

Here's why you should not buy a Drobo - jwr
http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2010/6/18/drobo-and-droboshare-a-review.html

======
jwr
I've read most of the comments here and I think people are missing the point.
Forget the noise, that's just an inconvenience. More importantly:

The "reliable" data storage device I bought _corrupted and lost my data_ once,
and right now is showing the symptoms of _corrupting the filesystem_ again.

I doesn't get any simpler and more objective than that.

And to those people whose Drobos have been working fine so far: I wish you the
best of luck and I hope you won't hit the same problems I did. But I would be
worried, beause if I'm hitting them, it means they are there, and eventually
you might as well.

------
archgrove
I've had my Drobo 18 months without a hiccup - It's not silent, but it's not
noisy either. I've never had to contact customer support, so I can't really
comment on that. I am marginally concerned by the fact that its death would
mean I _must_ have another Drobo to read the data, but this really isn't any
different from most other hardware RAID controllers/NAS boxes, where the death
of the card almost always means purchase of another identical card/driver
combination to get your data back.

The point here is, Drobo/RAID/NAS are disk redundancy solutions - they cater
for the fallibility of spinning magnetic platters, and never promise 100%
reliability. Just like any solution, if you want to avoid data loss, you need
to have an orthogonal backup system for when the other fails at a system
level.

It sucks that he's had such problems with his Drobos, and it looks like the
support he's got is subpar. This is not, however, the universal experience.
Based on my experience, I'd be happy to recommend the Drobo to most people I
know who want a simple and easy to setup solution for hard drive failures,
with the big caveat that they still need at least one other backup solution.

~~~
imajes
I'd echo this experience; I have a drobo fs with the new wd caviar greens. It
works like a treat and is very quiet. I'm next looking into a tape backup
solution for longer term storage, but for now- the drobo is an excellent way
to work with.

Tip: don't buy the old drobo, get the new one. Don't get the drobo share, use
an airport extreme or similar disk-sharing network device.

~~~
napierzaza
So buy two things? The fact is that you can find something with a gigabit
ethernet port built into the unit. Not a tricky dongle that doesn't offer the
real thing, not a sketchy router-based SMB share. It's a bad idea to have two
devices when you can have one. Especially if you can get a one-device solution
that will transfer files faster over your network.

~~~
imajes
Actually, i disagree it's a bad idea to have two devices; I trust that the
apple extreme will work fantastically to share a disk for me; they get the OS
and the fs, so it's pretty straightforward.

A one device solution? Well, that'd be a router, switch, hard disk... (can you
say, computer?)

sometimes we want stuff that's single purpose, done well, easy on the
power/heat/etc. I now have an appletv on a turn-off power strip, enabling me
to 'turn on' the tv system and have something running easily, rather than
having to get my laptop out, an external disk, try and make it all work. Ugh.
madness.

------
silencio
I'm not sure on how to reply, because experiences with a Drobo seem to be
extremely hit or miss and it is all very anecdotal.

My drobo with all WD green drives is as silent as my Mac minis and MBP are,
while a friend of mine has one also with similar drives that's so loud it's
very difficult to sleep in the same room with it (and yes, it rivals his Mac
Pro in terms of noise).

I've not had a single problem with my drobo since I got it almost two years
ago, while others keep having them fail repeatedly and replaced repeatedly
until they give up and find something else.

I've also come across people that think their drobo is great and infallible,
and then go and realize they have no backup for the file they just deleted off
their drobo. And come across people like me that back up their drobos because
a drobo is purely redundant, which doesn't cover cases like accidentally
deleting files off it and losing the drobo to fire/flood/theft and more, only
situations like a dead hard drive or two.

I love my drobo to pieces and recommend it to anyone that wants a solution
they don't have to manage...with the caveat that it's their data and therefore
their responsibility to take care of it, and a drobo can only be one part of
the solution. data robotics customer support definitely has a bad reputation
that is probably warranted to an extent, but not many NAS manufacturers, nor
you if you roll your own solution, can do much when things go very, very wrong
with your device for whatever reason.

(Note that I use my drobo only as direct storage. The drobo NAS solutions
always seemed a bit hacky to me...)

~~~
jwr
Well, in my case the failures are obvious and objectively present. You can't
really discuss expectations if your device just lost all your data due to
filesystem corruption. You don't discuss "infallibility" if your device tells
you:

Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806282 scsi2 (0:0):
rejecting I/O to dead device

SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda,
sector 4533105544

HFS+-fs: WARN: Turning journaling back on even though Journalling was not on
at mount. HFS+-fs: WARN: We may be setting the Journal bit on an unjournalled
filesystem but it is OK.

So please don't soften the issue — it fails. It failed for me multiple times
already and I expect it to fail again.

I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first
one — but then, what's the point?

~~~
Dirt_McGirt
> I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the
> first one — but then, what's the point?

RAID is _not_ a backup. If you don't understand this, you'll never be
satisfied with any RAIDish products.

~~~
bradleyland
It's true that RAID is not a backup, but backup strategies are rarely any good
if they back up data "instantly", which is what redundancy provides. So you're
stuck with a catch 22. If you back up instantly (without versioning), you may
backup bad data. Boooo! If you backup, say, daily, you still stand to lose a
days work when your array fails. Boooo!

RAID should _increase_ reliability, not decrease it. Any RAID solution that
results in a net increase in data loss is not a good solution.

~~~
silencio
That's a catch 22 that can be minimized or even avoided altogether. My main
drobo backup is automatically versioned and backed up every 12 hours (to a
single external drive, since I don't need to back up everything on my drobo).
I've got older backups dating from like a week (work-related) to half a year
or more old (for the important docs that don't change that I should keep
around regardless...like old accounting/tax stuff) stashed around my home,
online, and in a safe deposit box at my bank. And of course occasionally I
test whether or not my backup is actually backing up the things I want and
that I can successfully restore from it.

If I back up bad data, I have older but good data to recover from. If my drobo
catastrophically fails, at the worst I've lost data that is probably not going
to be difficult to replicate/replace because of how new it is. I don't have to
start ripping my hair out at the idea of having lost an incredible amount of
data ranging from irreplaceable photos of my life to work and more.

In the ideal case, raid should increase reliability, and they do, only for one
definition of reliability. But freak accidents and poor design happen, and
it's silly to rely only on a raid for reliability.

------
steveh72
I've owned a 2nd-gen Drobo and now a DroboPro. My experience with it is very
mixed. My opinion is that it's a good solution for someone who can't be
bothered with mdadm anymore and needs a lot of storage, with some important
caveats.

When it works, it's fantastic. When things start to go wrong, there's nothing
you can do about it except experiment with switching drives or email support
and hope they can diagnose it.

I loaded my first Drobo with Seagate 1.5tb drives. It constantly dropped
drives out of the array and was very slow (<10MB/sec over FW800). After
several back and forths with tech support I gave up in frustration and didn't
use it for a while. Then 2TB drives became available, I swapped them out, and
it stopped dropping out.

I then upgraded to a DroboPro as I had outgrown the 4 drive version, which was
painless. It was still slow, but not as much. The log is now ENCRYPTED(!!!) so
there is absolutely nothing you can see for yourself other than whether a
drive is "bad" or "good". If you suspect that one of the drives might be
failing, you have to email your encrypted log to Drobo and wait for them to
respond. Which is pretty frustrating when you're in another timezone and each
exchange takes 24 hours.

Somewhere among switching around drives and upgrading firmware it became
faster, and now to me seems acceptably fast. I think I must have just had a
bad drive or three, but of course without access to any logs it's a tedious
and expensive process of trial and error to figure out.

All was well, and then just shy of a year it stopped booting. I bought it in
one country and then moved, so had to ship it back to the original
distributor, which is annoying and expensive but understandable, but of course
you can only access the drives with another Drobo, and means I'll be without
access to my stuff for about a month (except for backups). I wasn't too
impressed about what is marketed as a professional product designed to run
24/7 failing after less than a year of light use.

Pros:

* Very easy to use. Auto-expansion is fantastic and works as advertised. You literally only have to shove a new drive in the slot and wait a few minutes. * Don't have to rebuild when you add capacity * Don't lose all your data if you disconnect 2 drives at once, put them back in a different order, or any of the myriad interesting ways you can accidentally kill your entire array with RAID.

Cons:

* Somewhat pricey. But you get what you pay for - at least I did until it died. * Encrypting the log files is outrageous. This is probably the worst thing about it. * No transparency about what it's doing. It's quite literally a black box. * iSCSI on Mac doesn't reliably reconnect if you unmount it. I usually have to restart the device and/or my PC. * No way of accessing data (other than another Drobo) if the device fails. * Not particularly fast. Much slower than a bare drive. 40MB/sec if I'm lucky. No idea how they got VMware certification; trying to boot from it would be agonizing.

Other thoughts:

* Others have said it sounds like a jet engine. It's not quiet, but it's by no means loud. It's just two 80mm fans spinning at maybe 1200rpm or less. Drives always seem cool to the touch. You probably couldn't sleep with one next to your head but in the next room, no problem. * It takes days to rebuild 8TB when you switch out a bare drive. So does normal RAID though.

------
rdl
I knew from other people that the Drobo was worthlessly slow, but thanks for
the info about the other problems.

I'm a big fan of either building a linux-based server, or using a QNAP. QNAP
is a bit pricey per disk and per GB, but it just works.

For large disk requirements, I use a linux server with Areca 12-port RAID as
secondary storage, and external eSATA+expander trays for tertiary storage
(probably could put 50-100 drives on this with no problems). Overkill for most
home use, though.

It's 2010, and I'd use iSCSI, not SMB, unless I wanted direct-attach FW800.

~~~
shpxnvz
I'm very curious how well the online disk changes work with something like the
QNAP NAS. Is it really as simple as changing out the disks one at a time and
waiting for the RAID to rebuild?

~~~
rdl
Generally, if you set auto-rebuild, yes. It's RAID5 though, so you're only
protected from single drive failures. I use RAID6 on Areca cards (or better)
for "critical" data, or remote servers -- single drive failures all too often
become double drive failures before the RAID finishes rebuilding.

The other issue is that write (and sometimes read) performance is hurt during
rebuild. For timing-sensitive systems, people often turn off auto-rebuild or
scale back rebuild percentage of writes, so their application's performance
isn't so affected. Of course, if the second failure happens during the
rebuild...

------
tomstuart
Stories like this are why I didn't buy a Drobo. Instead I got a ReadyNAS NVX
and have been incredibly satisfied with it. It's been rock solid so far and
hasn't given me any hassle at all.

(Incidentally, Netgear UK are doing a "free 2 x 500GB drives" promotion until
the end of June: <http://www.netgear.co.uk/freedrives_nvx.php>)

~~~
agperson
I have also had a ReadyNAS (NV+) for some time and have been extremely
satisfied with it. The device does not come cheap, and it isn't silent, but it
is very capable, offers decent performance, and lets you access your data in a
wide variety of ways (NFS, Rsync, AFP, CIFS, etc). It is relatively open as
well, including allowing full root SSH login, and has various software add-ons
as well.

Until an equivalent OEM product comes along that supports something like ZFS,
the ReadyNAS is probably one of the best options available.

~~~
Terretta
Also thrilled with ReadyNAS NV+ for all the same reasons, but especially to
support Macs, TimeMachine, and remove WebDAV access.

------
barrkel
I'm running Nexenta / Solaris zfs with samba, but it supports accented
characters just fine. Perhaps this is a limitation of Mac smb support. zfs
also doesn't have a repairing fsck as far as I know, but I have more faith in
its monitoring and scrubbing features. It also bulk reads and writes at about
100mbytes a second, approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet.

~~~
cynicalkane
ZFS doesn't have a repairing fsck because it doesn't need one. The on-disk
format uses a transactional design such that its always consistent, even if it
fails in the middle of a write.

AFIAK the only way to damage a zpool is if some snafu (one more serious than a
mere write failure) wiped out a bunch of metadata together with the backup
metadata all at the same time, but such an event would do very serious damage
to any filesystem, which is why all important data should have an off-site
backup.

~~~
oomkiller
And now, you can even fix this with zpool import -F. It will find the last
consistent transaction in the array and roll back to it. Saved my buddy's ass
a few weeks ago when he went to replace a drive and accidentally pulled out 2
SATA connectors at once (on a raidz1).

------
mfuccio
Hello, Mark from Drobo here.

First, I'm sorry for the troubles the original poster (Jan Rychter) has had. I
don't have any first hand knowledge of his use, and can't find a support case
on it -- has it been escalated by our European team back to the factory?
Please send me your case # (via direct message at drobospace where you are a
member) and I will escalate if necessary.

The Drobo/DroboShare combination has a binary user experience. Those with no
prior network storage experience love it, those with prior experience want
more functionality and performance. Providing more performance is the goal of
the Drobo FS, a single box solution for sharing via AFP or SMB. Third party
DroboApps provide web, ftp, rsync, NFS, and other protocols. This box is 4x
faster than the Drobo/Droboshare owing to eliminating USB as an interconnect,
and faster generation of ARM processors.

Mark Fuccio

------
illumin8
I think his problems with the Drobo are mainly the way he's using it. I've had
a Drobo for a couple years now and have not had problems with it, but I have
noticed a few strange things:

1\. Regarding the fan noise - I used to keep my Drobo in a warm house with no
air conditioning. Temperatures in my office would regularly reach 78-80
degrees, and anything in the high 70s would cause my Drobo fan to go into
"vacuum cleaner mode," which is really annoying. Solution: Don't keep your
Drobo in a hot room. This is a sensitive piece of electronic equipment with
lots of spinning platters stacked on top of each other. Drobo is more
sensitive to heat than other pieces of technology. Since then I keep my office
air conditioned and at 72 degrees, the Drobo is silent other than the hard
drive seeking itself.

2\. Filesystem support - This is a problem with any "cross-platform" storage
and the fault is not Drobo's. I use my Drobo on both an OS X 10.6.4 system and
a Windows 7 system. The only filesystem I can use that supports both
seamlessly is FAT32. Unfortunately, FAT32 doesn't support some character sets
that Mac does, which I found out when I was trying to back up my iTunes
library there. Another limitation of FAT32 is that your filesystem can't be
larger than 2TB, and you can't store files larger than 4GB. My other option
was to go with HFS+ or NTFS but either of those solutions are Mac or Windows
only.

The two main issues he has: Heat and filesystem compatibility, can be solved
by simply using the Drobo differently. Drobo is not without it's limitations.
The speed is slow, and it's sensitive to heat. But if used properly, it works
fine as a large data storage device.

~~~
DannoHung
Pretty sure that MacFUSE has NTFS support. Or, no, wait... didn't Apple add
NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard? Yeah, they did. It requires editing fstab
though.

~~~
ajtaylor
No, no, no! Do not do that! Googling will show you that this generally results
in corrupted, unrecoverable drives. Use this:
<http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/> It's not the fastest driver (you can pay a
small fee for a more performant one), but it hasn't caused me any troubles.

------
hawflakes
I've been very happy with FreeNAS running on a recycled PowerEdge 400SC. I
boot it off a USB thumbdrive and it manages to spin up and down the six SATA
drives I'm using with even even with a cheapie 4-port PCI SATA card.

My workload is pretty light though as it hosts media and I only stream it from
two devices max at a time.

But it's hard to beat the price and comprehensive protocol support. FTP,
Samba, NFS, AFP, Time Machine backups, iTunes sharing, etc.

<http://www.freenas.org/>

~~~
pibefision
Are you using zfs?

Have you anyone tries to use freenas as a time machine destination?

~~~
hawflakes
I've been using Time Machine on this setup. So far it hasn't complained. But I
also haven't had need to restore yet.

As for power consumption, I unfortunately haven't kept tabs on the electricity
nor have a Kill-a-Watt.

But I have told FreeNAS to pretty aggressively spin down unused drives.

------
dianikes
Excellent thread. I was very close to buying a Drobo several days ago, but
chose not to. There are many excellent advantages to it. But two main reasons
pushed me away:

1) Encrypted logs. I think it is crucial to have readable log files to be able
to understand what is happening with the drive array. If there is proprietary
information that the company wishes to be protect, I welcome them to do so.
There should be two files: one which is plaintext with the major status and
event messages, and one which is encrypted with their proprietary information.
Rolling the plaintext log into the encrypted log seems like a user-hostile
posture.

2) Maintenance costs. If the log files are encrypted, then when the array
fails (not "if", "when") then I will need to buy drobocare ($129) to get them
to read the logfile to tell me what happened. I expect to keep this array
running for the next 4-6 years, and I am not willing to buy ongoing yearly
maintenance ($250/three years) just find out how the array is doing.

Like I said, I was hours away from ordering a drive, I really like the
simplicity of the design, but thanks to some of the comments on this thread I
suddenly realized that I would signing up for years of maintenance fees.
That's not what I wanted.

------
ff0066mote
_Not related to Drobo:_

I use a cron script which runs rsync each hour and synchronizes my / and
/home/ with my /mnt/mirror/.

Ever since I've set this up, I've had a reliable backup which I don't have to
think about. I've even migrated my system to it once, because I needed to swap
the primary hard drive out.

What's the big deal about backing up? Why buy a dedicated unit anyway? Am I
missing something fundamental?

~~~
jmount
Unless such a backup is versioned it seems all you have is a system that
automatically erases your backup one to two hours after a soft failure.

~~~
amh
rsync won't delete extra files at the destination unless you tell it to.
Although, there's still the problem of syncing corrupted stuff to the mirror.
Keeping multiple versions is certainly more robust, in any case.

~~~
jmount
I was using "erase" figuratively.

------
MC27
Podcast ads should really be taken with a strong pinch of salt. They are less
restrained than old media ads, so it's very easy to think they are personal
recommendations.

Best advice is to do some research, like I noticed their closed support forum
too, and thought it was suspicious - it's a good sign that they let their
customers talk to each other, but if it's hidden then something's not right.

------
jmah
I've had my Thecus N5200 running solid for around 3 years now. When I first
saw the Drobo demo videos I feared I'd made the wrong purchase, but having the
Thecus as an open platform (Linux installed on a CF card; you can SSH and run
whatever) has proved a win. Support lately has gone by the wayside (they had a
new beta firmware a few months ago that was later pulled), but the community
is strong.

------
latch
I've been using unraid for a while now and am really happy - especially with
its flexibility.

Once you get to the Drobo/WHS point of your NAS life, HDD bays and xfer speeds
quickly become the biggest issue. (4x2TB - redundancy) can quickly become not
enough..and chances are that you'll always be ahead of where HDD storage is.

~~~
altano
My WHS has 4 HDs and its transfer speed is still network bound (100 Mbps).
Much faster than the Drobo it replaced.

My biggest gripes with the drobo were loudness (no really, it sounds like a
jet engine), inability to recover data directly off the HD if the drobo dies,
horrible transfer speeds, and horrible support.

It's one pro was simplicity.

~~~
latch
I had a WHS, and the only complaint I have about it is that redundancy is
accomplished via duplication. Depending on how much data you have, that can
greatly increase your total cost of ownership. To achieve 10TB of redundant
storage on WHS, you need 10x2TB disks. To accomplish that with unraid you need
6x2TB.

The downside is that unraid will only protected you against a single disk
failure, whereas WHS _might_ protect you against multiple disk failures -
depending on which disks go.

------
hyuen
I had a similar experience with an AirNas, which is basically an enclosure for
a hard drive that exports a samba share. Performancewise, disappointing, all I
could transfer was around 2Mb/s, convenience, maybe, streaming mp3's is fine,
but there is no way you can stream movies from it. Noise wise, I think I
wasn't as unfortunate as the author of the post, but you have to keep in mind
that these systems are more suited for data centers, maybe the Drobo is just a
poor implementation of a NAS box. If I were to get a NAS, I would probably
look for something that does block storage, such as iSCSI or FCoE, not sure if
there are home appliances for that, but with that you can ignore annoyances
like unsupported character sets for filenames and similar stuff.

~~~
arethuza
If you have a spare PC to turn into a SAN-lite, OpenFiler supports iSCSI
<http://www.openfiler.com/>

------
nader
A couple of years ago when I was looking for a NAS for our office the choice
was between a Drobo and ReadyNAS from Netgear. Although Drobo had so many
recommendations and good feedback I thought I'd rather go with a weller-known
company like Netgear. The ReadyNas isn't the greatest but solid, quite fast
and reliable. I'm happy about the decision.

We're increasingly using our own custom debian linux box now with SMB shares,
backups with duplicity, Apache / Lighty and so on. It just allows for more
flexibility.

------
baddox
First off, I never trust reviews saying that something is extremely loud. Just
look at every single fan or video card on newegg and you'll see people
complaining that they are the loudest thing they've ever heard and other
people claiming they are virtually silent.

Secondly, what does the author (or you guys) recommend as an alternative to
the Drobo? Just creating your own file server/NAS? Do you need a hardware RAID
card, or are mobo-integrated ones or cheaper software cards sufficient?

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Generally, hardware RAID is good and software RAID is decent. Mobo-integrated
and "software hardware RAID" suck.

------
artlogic
I can't speak for Drobo with a Mac - but mine works great with Linux. I was
going to get a DroboShare, but then decided just to use an old server to
network the storage. It's slow to spin up but fast until you start to fill the
drives - once you get to about 95% usage things really start to slow down for
some reason. I have not had noise issues either but have noticed the
relatively quiet fan does come on fairly often. Combined with Tarsnap, I've
basically stopped worrying about data.

------
willmacdonald
I have helped setup 5 drobos for different people and they have all worked
fine. My only suggestion is not to partition them, seems to cause problems
when resizing the partitions with bigger drives. Defiantly no problems with
noise.

------
callmeed
We work in the pro photography space and Drobos are hot right now. It seems to
be the de-facto recommendation when people want high-volume storage for
Lightroom or Aperture libraries.

------
ioquatix
If you don't have an incremental backup you are playing with fire no matter
what kind of solution you have in place. A single point of failure is a single
point of failure.

------
phsr
To counter this, I have a friend who uses two Drobos with his Mac Mini and
loves it. I don't think he's had a single issue. I'll see if I can get him on
here to comment

------
jwr
Thanks to everyone for advice on what other devices work. That's exactly what
I was hoping for — I'm tired of the Drobo and I can't trust it with my data.

------
pclark
My main beef with Drobo is the way the file system works. You specify a faux
file size of the drive that Mac OS recognizes, but it doesn't relate to the
_actual_ file size of the drives.

It turns out you should make this faux file size as large as you can (16TB) as
the faux file size restricts the _actual_ file size, so I made my faux file
size 2TB and now actually have 2.5TB of storage, to make my drobo recognize it
I have to reformat all the disks and lose the data. Daft.

~~~
artlogic
I believe you can just make another dataset/drive - not the best solution, but
you can use that extra space - just in another logical drive.

------
oomkiller
I'll stick with my ZFS raidz array. Right now I'm using NexentaStor, but I'm
probably going to switch to plain Nexenta soon.

------
josh33
I was considering buying one of these to back up media files. Thanks for
saving me cache and a headache!

------
AndrewWarner
Why isn't Drobo in the comments here responding?

~~~
grantheaslip
Why should they be? They have an official support channel--they aren't
obligated to have some poor "evangelist" follow up on every reference to their
product on the internet.

Some companies might do this, and you might be used to getting a semi-canned
response on Twitter every time you mention a company's name, but that doesn't
translate into any kind of obligation on their part.

------
napierzaza
No ethernet and expensive?

