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Drobo – hands-on with the world’s first data storage robot

In Use. Well the fascinating thing about reviewing this puppy is that it just works. Not a lot more to say. Once it’s plugged in, all you see on the front panel are some LED lights indicating a) the state of each drive (green is fine, yellow for caution, red means change this drive now), and a set of blue lights which indicate how much overall storage space you have left. Once the whole set of blue lights is lit, you need to add a bigger drive, but before that you will receive indications about storage issues from each of the individual drive lights. It’s just about as failsafe and easy to use an interface as you can get.

Drobo5

The dashboard software also provides more detailed information and sits in your tray (if you’re a Windows user). You can access it at any time to see the state of play of how much space is being used, get diagnostic information, shutdown the system and such-like.

Drobodash2

Noise. The one thing you will notice if you’re used to a quiet environment, is the noise. It’s not huge, but you can definitely hear the big fan whirring on the back of the unit at intermittent times, and the spool up of the drives under load can be quite disconcerting. But the unit does go into a silent ‘fan off’ mode when there’s been no action for some 15 minutes, which means that the noise never really becomes a big problem. However if you are using the unit in a home recording studio set up, you may want to stick it away behind glass somewhere so you can still see the lights, but not suffer any unwanted sound effects on your recording. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company continue to improve this area as time goes by.

Drobodashboard

Use and capacities vs RAID. The Drobo system is not RAID, it’s a proprietary technology, which brings with it quite a few advantages. The first is that you can mix and match any type of 3.5″ SATA drives, and you will be able to take advantage of a significant amount of the total storage available. With RAID your capacity is limited by the smallest drive in the array, with Drobo the total capacity is pooled together, a chunk is set aside for ‘expansion’, another chunk is used for ‘protection’ and what’s left is yours to use.

In my setup, out of the 922GB of physical space some 451GB was available, so I lost around half. There’s a handy calculator called the Drobolator on the Drobo site which lets you determine the optimum disk array to use to obtain your desired storage, which is very useful. Despite the fact that you lose a fair amount of disk capacity, you have to remember that this is replicated capacity, it’s double protected in case of drive failure, which is a key point about the whole setup. A drive goes down? No problem.

Drobolator

With RAID you also have to have the same drive sizes, you can’t mix and match like Drobo. And probably the most important difference between the two technologies is the fact that you can still keep using a Drobo unit even if a drive fails or you need to upgrade. You don’t need to wait for a rebuild or re-layout process to finish before you can carry on. It’s a huge time-saver in an emergency. You also don’t need to go through any kind of formatting when you insert a new drive, you only need to do the one format when you first install the system with the starter drive/s.

Drobolegend

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8 Comments

  • Very nice, but really only suitable for home users. Corect me if I am wrong but I could not not see any options for RAID, which is very important in terms of speed and redundancy for business.

    On top of that capacity is quite small in my opinion.

  • Paul, the whole point of this box is redundancy but done more efficiently than RAID. The capacity is determined by the size of the disks you use, so if you have 4 x 1TB drives in the slots you will get 2.7 TB of useable space (the rest being for the mirroring of the data etc). See this forum post for more information.

  • Dang that’s pretty nifty, I’ve been looking for something similar for our place. The only problem I see is that’s only has a USB interface and can only be used if the PC is connected. I wonder if they’ll do a NAS version?

    Although the laptop hang that you had seems to indicate that it will kick on regardless of whether a PC is attached or not, you just need the PC to access the files.

  • Red,

    Thanks for your comment.

    I do realise that the whole point of the box is redundancy, but my point was that having no option to change the RAID type is not great.

    For example, some people may want to do striping as well as mirroring, or RAID 0+1 (see http://www.acnc.com/04_01_0_1.html ) . As it is , this product cannot do that as 5 discs would be required for this setup.

    In addition, a network connection ideally gigabit , would have been nice. I see from the spec that it is USB…

  • I have a feeling that Drobo is designed for people who don’t want to worry about RAID configurations and just want a simple backup/storage device, Paul. Different target markets? :-)

  • Hi Red,

    Yeah I do agree that it is designed for a different target market. But still it would have been nice for the manufactor to include a basic interface as well as an expert interface for the clients that would want this functionality.

    Have you also heard of a free open source solution for people who would like to make their own NAS (provided they have a spare computer and a few hard drives)

    Here is one : http://www.freenas.org/

  • Now that is one great machine! I loved the thing. But tis a tad bit too expensive for me. Les c what happens in the near future.

  • Get the DROBO Share if you want to use it as NAS. You are not limited to USB or FW-A.

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