Drobo Review
My Drobo is great! It’s changed the way I keep track of all my digital assets.
I looked around and the best price I can find for the Drobo S is at Amazon. There are a few models, but I think the Drobo S with 5 drive bays is the best bang for the buck.
I used to have a fool-proof 17-step backup and workflow for my photos. If you are anything like me, you have a cobbled-together system of keeping track of digital photos that may or may not involve multiple drives, external backups, and a lot of forgetting about what is on what drive at what time.
Now that I have a Drobo, now there is a 1-step process. In fact, I can almost say it’s not even 1-step… because it’s just a 0-step way of handling my entire library, while ensuring its backed up.
Rather than tell you ALL the ways you can use a Drobo, I’ll tell you how mine works. Note, this is not a description of my entire photo workflow, but perhaps the most important piece of it.
The Drobo is a little external drive robot that has drive slots. It doesn’t require any screwdrivers, mounting rails, or any of that nonsense. You can put any SATA drives inside any of the slots. I bought a few 1.5 TB drives (about $100 each) and put them in the first two slots. After I hooked it up to my Mac (but same with PC), it showed up as ONE external drive. I hooked it up to my computer with the included Firewire 800 cable. It also comes with a USB2.0 cable, but that is a little slower.
Over time, I added more drives as my data library grew. I just bought them on Amazon, they arrived, and I slipped them in less than 45 seconds. Crazy-easy!
There is a 4-drive Drobo, a 5-drive Drobo (The Drobo S that I recommend), and a huge 8-drive Drobo.
I moved over my entire Lightroom catalog to the Drobo. And that was it. Now I run the library from the Drobo itself. The Drobo automatically backs everything up to the second HD inside. And, as time goes on and it fills up, I simply add more drives to the Drobo and/or replace smaller drives with bigger drives…the Drobo takes care of all replication! Here are some questions you might ask:
1) Why are you running the main library off your Drobo?
I use Lightroom to import all my photos, rate them, and then select my favorites for editing in Photoshop and/or Photomatix. All of that stuff takes place in RAM or VM on my main system anyway, so HD speed is not much of an issue. Furthermore, I never have to think about the last time I backed up anything… because every move I make is duplicated on the Drobo.
2) What makes the Drobo better than any other external drive?
Aha! Now the beauty of the Drobo arrives. Once my 2 drives are full (Drobo tells me with a nice orange light), I simply slide in another cheap drive, and it takes care of everything. Even better, in 1.5 yeas when all those drives fill up, I TAKE OUT the 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 or 4 TB drive, and then Drobo takes care of all the replication.
Hey,
I decided to go the Drobe route and have been dragging my feet .. due to drive hell… thanks .. I”ll place my order later in the day …
I am going to start with four 1 TB drives… any thoughts?
thanks so much …
Kathy
Sounds good to me — that should get you by for a while!
[...] I have started using a Drobo and I love it! I put together a little Drobo review here on the [...]
Glad to see you’re enjoying your Drobo – we purchased one at my last job, and I think it’s a great device.
However, as a guy with 10+ years experience in various IT environments, I’d highly recommend that you don’t consider a mirrored drive a form of backup. While it should ensure that you don’t lose the data on your Drobo, there are a number of things that the Drobo won’t protect you from. These include corrupted files, accidental deletion, and theft or destruction of your Drobo. Also, it’s not impossible for more than one drive to fail at once.
Since your data is probably one of your most important (and irreplaceable) possessions, you should also be investing in some sort of off-site backup, at least on a weekly or monthly basis.
Anyway, love your work and would hate to see you lose any of it.
- Ian
We have a couple dozen of these at my work — we do a lot of DNA sequencing with the so called “next generation” technology and with this stuff generate terabyte after terabyte after terabyte…. The drobos are a godsend!! I’ve been oogleing them since they came out to manage my own burgeoning cache of digital photos…
I have 2 Drobo’s. I love how protective they are with the drives. I’ve had 2 drive failures and it made sure everything was ok. Be sure to upgrade the firmware to 1.3.0 as it fixed a connection bug. But it may not affect the Firewire Drobo. Mine are the USB2 based Drobo’s
I also bought a Drobo last week
For the moment I’m still in the testing phase.
I would be careful to call your data backed up. It’s only safe now for a drive failure. It is still no protection for theft, fire, viruses and/or accidental deletion. Also keep in mind that when you are using four drives in the Drobo you have a four times bigger chance to get a drive failure. When this happens you are in the danger zone for several hours, even after inserting a new disk.
Hey, this is Tom from Data Robotics! Cool review! Glad to know Drobo is making your life easier. I use my Drobos for primary storage for my Aperture library.
I’d echo some of the other posters and recommend also adding an offsite layer into your digital asset management process. Drobo is great, but unfortunately hurricanes, earthquakes, theft, accidental deletion and three year old children are hazards that can only be protected through offsite. I personally use and recommend a dual Drobo strategy. I have one at home and one at the office. I initially synced them both direct attached. I then took one offsite and now I use free software from Crashplan.com to sync the differentials between the two Drobos over the Internet (fully encrypted).
Also to, Caddymob, the fellow who posted on this thread from the genetics labs with a couple dozen Drobos…Please drop me a line at tloverro {at} datarobotics [dot] com as I’d be interested in learning more about how you’re using them!
I really like the concept and the way it works, excellent product, it just seems to be an awful lot of money for what it realistically is, here in the UK it’s pretty much £400, which is crazy! I just couldn’t imagine paying more than £200 for it in my opinion.
Fairly standard Raid 1 Box IMO I have been using Ready Nas NV+ (http://www.readynas.com/?cat=4) for a few years now.
I have moved all my files that I normally move from PC to New PC on it. The only difference I see is that this is USB where the Ready NAS is a Ether net solution. You just plug it into your network and every computer on your home network can access it.
Also comes with some nice addons for sharing photos and a streaming video to your media center. Also set it up to be a web server for family and friends, IMO the performance of the web server is poor. but for storing files it is excelent.
Trey
Thanks for the update. The only thing that is stopping me from drobo is their proprietary mirroring mechanism. If drobo fails, I read it is very expensive to retrieve the data from it, in case of failure.
Hya,
I just wanted to say that the drobo is a really nice kit for redundant storage.
It is a little expensive if you have a bit of experience with Linux and afford the time to maintain a server at home.
But aside from that, the drobo is a solid, well thought out solution that offers some robust redundancy management with spectacular ease of use. Good stuff! [I don't work for them]
Cheers,
Pedro.
I’ve got four drobos. They’re great. Replicated primary storage is the only way to go these days.
I am sure you make this part of your workflow, but just in case others decide to adopt a Drobo or any other type of solution like this, don’t forget to keep a 2nd or 3rd backup offsite. These machines are great, but this puts all you work in one basket, so get a second basket somewhere else in case of fire, earthquake, or other natural disaster.
Good shooting.
I’ve been looking at drobo for a home server. As compared to Windows Home Server (HP box is nice)
Home Server Functionality required:
1. Internet Access to Drobo & connectivity to all systems connected…
2. DLNA – I would eventually like access to videos, music, pictures, etc from TVs located around house.
Would love to hear experiences people have had with DroboApps: Yoics & Fuppes..
Final – Would like to see Drobo cost reduction. Could instantly drop $200 if Gigi Ethernet were included in main box in place of Fire wire.
Hey Trey,
Did you look into the Iomega IX4 NAS system at all? I am a few months from needing a new storage solution and trying to get honest reviews on both sides. This was a good review though (most reviews just say “I love it” but don’t explain why. Sigh.
I’ve had several photographers tell me these are great in concept, but too slow as primary working drives. The statement that all of your Photoshop work takes place in RAM and virtual ram is true if you have small files, but that doesn’t take into account opening, saving as you work and finally closing files, all of which are drive intensive. And, there are other apps than PS to consider.
One question: if you have three or four drives and you pull a full drive to archive it, does it contain the complete contents of one drive, or is it partial?
I have a Drobo or two too. Please note that the Drobo protects against drive failure. But, someone can still open the Drobo, select all and throw the files in the trash.
Also, when the Drobo’s volumes get fullish (mine report 30 Gig free), file processing grinds to a halt. My recommendation is to format the Drobo when you get it to 8 or 16 TB and then when you need more space, just pop in another drive and wait 48 hours while it does its thing.
Hey Trey are you a MAC or PC. I enjoy reading your reviews, thanks.
Thx – I use both mac and pc — mac mostly for photography
Hi Trey,
First and foremost I want to congratulate you for your awesome work.
Now about the Drobo review, I got myself wondering how do you store your files while travelling, since you travel quite a lot.
I imagine that, at the end of the day, when you get back to the hotel, you may want to empty your flash cards and store your daily work somewhere else. If that is the case, what kind of data storage equipment do you use to that purpose?
I guess it’s easier to slip on your bag one of those 500GB Western Digital or iomega external drives, than taking the Drobo. But on the other hand, I am not sure if you can rely on these external drives, since they are prone to “catastrophes” (and I say this because I’ve had some nasty troubles with one of those little suckers).
So I was wondering how do you manage to securely store your files while travelling.
Thank you for sharing your work, tutorials and reviews, and I wish you the best!
Thanks! Well – what you are describing is a different process that does not include the drobo – I will talk about that some day!
Maybe make a quick video
I’m using two Drobo’s to store and backup my photos. They are great but as other’s have said above, just because your files are on a Drobo, that does not mean they are backed up. If two drives fail, all your files, including your Lightroom catalog will be lost. That’s why I have two Drobo’s, one for my Archives and one for backup. You should also have a copy of everything off site, so if something happens to your hardware, you don’t loose everything.
Your HDR pictures are great. I’ve never taken one before, going to try it out.
Thanks!
Just wanted to re-state the obvious in hope you don’t experience catastrophic loss in the case of a problem. Your statement:
The emphasis should be on “duplicated”, really. That means that anything you perform on your filesystem, will be automagically duplicated onto the mirrored drive. That includes any changes you make to a file, or a deletion. A mirrored array should NEVER be used for backup. It is only used for reliability. A proper file backup would allow you to recover from an unwanted change or a deletion.
Hope this helps.
I’ve tried several NAS and RAID setups. I finally settled on the Drobo. 1st off – software RAID sucks – don’t even think about it. 2nd al the NAS/RAID solutions sucked for speed – example would be the Buffalo TeraStation. As one poster mentioned if you feel good about Linux then you could in fact throw together a NAS/RAID box yourself. Guess what? A decent hardware RAID controller will set you back $250 at least – then your other hardware will cost at least the same; motherboard, RAM, CPU, case, powersupply. By the time you finish you have a fairly large machine sitting there that does pretty much what the Drobo does for the same price – maybe even more. Nahhhh – my time’s worth more than that. Like Trey I copied over my entire Lightroom catalog to my Drobo with my initial 3×1.5TB drives. You know three days later one of those spanky new drives took a dive. Drobo recovered flawlessly when I plugged in a new drive. It’s got my vote! All the prices I used for comparison were at the local Fryes we have here in Austin.
Oh – and the Drobo does not mirror – it is a form of RAID 5 to the best of my knowledge. Acts like RAID 5 anyway. The big difference is zero admin – the Drobo takes care of all that crap. Anyway a mirrored drive would use two drives and simple echo the info – in fact the Drobo uses about 1/3 of the available space for recovery *information* and this information is used to recover the data. Similar to the way a PAR file works.
Coud you ask Data Robotics to enable the code also for the european store?
Regards
[...] Drobo Review [...]
Since buying my Drobo I have never worried about backing up to external hard drives or burning to dvd’s etc. With 4 1 tera/b drives in my Drobo I now have 2.6 t/b of redundant storage. Life is good
Bernie
The Drobo looks like an incredible solution to my dilema I’m in now actually. I’m actually starting out in design but I have most of my storage on board in an XPS system. Most tower systems do not have the space for 4 drives like what I currently have and they don’t have the ability to quickly back up or quickly disconnect. Having the ability to take the drives with you or quickly upgrade is a huge benefit. Granted Drobo has a bigger price tag, but the benefits are huge! And for someone with my qualifications in working with graphics, web, photos and video it is an essential.
Do note that the 4 disk Drobo has no fail safe in place during the time it is replicating data accross drives.
When a drive fails and you put a new one in there, you won’t have a full redundant back-up until replication across the new drive has finished. The newer Drobo S does not have this problem IF you enable 2 drive redundancy.
Also beware of the thought: “I got my nice little Drobo now, my back-up is all set now.” One power spike that fries your Drobo + contents and you still lost everything. If your data is too important to lose. Consider using a back-up service like Mozy, Carbonite or some similar solution.
This is awesome, I would use my Drabo to back up the 45,000 family pictures I have now. This would save my marriage in case of of hard drive failure.
I lost lots of important data when the 2 drive mirrored backup NAS suffered an electrical fault that fried both drives.
You really need a second drobo at the other end of the house, or better yet one that gets stored elsewhere to protect against theft, fire, flood or electrical surge at your home/office. You haven’t averted single point failure yet of what is one of your most valuable possesions.
I have now had the Drobo for about a year now. I also have the Buffalo TeraStation and Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. The Buffalo is seriously lacking bells and whistles. It doesn’t support expandability but in the 2+ years I’ve had it, it has never lost or corrupted a file. The ReadyNAS is very loaded with features. It even allows you to hot swap and upgrade the drives. It is also very dependable and I have never lost a file on it (even though I have lost a drive). Drobo…is fancy and just a slick unit. Not to strong in features and certainly not very dependable. I have lost files…twice. The first time was because I filled up the drive too much. Instead of just refusing to accept new data, it corrupted the volume. When I called Drobo, they said that that was by design so that you could add a larger drive without resizing the drive. Bad design. I like ReadyNAS’s approach better. It just gives you a full drive error and then you can hot swap each of the drives (1 by 1 with a few hours reload in-between). The second time for losing everything on the volume was tonight. All I did was enable Apps. I haven’t called Drobo tech support yet because it’s Christmas today. But I have little hope of a recovery based upon what tech support told me last time. I don’t recommend Drobo. It’s a great unit on the surface and if you don’t compare it against the competition. But dig below the surfaced, its really not that impressive.
Do NOT rely on Drobo solely.
Do NOT believe your data is totally safe.
O.k….dramatic….but after my experience and research….and further to what others have already said….Drobo can lose your data. I have the version that Trey has shown above.
The main problem is that the file structure can become corrupted easily. This may be due to various issues (improper shutdowns, pulling usb out etc.). What happens is that one day you have 500 GB of data and then zip….zilch…nada…..it reports that that no data is present and presents you with an empty root directory…..when this happened to me….it was a shock….I looked at drive recovery programs and various forums for a solution to recover the data……and nothing helped….except for one suggestion in an obscure forum somewhere…..swap the drives round…..I did and phew….it recovered…..BUT…..that was a shock…and others I’ve heard haven’t been so lucky……so the strategy for me, at least was that:
1) I bought allsync synchronisation program…..extra hard drive….and set allsync to keep backup on the extra drive.
2) Signed up with backblaze…and got some offsite back up. Problem here though is that upload speed is slow and over 6 months I’ve managed to only get 100Gb up…..so some prudence is required as to what you backup offsite to reduce volume.
3) Bought an extra drive for Drobo
It’s what everyone tells you…..have multiple backup strategies…..Drobo is fallible…..
On a positive note, it has saved me from a drive failure….
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Drobo but with caveats.
The costs to you are more than the cost of the Drobo…you have additional drives to buy for it, then further drives to back up Drobo, offsite backup costs and additional software to help backup.
Hi Trey, thanks for all your suggestions and thanks for the further input from forum contributors,
RE Back up.
I was just wondering if it was possible to configure drobo so you can rotate Drives ie pull out one drive and store it remotely replacing it with another drive so providing you with a back up.
one question it poses is what happens if you insert a drive into drobo with data already on does it assimilate the data or format the drive etc ?
Most of the online backup suggestions are impractical for me , shooting in RAW 30MB file size and on an average week shooting over 2000 pics and here in aus upload speeds are slow and expensive.
if the above suggestion is crazy , can anyone suggest any software that will back up and keep HDs in order, bearing in mind that i work in more than one location so i frequently disconnect hard drives and use them in other locations.
Thanks in advance for you comments,
Blue Skies!
Kev.
Well… hum… I have been through two USB Drobos and numerous problems. I’ve had to reformat the thing no less than 3 times. Recently their tech support has pretty much moved to Jupiter and they are using the long galaxy orbital path to return any kind of response.
I’m not here to trash Drobo just to give a little heads up. Before you buy based on one review search the net. There are tons of Drobo failures, problems, issues. No system is perfect and online storage is unfortunately not cheap yet.
I use Amazon S3 which runs about 15 cents per gigabyte per month with some transfer costs as well. While I’m not a huge photographer, my library, including iTunes is close to 200g. So my monthly cost would be about $30 a month or so. It seems the more you put on Amazon S3 the cheaper it gets. If you were to put 500 TB (yes thats TB… Terrabytes) up there you are now down to $0.10 per GB. I don’t even want to try to do the math on that…
Anyway back to the issue at hand. I’m sitting here today with my noisy, slow, generation 1 Drobo 20 feet away from me annoying the hell out of me and I’m looking at replacing it with a Promise DS4600 4 bay RAID device. It has great reviews, good transfer speed, etc. Warrantied for 3 years. The cost of this device is $349. But I struggle because if I just said to hell with my own RAID backup and went Amazon all the way I’d be looking at probably close to 500 g so that would be: $75 per month or $900 per year. Thats like 2.5 Promise devices but I don’t have to worry about drive failures… Amazon takes care of all of that. Still $900 a year a a chunk of cash.
So it is a tough decision. But search the web carefully regarding Drobo
Thank you for that info!
I am thinking about using S3 as well — I have yet to have trouble with my Drobos – so I will keep my fingers crossed !
Photography is a serious hobby for me, has been for over 40 years, but if I ever lost all my images, life would go on. I added a Drobo box last month as a fairly safe working environment for when I work on a Photoshop project. Out of the camera, all my files first go to mirrored SATA drives housed in FirmTek enclosures.
These SATA drives are cabled to a SATA card on a G5 Mac. I have used SoftRaid software for the external SATA drives. So far, a five year period before my Drobo came along, nothing has ever failed.
Whatever is on my Drobo box are copies of original RAW images.
After I have worked on them, they go back to a different external SATA drive pair.
What worries me is the whole proprietary “black box” file structure that Drobo uses. Data corruption might lose all Drobo-stored data or might cost a bundle, if some Drobo expert were to do the recovery. I feel with safe with my three “buckets” approach: original images saved on mirrored drives – working on files after they have been transferred to Drobo – store finished work on a different SATA pair.
As many have people pointed out, I also use a secure off-site location for duplicate SATA drive pairs as an extra precaution, but that is as far as I want to go. Let’s not forget that 2TB drives are cheap. I use 2TB WD Green Caviar drives – currently $148 at Canada Computers stores.
Why does everybody say that an external copy, or mirror, of you files is not a back up? After all, disk failures, theft and data corruption happen to ANY type of configuration. Redundancy vs backup is a distinction without a difference. Also, if you go to the trouble of using offsite, why the devil would you worry about a Drobo at home? Why wouldn’t you just back your stuff up to whatever and call things square???
I like having my data in various places… sure it can be stolen from anywhere — but the odds of it being stolen from two places at once are slim
But that’s why I said that to use offsite and back up to whatever [any HDD you have] as being enough to reassure you of your data safety. Why use a Drobo?
Aha – I see your q. I use a drobo simply because I have too much data for a single drive, and it becomes confusing to store a contiguous photo library across multiple drives. I don’t want to store 2/3 on 1 2TB drive and the other 1/3 on another drive. It’s good to have them all on something that appears to be one huge 7 TB drive.
OK that makes sense. The Drobo seems like a good solution to many such issues. However, what confuses me are posts on other blogs like the one where a user lost data after installing a firmware update to his Drobo. On a separate issue, La Cie has a software backup [Intego] that it includes with it’s large 4 HDD arrays that checks for file corruption as well as incremental backups. The operative word here is “seems” since I really have no more than average information about such RAID [1,5,etc] configurations. User reviews on Cnet about the Drobo are particularly disturbing notwithstanding the positive opinion of Cnet reviewers themselves. But, since you are happy with your Drobo, I guess I either accept peoples positive opinions or go with La Cie. Both are pigs in a poke to me at this point. Thanks for your feedback.
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[...] Review [...]
I’m a 2 Drobo v2 & Drobo S owner…. I will not go into details that can’t be Googled… but I do not use the Drobos as primary storage. They were bought before I knew better and some fellow photographer’s advice.
The issue is the proprietary nature of the OS. Any NAS using MS Home Server preferably or Linux should be OK, as there is a lot of 3rd party support if the data gets corrupt. For Drobo…. zilch, nothing nada. All you will be told – as mentioned by Tom, any corruption, deletion or formatting, and poof your data is gone forever. Tom did not mention Drobo hardware failure, but that too jeopardizes your disk stack.
I’m looking into LaCie 5big Network 2 (which has now seen the light and offer MS Server and TS-559 Pro Turbo NAS (only when and if they go with a standard OS).
I can safely guaranty, sooner or later you will lose data with Drobo. Drobo closed it’s forum to public eyesight for good cause. Due diligence is in order.
The Drobo SF (and I guess S which I do not own) is a big improvement over the Drobo v2′s. Time will tell….
DO NOT BUY! BEWARE you too WILL BE OUT >$400 FOR AN ABSOLUTELY TRASH PRODUCT!!!
This is NOT RAID, its a very lite software based RAID that DOES NOT guarantee
that your data will NOT BE LOST!
1) The drive is REALLY slow at startup and hence renders it useless as a music or otherwise server even when used with Firewire 800
2) The Drobo DOES NOT Check the integrity of the DATA! No compare of the data coming from multiple drives is ever done… That requires hardware to do it and the Drobo uses a whimpy processor!
3) Think you wont lose data??? Think again. After 1.5 years, one of the Drobo bays has stopped working properly (although no indication is provided — only Data Robotics Diag after they private decode can determine that) AND NOW I LOSE A MUSIC TRACK EVERY TIME THE DROBO COMES OUT OF SLEEP!!!
4) MINE IS NOT A UNIQUE CASE WITH THE OUTFIT THAT SOLD ME MY DROBO HAVING THE SAME PROBLEMS!
5) This product SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN MADE! — IT IS ABSOLUTE TRASH… Wait for yourself and you will find out like I did that I just threw $500 out the window with this purchase!!
I have the Drobo as well as a Sans Digital Hardware 5 bay drive RAID5. I use my Drobo as an off site backup (leave at my son’s house) because with Windows 7 (64 bit), I have to boot it with the unit unplugged and then plug it in. If I leave it on at boot up, my system hangs at boot. A co-worker of mine did lose all his Drobo data when the unit failed 4 months ago. The unit does have a couple of single point of failure points in its design (in my opinion). Using dual mirrored 1 TB C and D drives (cavelier Black) 8 Gig of RAM on my base quad core workstation, I have a 55 MB/sec transfer rate with the Sans (eSATA external) and a 17-21 MB/sec with the Drobo (USB2). I have 4 spare Hitachi 1 TB drives for the 5 bay Sans unit and 4 spare Cavelier Blacks (1 TB each) for my Drobo Spares and mirrored internal disks. I also added the USB 3.0 single drive drop in unit with one 2 TB drive stored in my office at work and one in a book case at home. Remember, that one single photo storage unit is not sufficient even if it is a RAID; however, you do not have to be as protective as I am with my photos. An internal mirror with an external RAID is the minimum I would recommend for anyone to protect their photos.
I forgot to add a comment responding to how to back up on the road. I have more than 64 Gig of CF cards (yes I did purchase a Hoodman 16 Gig card after Trey’s review). I bring a laptop along in my photo bag with a 250 Gig small external hard drive. After the day’s shoot, I copy the images to the laptop’s internal hard drive. I then copy that to the external drive and I leave the images on the CF cards. Once I get home, I export the Lightroom catalog to the external drive, copy the job’s images to my workstation configured as enumerated above, and once I determine that all the images are transfered and client DVDs are created, I delete the images on the CF cards. I delete the images on the laptop and external drives only when needed for space for the next assignment. I do not trust any device to be the sole repository of my images regardless of whether they are Drobos or other RAID devices.
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