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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byAnonymous Coward writes:
And one NAS shall bind them all. http://www.drobo.com/ [drobo.com] If I could have afforded it I would have bought a drobo. I ended up with a Thecus (strange name) instead. Don't get me wrong it's a nice little unit but the documentation is horrible and the KB is not much better.
Shoehornjob
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) writes:
Unless you are absolutely phobic about exposure to harrowingly technical terms like "raid5", you should approach the drobo with notrivial caution.
They are quite pricey for their size and performance, which has historically been pretty tepid. Probably worse than that(which is a set of vices shared with quite a few other underpowered NAS units), is that their "BeyondRAID" system makes up for some powerful features by being Just Fucking Weird in some annoying ways.
Perhaps my least favorite is the ghastly hack that they use to make automatic array expansion 'easy'. To quote from their getting started guide:
"- Volume size does not represent how much actual storage space is available on
your Drobo/Pro/S. It represents virtual storage space. For example, your Drobo/
Pro/S may be loaded with 2TB of hard drive space, but you can create a volume
of 8TB. What this enables you to do is add more capacity to your Drobo/Pro/S (by
inserting an additional drive or replacing a smaller capacity drive with a larger
capacity one) without having to format an additional volume. The additional
capacity becomes part of the same volume you formatted originally.
- Your operating system may show the virtual space you have available on your
Drobo device, as defined by the volume size."
Yup. Unlike traditional RAID, you don't have to break and re-create the array to enlarge it, which is nice; but only if you initially create the volume to appear as large or larger than the expanded array. So, either you ignore the handy expansion feature, or you have a volume that your OS thinks is larger, possibly substantially so, than it physically is(just like a counterfeit fleabay flash drive...) Nothing bad can possibly come of having your OS and filesystem capacity numbers being based on lies, with the only true capacity report being through the proprietary dashboard application... Their oddity and heavy dependence on nonstandard host software is also an issue with their higher end iSCSI-supporting products. "- You can purchase an add-on gigabit Ethernet adapter card for your computer if
needed. Note, however, that a regular network adapter card is required, as Data
Robotics, Inc., does not support iSCSI-specific cards, or HBA (host bus adapter)
cards."
Hooray, pay the substantial premium for an iSCSI model vs. the equivalent NAS unit, and don't even get HBA support...(an 8 bay NAS, for example, starts at $2,500. 8 bays of SAN, $3,999...)
I'm not saying that they are a terrible product; but you really have to hate the limitations of normal RAID or make strong aesthetic demands of your storage arrays before it becomes worth looking.
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byBLKMGK ( 34057 ) writes:
I've nwo met two different people who have had Drobo fail on them. One was a port that went up in smoke - literally - and the other just had performance nosedive for no obvious reason. Both moved to unRAID and the guy who had the bad performance found no issues with his drives. Drobo has some nice features but at the end of the day I'm happy using something I built so that if I need to replace or repair it's easy - and drive expansion is as easy as slapping a drive on another port and adding it. I just have
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) writes:
I haven't really been able to get a good sense of Drobo reliability at the population level. There are certainly enough horror stories in the wild to incline one not to trust them more than other storage appliances as a class; but I've also had the (dis)pleasure of observing RAID cards that cost more than the low to midrange Drobos, never mind the chassis and redundant PSUs, murder-suicide with all the data downstream of them...
They certainly don't seem to be markedly better than the competition in their
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