they resolved the issue by allowing a one time Drobo firmware upgrade along with the DS upgrade. After the upgrades I see that the Drobo software is showing only 300 gigs of data instead of the 600+ gigs when it asked for a new drive.

Now you can think of the drive correctly reading the amount of data on it a feature enhancement but its old fashioned BS in my books. It cost me a new drive for nothing along with the inconvenience and risk of losing all my data during the rebuild because of a bug in their software and they expect us to pay them again after selling us an unfinished product. I wish I had customers like that!
 

Terry

New member
My Drobo just updated it's firmware this morning, for free and it was easy.

I have 4 1TB's in a 2nd gen Drobo and it works flawlessly, without my having to know how to setup RAID, etc. and it seems to be very stable and secure. So it's not just hard drives, it's a system that works and I gladly pay for anything that flat works! (Like the Mac for instance, I pity anyone stuck in Windoze)
Ditto on the Firmware upgrade.
 
M

meilicke

Guest
A little update. I've decided to forgo a Drobo or Raid box, partially because of the prices here. I'm going to build a storage box using ZFS. It's quite nice from what I can tell and should be considerably cheaper. I'm looking at a 9TB server for less then $1500. It can offer protection against either a single or double drive failure and supports hot spares. It's more reliable then a cheap RAID solution and actually looks really easy to set up. It's also really easy to recover if your OS dies for some reason.

Hopefully I'll build it within a couple weeks. If anyone is interested I can either post more about ZFS or how the system build goes.
I have built such a system, and for the most part it works quite well. It does stress the rest of the components, such as your switch, network cabling, etc. I'll try to pull some details together and start another thread.

Charles, PM me if you need any assistance. This is my first solaris box, so I'm pretty green, but will help if I can!

-Scott
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Made some update edits on the first post regarding my system.

Bottom line is it's been well over 6 months and this unit is performing its duties admirably. In that time I have had one drive fail. DROBO alerted me, I yanked the bad drive and replaced it, no worries. Unit is very quiet (it's sitting on the floor right under my Mac Pro stand) and so quiet I only know it's there because of the icon on my desktop.

Almost didn't share this -- but at one point I had a small emergency where I needed a drive for another purpose, so figured WTF and yanked one of the drives from DROBO to use temporarily. Not that I'd recommend that as regular practice, but it worked just fine and handled the abrupt yank and subsequent re-insertion a day later with grace ;)
 

mwalker

Subscriber Member
I bought one it arrived Friday. It took me 15 min to set it up and 3 hours for time machine to run a back up. So far I'm impressed, I would recommend it to my mother:D

I like things to be easy.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Since I just got a new laptop a big decision was what to do with 2 tb of shooting data. I had it in my MacPro so this was a big decision what to do. I got one yesterday actually and I had to buy 2 free drives to start than add my other 2 as i loaded them up . Have to say this was about the easiest thing I ever had to do and to make it like my MacPro so I see the icons for three separate drives I just put there alias on the desktop of the three folders on the Drobo. This way my mental thoughts have not changed I just drop folders into the right alias and forget about it. Now this is computing the way it should be done EASY. I still have about 1.5 TB left until I need to bump a drive up to 2gb. I set mine up according to what Jack did and made it 16TB setup . By that time the 2TB drives will be 120 each . Really a nice setup and really helped me on the switch over to laptop only. I have this thing going pretty dang fast for a laptop.
 

Lars

Active member
I went with Netgear, got an NV+ four-disk NAS. It's an outgoing model and it was priced about half of the Drobo with network adapter. The newer Netgear model NVX works more like Drobo in that you can use disks of different sizes.

Netgear is betatesting firmware that supports TimeMachine, but it's not released yet.
 
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