What Is The Drobo? The drobo is a little box you add hard drives to in order to create a huge pool of protected storage for your data. If you have a lot of data you might need an external drive. If you have a ton of data you might need three or four or five external drives! And if that data is important to you, you’ll want to back it up. You can see where I’m going here.
The drobo can hold four SATA hard drives of any size. And if you run out of room you just swap out the smallest sized drive with a larger one. It’s quick, easy, and painless. Now what about backups? The great news is that Drobo makes multiple copies of your data across the hard drives you’ve added. If a drive fails you’ll still have your data. It’s beautiful.
Setting Up
Installing the drobo to my intel mac-mini was a breeze. I installed two drives, plugged it in and began formatting. Next, I started moving all the data from my two MyBook external drives over. Once that was done I extracted the drives from the MyBooks and fed them to the hungry hungry Drobo for formatting.
Three Months Later
I’ve been using the Drobo as part of my home entertainment system. I have a mac-mini I access with FrontRow and the little white mac remote. The drobo stores backups of my DVD collection so I preserve the integrity of the DVD disks.
The Drobo is Loud. The fans rev up and reach their peak when writing lot’s of data. I quickly learned for example that if I’m looking for a quiet evening, I write my data to the internal drive and then copy it over to the Drobo in one fell swoop. Watching a movie off the Drobo will ultimately spin up the fans and become especially annoying (although tolerable) during quieter films. Drobo fan’s won’t complain about a short 30 minute show.
The Drobo is Slow. Don’t expect amazing throughput with this machine. With the virtualization layers and multiple writes to the different drives, it takes some time. The real annoyance here is that a two-hour movie will usually hang a couple times if writes are happening in the background.
The Drobo is Hot. I moved over all my GarageBand audio loops to make space on my internal drive. Now this really gives the Drobo a run for it’s money if you try to work in GarageBand and all its’ real-time glory. I usually stop after thirty minutes or so because the Drobo is just too loud and the drives are so effin’ hot.
What I’ve Learned
Don’t leave any software open that’s going to end up writing to the Drobo. For example if you have iTunes connected to the drobo, close iTunes when you’re done.
Don’t watch a movie AND write to the drobo at the same time.
Don’t download large files directly to the drobo. Download to the internal drive and then move the files over to the drobo.
Conclusion
While I’ve never felt safer with my data, the drobo is not the best solution for a home media system. The biggest drawback is not the slow read/write times which I can live with, but the noise from the fans. I want to be able to watch a two hour movie without the fans spinning up. The fan sound doesn’t overtake the movie audio, but it is noticeable/annoying when they kick in.
Thanks for that Matt
I was looking at the Drobo for my living room setup as well, and am glad to have stumbled upon your thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to jot them down Matt.
I totally agree with you. I
I totally agree with you. I bought drobo instead of a NAS mainly because of the mix & match feature. However i found myself buying 4 identical drives anyway. One thing to notice is that, sometimes the drives inside keep spinning although i dont do any reading or writing at the time. My guess is that it was doing some kind of backing up routine. And last but not least, changing (or adding, or replacing) drives TAKES time. a lot. At a time, when it reached 50% full (about 700GB) i got curious and pulled one of the four drives out, and put it back in. It took this drive as a new one, so it did its reconciling routine, which lasted almost TWO days. yes, TWO effing days, during which i was so horrified as the user manual clearly states that if the power was cut, my data would be gone for good.
I forgot to mention that,
I forgot to mention that, all what i was saying wasn't to make the Drobo looks bad. Because, if you take a look at a ReadyNAS, or a Time Capsule, for example, you'll see very similar comments.
I also agree
Great review. Complements my thougts and experiences with the drobo. Especially the generated heat and noise. But i learned that closing the faceplate helps for better cooling.
On the first time i start using the drobo with two disks. The whole time i let the faceplate open (to look at the fancy lights). One of the drives died by heat (i think so). The drives are so damn hot that i coudn't touch them for a while. After that experience i bought an digital thermometer with an small external sensor. I installed now four drives (2 x 1 TB, 1 x 400, 1 x 500) and placed the sensor in the upper half of the disks and closed the faceplate. It was interesting to see the self-adjusting fan-system which won't work before with removed faceplate acts now as expected. Seems to me that the air vents of the faceplate forces the air stream in some way.
Keep the faceplate on
That's a great tip! Keeping the faceplate on keeps the auto-adjusting fans working as expected.
Thanks for the review. I am
Thanks for the review. I am looking for a home storage solution for my media center. While the drobo looks like a great idea I may hold off on buying it for a while to see if they can resolve any of these issues.
Next Version
Good idea. The drobo has a lot of potential and I can only hope they're working on drobo 2.0 to address some of the frustrations with this version.
Drobo 2.0 is out July 8
It's significantly faster, and the fans are quieter. They sell the 1.0 model for $350, and the new 2.0 is at the old price point of $500.
http://twipphoto.com/archives/593
http://www.drobo.com
Drive Life Expectancy
Hi great review!!!
Im looking to buy one as i generate very large photoshop files for work (illustration student) and need to know there safely backed up.
I've never used hard drives on there own (other than external western digital my books, which are always dying, grrr)
whats the life expectancy of drives used with drobo, or is it just sods law when they die?
cheers
great
oh, it's great
I saved $50 at drobostore with this code: ACNCHE
2 of my friends have the drobo and love it. They do a lot of RAW photography and video editing.
I also have been hearing great things on the TWiT podcasts. It sounds like all the guys use them.
I just picked up one at Drobostore.com and entered this code
ACNCHE
it gave me $50 off the price instantly. I picked up one without drives and I'll go get cheap ones. 1 TB drives are just dropping below $99 so its a good time to buy. I'll post an update when I have it all set up but I can't wait.
rob
Guess you must be a
Guess you must be a corporate shill, if you check all the comments in drobo related posts on other blogs you see the same code from you repeatedly. Not a great way to do business dishonestly...
HUBBMdtUDqfPU
good job.good lucky))
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Drobo 2
I purchased Drobo 2 in December. I had some problems, but I will say that the folks at Data Robotics went way out of there way to give me superior support. It turned out that 2 out the 4 drives I purchased with the unit were DOA. But they shipped me a new unit as part of the trouble shooting process. And continued to monitor my system for a while to make sure things were good.
The unit is quiet and extremely reliable. It has an updated power supply and fans vs. the Drobo 1.
I recommend getting 7200 rpm drives vs. the WD Green drives that I purchased.
I would highly recommend B&H Photo for the best price. It beats the discount on the Drobo site. At least the bundle was cheaper.
But I highly recommend the Drobo, and the Drobo 2 is definitely faster than the Drobo with the Droboshare.
My only complaint is the faceplate. Two of the lights can't be seen with the faceplate on. Power and data transfer.
wczasy
While I’ve never felt safer with my data, the drobo is not the best solution for a home media system.
Can you believe I hadnt even
Can you believe I hadnt even heard of Drobo until now? It seems pretty sweet aswell, and convenivent. Should help with the backing up of a 1TB HDD :)
I picked up one without
I picked up one without drives and I'll go get cheap ones. 1 TB drives are just dropping below $99 so its a good time to buy. I'll post an update when I have it all set up but I can't wait.
Will there be a market for this....
I bought it too and as the review says its quite loud, though i couldnt complain about its speed.
think so
Where can I buy Drobo - this smarty box...
"Where can I buy Drobo -
"Where can I buy Drobo - this smarty box..."
I'd like to know also
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