Looking to buy a Drobo array

I need to find a good hard drive array mainly for storage of projects that are either completed or as backup for that data. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with or heard anything (good or bad) about the Drobo units? Thanx Barry

No desktop experience in Drobo but from the several demos I've seen it seems a perfect backup system; just pop bare drive sets in and out, it seems to manage them intelligently. Supports FireWire 800 too.

- Loren

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Key word being "bare" drives. The way those systems are sold it's "simple, easy enough for anyone to back up" which is true. The complication being that if you have them located in the same place as say, one of those SATA docks it looks like like it operates on the same idea.

The uninitiated might think that it is just a dock for SATA drives. But it will take any drive that isn't formatted for Drobo and format it for Drobo, erasing whatever is on there. I only know this from a very large red felt tip marker sign in the tape room of a place I freelance at. I don't know exactly what happened but someone popped a full 1 TB SATA drive into the Drobo and lost an archive.

Does anyone who uses them ever switch out a full set of drives and later put that full set back in? Like 5 drives all for one project, and then a whole new empty set for a new project, and then put the old project back in?

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Drobos aren't a bad idea although you can use loads of different drives I'd still recommend using a good quality set of Hitachi HDDs.

They also aren't the fastest backup solution on the block but are pretty universal and easy to run. I have a 14TB Drobo array.

However after a lot of use I would rather have another identical 14TB SAS RAID 6 (which would be a similar cost to the Drobo) which would mean I would either realtime Mirror backup (RAID 1 made up of both RAID 6s for a RAID 61) or (as my RAID 6 is pretty fast at 450 to 900MBps) an incremental backup via Carbon Copy Cloner or Retrospect software (or other backup software).

Drobo manages around 70 to 85MBps when empty(ish) down to 20MBps 70% full

Which is about 7 to 23 times slower.

That would mean if backing up the entire 14TB (although you should never fill over 80% capacity!) the difference of 4.5 to 9 hours to transfer via SAS RAID to SAS RAID or 50 to 200 hours to Transfer via FireWire800/iSCSI!

Also I wouldn't recommend Drobo for swapping out sets of drives - however it should work as long as all the drives are seated properly before boot.

But you really want a "dumb" SATA or SAS controller for that and not one that dynamically concatenates drives!

Have a read of my old article:

[www.lafcpug.org]



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Ben wrote-

[Drobos aren't a bad idea although you can use loads of different drives I'd still recommend using a good quality set of Hitachi HDDs. ]

Even after Western Digital has absorbed them? Who else do you like, Seagate?

- Loren

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The manufacturing is still done by the hitachi factory in the hitachi way - WD branded are also good but Hitachi is still my preference.

Seagate also are good but both WD and Seagate required specific RAID based firmware in the past although I do have 8 Seagate 2TBs in my DroboPro. Whereas the Hitachi Desktop HDDs work without issue in a RAID array.

Hitachi DeskStars or UltraStars are used in a lot of prebuilt RAIDs (CalDigit, G-Tech, etc) and I've found them to be the most reliable (well that and Samsung F1s - which aren't made anymore).



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To add what ben said in my experience drobo's are SLOW.
I use a 4bay for project backup and a client has a drobopro for backing up Datacards. If its a 'write once (overnight) and forget' job then alls well and good but If your going to be writing a lot of media to these things, or your going to want to dip in and out of them to collect media etc don't expect it to happen quickly - the drobo pro in particular can take several minutes just to boot and load itself up, let alone the dismal transfer speeds.
On the upside they really are mind numbingly simple to use. Half the sales pitch seems to be about 'just pop another drive in and forget about it' which is true if you have a half empty unit - but if you already know you need lots of storage then you put all your drives in from day one and then frankly the drobo is like any other.

If speed isn't a worry and you already have a good collections of drives to fill it with the as a very static backup unit they do the trick, otherwise i wouldn't recommend getting one, and i must admit I can't see myself getting another one again.

Plus I like the colored lights, green for OK and red for DANGER WILL ROBINSON... is there amber? I vaguely recollect a MAYBE color.

Ben wrote-

[The manufacturing is still done by the hitachi factory in the hitachi way ]

That's great to know.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Invoke the big TimeCode Viewer with Control -T !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Yes. Yellow is what you get when a drive is getting full and they want you to replace it with a larger drive. Also if there's a minor issue, it may go yellow.