I'm currently packing up a lot of stuff, and I just came across the many hard drives I was holding onto to use in a possible Drobo purchase. I probably wouldn't use these anymore, seeing as only two are 750GB and the other five are less than 250GB, but I'm still curious about trying a Drobo or something like it. Are they any good? Are they reliable?

I don't plan on working from this drive for daily-use files. This is more of a background storage, and perhaps for streaming video. I plan to store stuff on this thing that wouldn't be the end of the world if it got deleted. It might also by my local mirror of the stuff I have on my Crashplan backup.

So what do you think of Drobo? I'm drawn to the idea of mixed discs, and of being able to easily swap out any failed drive. If those things don't work well, it would be good to know. I really don't feel like managing a NAS or do much/any work on it.

I have used three Drobos. An original 4-bay Drobo attached via USB2, original Drobo Pro (8-bay) attached with iSCSI, and I currently use a Drobo S (5-bay) attached via FW800.

On the 4-bay, I once ran into a problem expanding the volume. I believe I was going from four 750GB disks to four 1TB disks. The first three 1TB went through relayout fine. The last one couldn't for some reason. Drobo couldn't figure it out either, and they sent me another 4-bay unit to try with my existing disk pack. They did this a few months outside of my original warranty, which I think was a nice gesture. In the end, I decided to keep my original unit since I did a fan mod on it. I didn't lose any data since three of the four drives were always working. I moved it all off to external hard drives, built the 4x1TB volume from scratch, and then put the data back on. After that debacle, I upgraded that same drobo months later to 4x2TB disks without any issue.

We used a Drobo Pro with dual disk redundancy at work for a couple years. It hosted backups, disk images, and all kinds of miscellaneous stuff. It was connected via 1Gbps iSCSI, but it was slow as hell. We still have this unit in the closet since its firmware is stuck in a time warp. Again, Drobo support can't figure out what's wrong. It simply can't have its firmware (for larger HD support) upgraded through any means. It still works, you just can't put in disks with 4K sectors until the firmware situation is worked out. Lame.

At my house, I currently use a Drobo S hooked up via FW800 to a Mac Mini. This is my file server which contains five 3TB drives (single disk redundancy). By far, this is the fastest Drobo I've owned. It's still nowhere near as fast as a single SATA drive, but copying a file to it doesn't make you want to cry. The Drobo S was originally populated with 2TB disks. The upgrade to 3TB disks happened without any drama.

While the Drobo masks the RAID setup, it's still RAID under the hood for the most part. Putting in mixed drive sizes will not result in the availability of all the space. They have a drive space calculator here, and watch as the purple "reserved for expansion" part appears when mixing drive sizes. http://www.drobo.com/products/capacity-calculator/

Their tech is pretty much identical to what Netgear calls XRAID-2, and what other vendors also support.

The main differences out there all come down to your needs. Do you just want a larger local disk attached over USB? Or do you want a box that sits on the network and shares files to any computer?

Thanks for the input, guys. That's a great history, Rob.

Tom, I do just want a drive attached to my computer. I have a smaller NAS for stuff to share on the network, but I don't have much need for that, even. The Drobo would be for fairly specific uses. Crashplan backs up to local external drives in addition to the cloud, so the Drobo would be great for that. It would also be ideal for the stuff that populates my Plex server, if you know what I mean.

This would be a ways off, but I appreciate the input.

Synology are quite good, in my experience. They do require some more work to configure all drives, but that should not be a problem for you. Also, they have a nice and quite advanced web based GUI.

I used both a Drobo FS (1GBbps) and a S attached via SATA, and while the FS was not bad, I would recommend the S via SATA in terms of performances. They both seemed a nicely built devices. Because they were part of a project that we concluded, I haven't been using them for months. I used them for 6 months, only, in any case, so while I was happy with them, I can't speak about their reliability.
Oh, the FS was upgraded from a 3x2TB configuration to a 4x2TB (added 1 HDD) without any issue.

On a side note: are you still happy with Crashplan, Matt? I never got around using it, but I am still thinking I should.

I'm still very happy with CrashPlan, running well on four machines here.

It isn't perfect, but better than Mozy and Carbonite for my needs.

Tom, X-Raid 2 cannot be sized DOWN, Drobo can. Drobo can also make use of additional space when adding an odd number of drives, ReadyNAS's X-Raid 2 can't do the same thing here either.

But... ReadyNAS is pretty fast, easily 70-100MB/s on a single GigE connection. Drobo is at most, a fraction of that.

I think Crashplan is great. It has a couple quirks, and their software could use some work, but that's not a big deal because I never have to actually use the software. Everything is just backed up and I don't have to think about it. The only times I think about it are once a week when I get an email telling me how backed up my various computers are (including various family members).

It's the least expensive service with the most features. I don't know how long that'll hold, and they could be out of business in a couple years, but at that time I can just switch to another backup provider.

Without wanting to derail the thread too much, another happy Crashplan user here. Yes the frontend software is a bit sparse but it does the job and so far every time I've done a check (or simply used the web interface to access a file remotely), the files have been there without issue.

There are a few little bugs I see here and there but they don't affect the service quality.

I paid upfront for 4 years unlimited (about $280) and I'm just over 12 months in on that.

I've done this every so often too, and I've had the same experience. This is an essential part of a backup process, IMO. If you haven't tested a random file retrieval, you have no idea if your backup is working. I've seen/heard of many corrupted backups that gave no indication there was anything wrong.


That's what I paid for too. It's their most expensive plan, covering up to 10 computers with unlimited data. One computer unlimited is about half that, and one computer for 10GB is about half again. You pay a little more if you pay for less time up front.

I am still considering using the crashplan client to backup to/from a friend's house, so that we each have a local copy of the other's most relevant data. This brings me back on topic, as I am too considering getting a Drobo just for that. Because I have a server at home, I don't need the FS version, but rather the S version to connect via eSATA to the server.
Alternatively, I see Drobo has announced a 5D version (USB3+Thunderbolt), which on paper should perform even better if you have one fo the two interfaces available.

One more thing about the Drobo that you may find useful: it is not as quiet as the Synology I've used. Because I only used those in a office with various PC and equipment, I can't tell how noisy it would sound at home. Since I could tell the difference between the Drobo and the Synology (the latter being virtually inaudible), I tend to be a bit careful in recommending the Drobo in those cases where you keep it on your desk very close to you, though.

Drobo 5N is Amazon's current Gold Box Deal at $469.99