 The most exciting storage product at this price point. |
| Review Date: June 20, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Mitch Haile, San Jose, CA and Boston, MA |
Storage innovation has been ongoing over the years, but there hasn't been a whole lot of "new stuff" lately, and at price points like this, there hasn't been much change at all. Traditionally if you wanted to buy a cheap disk shelf, you'd be looking at something from Apple (discontinued), Promise, possibly Adaptec, NetGear, Iomega for a cheap 1u-style NAS head--at perhaps 4x-8x the price of this Drobo Pro.
But this isn't a NAS head, and it contains 8 drives (though it works fine with fewer). Instead, you're buying a block device that you can use over iSCSI, FW800, or USB.
The key benefit Drobo is selling is the zero management of RAID and volumes and the Drobo Pro delivers on this in a massive scale. Growing a volume is as simple as adding another disk (or swapping out the indicated disk with a larger one). The concepts of RAID-5 or RAID-6 need not be understood or considered by the user other than a checkbox of "do you want this thing to survive two concurrent drive failures?". Rebuilding is taken care of.
Drobo comes with a simple GUI to monitor capacity, show overhead for protection, configure email alerts. I did run into an issue where Drobo wouldn't work with my internal mail server due to a TLS problem, which I haven't debugged much--the mail server supports TLS, so I am not sure what the problem is. The iSCSI set-up was dead easy for me--I plugged in the Drobo with USB (just to get it configured), set the iSCSI IP address, moved the Drobo to the network closet and plugged in Ethernet, and the Mac automatically found and mounted the Drobo volume.
The construction of the unit is solid. It weighs a beefy 20 lbs (empty), and the fit and finish is superb. The drive trays are easy to work with--no screwing drive sleds onto drives or dealing with a flimsy aluminum chassis per drive. This puppy is solid. It comes with all the cables you will need (GigE, USB, FW800, power). I have some enterprise storage systems in the closet along with the Drobo, but none of them intrigue visitors the way the Drobo Pro does. Plus, the Drobo is practically silent with 8 drives in it--No 1u or 3u enterprise system is this quiet.
Performance is very good for the price point--I can do 100 MB/s in test I/O very easily. Xbench shows far better I/O scores than an Apple software RAID, and, mostly, better scores than a single SATA drive. There does appear to be some overhead for the data protection, but it's marginal and beats out cheaper RAID options.
I am mostly using the Drobo Pro for test storage for software I am writing but I am seriously considering buying another Drobo Pro for real live storage for my workstation and reducing the local SATA and FW800 storage.
For the price, there's nothing else out there like this. Sure you can buy some NAS systems from various vendors, or some big honking RAIDs from California Digital or other vendors--but no one bridges the management gap like Drobo does.
Some notes: I have only used the Mac software; I have no idea how Windows support is. I also have been looking into the Linux side of things, where it gets a little more complicated, and the documentation isn't there yet--but Drobo does note Linux is beta at the moment.
The Drobo Pro is well worth the cost for anyone who needs iSCSI or bigger capacities than the regular Drobo affords. Sure, there's just one Ethernet port, and only a single power supply, but this puppy is silly cheap for what it is. Higher end features will mean a higher price, but not everyone needs those features for small office products. For me, this is a winner. I hadn't owned a Drobo before this, but I expect I will be buying more Drobos in the future.
UPDATE 28-Sep-2009: Note that this is a block device. Some other device has to provide and manage the filesystem. If you plan to use this with multiple computers over Ethernet to the same volume, that's not going to fly so well--though the DroboPro should be able to serve up separate volumes (LUNs) to different hosts (haven't tried this myself). iSCSI is just a way to serve up blocks, not provide a shared filesystem. If you are looking for a shared filesystem, you either need some other device/computer to provide NAS (e.g., CIFS or NFS services) with the DroboPro or buy something else. The appeal of iSCSI over Ethernet is cheaper cabling and simpler infrastructure vs FibreChannel. Hope this helps. |
Drobo Pro - Fantastic
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| Review Date: April 6, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Marlon, Los Angeles, CA USA |
I've put it through the ringer for over 6 months. I've lost one drive, and Drobo restored all data without a hitch. I have replaced 4 1TB drives with 2TB (all Hitachi) without any loss of data, etc.
I can't say that I have had the same luck using RAIDs. I love the new non-RAID concept of Drobo. I personally haven't had as many performance problem as others reported, and I work with huge video files 9GB - 60GB typically. I can sleep at night now knowing that our company data is safe.
Things to consider:
- During drive replacement or upgrade Drobo doesn't protect data, and dependent upon the amount of data you have, it may take 2 days to restore a new drive(s)
- Better performance achieved by connecting to second NIC, so you have a dedicated connection directly to Drobo
- On my personal Mac, I have had some connection and setup issues, but once you have everything configured, things just work without incident.
- Drobo is shared by my Mac with the rest of the company. No issues there. I'm buying a 16TB version next and this time connecting that to an Apple server for file sharing and access control. I recommend this, however I haven't had any issues sharing from my personal Apple Tower.
- Highly recommend this to anyone who just wants great backup and assured restore capabilities, without the other issues associated with RAID and RAID hardware. I'm too busy to mess around, Drobo is pretty much plug-and-play, I just didn't really read the manual. RTFM, for sure.
- Don't use Seagate or Maxtor. If i've ever lost any drives in all my PC and MAC years (20+) they have ONLY been Seagate's and now I can add Maxtor to the list. Perhaps, I've just had bad luck, but proof is in the results! I highly recommend Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, and perhaps even Western Digital over Seagate hands down. |
Trouble free storage
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| Review Date: April 20, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Countach, Sydney, Australia |
| I've owned two of these devices for more than 6 months now, and they've given me trouble free expansion of my storage. I bought the 8 drive models on the theory that it will save me money being able to buy cheapest drives, and give me maximum expandibility. For example, right now its nearly 2x as expensive to buy a 2GB drive as a 1.5GB drive, so I can load up on cheaper drives and wait for the more expensive ones to come down in price. I also recovered some drives from old computers I had lying around and other dead equipment, so I have drives ranging from 300GB up to 1.5 TB, and everywhere in between, and have nearly run out of slots as it is. With about 14 drives in use, I've had two die over that time, so the natural attrition will probably allow me to never outgrow them. I have been using them with a Mac Mini being my file server. Highly recommended. |
IT ROCKS
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| Review Date: June 9, 2010 |
| Reviewer: vperl, Clackamas, OREGON |
You do not have one, get one...
The ones that cannot get it to work, are still trying to complain about
lazer disks and VCR formats. Follow the directions, works great.
Right out of Box..... get one, it Rocks . . . works as advertised |
Fast, easy to use
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| Review Date: June 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Steve Mokris, Athens, OH USA |
Dead simple to use compared to any other RAID-ish system I've seen, and more flexible. You can mix drive sizes and it (usually) makes good use of the space (be sure to prototype your configuration first using their online drive calculator). Plus you can replace small drives with larger drives on-the-fly. Rad.
The network iSCSI connection is more than fast enough to edit several simultaneous streams of video.
Some issues:
1. It only supports HFS+ volumes up to 16TB. According to Apple's Technical Note TN1150, HFS+ can technically support volumes up to 8 Exbibytes, so this seems like an arbitrarily low limitation on the part of the DroboPro. I'd rather just create a single humongous volume, and keep expanding actual capacity as larger drives appear, instead of creating multiple 16TB volumes...
2. It doesn't perform Data Scrubbing. So if data gets silently corrupted by bad harddrives, I probably won't know about it until it's too late -- whereas with proactive Data Scrubbing (like that provided by ZFS, for example), inconsistent blocks could be automatically blacklisted.
With these two issues solved, the DroboPro would be perfect. |
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December 19th, 2009 | 
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Posted in Drobo Data Robotics | 
Tags: 2.0firewire, 800iscsi, 8bay, array, data, drobopro, drpr1a21, robotics, storage