Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0
As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, Data Robotics has created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.
Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 Accessories
 Droboshare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo
Western Digital 500GB 3.5", SATA, 16MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD5000AAKS
Seagate ST31000340AS 1TB Barracuda Sata 7200 Rpm 32MB Cache 8.5MS Hard Drive
Western Digital WD10EACS Caviar GP 1 TB SATA II 3.5-Inch Hard Drive
Western Digital WD5000KSRTL Caviar 500 GB SATA Hard Drive
Western Digital Caviar GreenPower 1TB SATA Hard Drive - 5400 RPM, 16MB
Seagate ST3750640AS-RK Barracuda 750 GB SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
Seagate ST3500641AS-RK Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A
Hitachi Deskstar 0A34915 HDS721010KLA330 7K1000 1 TB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive
Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 Reviews
I own three Drobos. Unfortunately, it seems there is a lot that can cause it to break (even specific brands and models of HDDs seem to be incompatible although one can only find out after owning a Drobo and accessing the User Forums part of the website.). (The other required a series of reboots and rebuilds before the data was accessible again, the whole process took almost 3 weeks).
The worst part: Drobo Customer Support is unreachable, non-responsive, and generally unhelpful. When it works, it's fine. Great concept, lousy execution, even worse support.
When it breaks, there's nothing you can do. Avoid. In the last 2 months, two of them have failed; one terminally so, taking with it ~1TB of data.
Thirdly, under Linux it seems like the first time the drive is mounted on system boot, it fails quickly, so I need to try and mount the drive twice which increments the drive letters for the system. I've been incredibly impressed at just how easy the Drobo is to use, just plug it in, throw in a couple of hard drives, and you've got an ever expanding file system. I can get about 25MB/s from the Drobo, which is more than enough for multiple high definition video streams. What does this mean for you. Along with the Drobo I purchased a pair of Western Digital 1TB Green Power drives. I haven't seen any other enclosures that allow this. No more wondering what to do when your RAID 5 array becomes full.
One of the biggest features you get with it is the ability to have on-the-fly limitless expansions, which allows you to incrementally increase the size of your array without having to worry about matching disks. Of course, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say some things that are sorta strange and less than ideal about the Drobo. It's so simple, I just don't need to worry about my drives anymore. The Drobo is not cheap, but it's also not the most expensive of external enclosures. Finally, there is no network interface for the Drobo.
Unfortunately, the setup of many media center computers makes it difficult to add drives either because the drives would make too much noise, or because the case isn't large enough to add drives to. The Drobo even provides helpful lights so you can see when you need more disk space. The Drobo just works something that is all too rare in technology today. After using it for a while, I wonder why I didn't do it before. No more mucking around with software raid. Then I copied all my data over to the Drobo, broke down the RAID, and moved two of the drives into the Drobo to give me more space.
Most of the time the fan isn't running, and even when it does run, it's quiet enough that the TV or stereo easily drowns it out even when listening at moderate volumes. As an experienced system administrator and generally picky person about computers, I was really hesitant about purchasing a Drobo and losing some of the minute controls you can have over a RAID system. You can pick up a Drobo Share to go along with it, but you're probably hooking the Drobo up to some home media server, so it shouldn't matter anyway. So, once your external RAID-5 is full, on a traditional system you'll need to spend lots of money to upgrade all your drives all at once not so with Drobo. Second, my first Drobo had a bad fan, luckily Data Robotics' customer support was able to ship me a new Drobo with no difficulty. Media center PCs are an indispensable part of your entertainment center, but once you start recording high definition video, they fill up quite quickly, leading you with a desire for more disk space. Other folks will raise an issue with the price.
What's better is that the Drobo takes care of all the mundane issues such as setting up RAID and doing data integrity checks for you. The Drobo just takes care of it. My Drobo was purchased to replace a 4x320GB drive RAID-5 array for Linux and MythTV. Enter Drobo to the rescue.
No more managing drive health. Setting up the Drobo was trivial, plug it in, plug in the drives, and format the drobo. Truthfully, I've hardly noticed the noise of the Drobo in my media center. Some people have raised issues about the noise of the Drobo.
First, it takes a while to boot up when power is restored. Pick up new drives at your pace. Usually just a couple of minutes, but if you tell it to allow for very large volumes, it can take much longer.
Love this product. A completely redundant back-up with no set up. The manufacturers packaging I recieved my DROBO in is just as impressive as the DROBO itself. I bought this item based on a freinds recomendation, they were spot on. I could hardly believe how easy this was.
At this point I cut my losses and returned it to the store where I bought it before the 30 day money back guarantee ran out. I spoke to Drobo who suggested I use Disk Warrior to check the drive (a $99 dollar program), I have a copy so used it and the resulting diagnosis was that the Drobo unit is faulty.
I just returned my Drobo after it lost 1.2TB of video files. I was then told to mail it to Germany (I am in the UK) and they would send another one which may, or may not, be able to read the hard drives created by the first one, depending if the first one trashed them.
The dashboard then showed that the drive was completely empty, whereas the drive itself (which was still appearing on the desktop) had a small fraction of the files it should have had. If you buy it don't rely on it.
(I bought it from local store not Amazon). It's a great idea, but after two weeks the unit gave an error message in drobo dashboard on start-up, saying it could not repair the drive.
I really wanted this peice of kit to work but unfortunately it looks like it needs more work before prime time.
It'll make two small ones. act as a single large partition otherwise. Their RMA policies blow. Will NOT. Also, do not buy it from NewEgg. This machine is only worth it if you run new MacOS or, I believe, Vista.
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