I recently received this comment which brings up an important point:
"Got this last 1/2 of June. Then waited for about three weeks for HDD to arrive from NewEgg, I was traveling anyway. So it was July before opened the black box. I couldn't get my iMAC to see this or quit loosing the connection when it went to sleep so I put it aside because the Lion update just came out.
I upgraded to Lion and it got a lot worse, hard to believe, but it did. So it went back into the box waiting for updates.
Over the past month I got it out of the box again and updated the drobo dashboard to "fix" the Lion issue which didn't work (drobo solution on the forums is to roll back Lion to Snow Leopard, yeah that's' not going to work for me).
I can not use it with Apple Time Machine because it looses the connection every time it wakes up or like yesterday NEVER connected without rebooting both machines AND took over 5 minutes to see it AND I still couldn’t save anything to it (yes I was logged in as a registered user).
About 1/3 of the time it doesn't show up on my Win7 laptop at all either, but to be fair even then I can usually still access it using a \\drobo\ even when it doesn't show up in Explorer.
I'm really not happy with the product and have been very patient in waiting for updates, etc, from the company. So I contact the supplier B&H Photo. Yes I know your usual policy is 30 days, however I waited for Apple update, Drobo to update, and guess what it still doesn’t work. I explained this, it’s too old? Go sell it myself?
So I should have just returned it earlier because you say it’s too old because I waited for updates to see if that resolved the problem. Nope, go sell it on your own.
Okay, as promised there will be a WHOLE lot of bad press around me selling it on my own because I’m going to have to agree with drobosucks here (interesting the drobosucks.com points to drobo) should tell you something."
This is a warning to those who think that they will buy a Drobo and return it if it doesn't work. Due to the nature of the Drobo, it is very time consuming. It takes a long time to set up, diagnose, troubleshoot and get support. You will inevitably wait and wait for updates and/or support. As the weeks of waiting go by, this is when the typical 30day vendor return policy to lapse. This is especially true if you attempt to have a replacement sent from Drobo.
All the time and headaches spent trying to make it work will ultimately cause you to be unable to return it. On my first encounter with a drobo, I had to pay my vendor a 40% restocking fee after unsuccessful attempts at making it work. In reality, it only worked for two weeks but it took 3 months to determine it was crap.
Be warned... if you decide to purchase a Drobo and have difficulties, return it immediately. Attempting to diagnose the problem will cost you valuable time and may cause you to be an owner of an expensive brick.
I have Purchased Drobo FS and have it set up over Ethernet. I had it for over 6 months and everything works great so far. I have 2TB hard drives installed.
ReplyDeleteI have finally lost all belief and patience with Drobo. I have sold mine and switched to a Synology. Much better features, performance, reliability and price! I have sent the following letter to Drobo:
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind responce to my email.
I am quite impressed and pleased that you value your customers so much that you provide good support and personal responce to their observations.
As for Drobo FS, I am well aware of its existence and have considered its purchase several times in the past. However, I have been discouraged by several factors.
First of all its feature set. It is well below that of competitive products. Let me compare it with Synology DS1511+, a similarly priced product. I'll only compare major features, I omit numerous smaller ones.
a) DS1511+ has twin GE ports (802.3ad LAG capable), while FS has a single GE port.
b) DS1511+ supports iSCSI (max targets 32, max volumes 256), along with NFS, while FS only supports CIFS and AFP.
c) DS1511+ supports Windows Active Directory integration. FS does not.
d) DS1511+ includes excellent client-less web management. FS needs Drobo Dashboard, which, when compared, is quite minimalistic.
e) DS1511+ supports expansion with external units for ten additional drive bays. FS does not support expansion.
f) DS1511+ essentialy matches FS's BeyondRAID HDD flexibility (expansion and upgrades) with Synology Hybrid RAID.
g) DS1511+ supports UPS communication and management. FS does not support UPS comms.
h) DS1511+ features numerous on-board apps (file browser, file station, ftp server, mail server, web server, surveilance station, photo station, audio station, DLNA/UPnP server, download station, iTunes server, print server, VPN center to name a few), whereas FS offers just a few of them through Drobo Apps and their clumsy integration with the unit's management interface.
Second, performance. Reading numerous third party reviews on the Web reveals that DS1511+ is at least twice as fast (some measure it to four times) as FS.
Third, reliability/bugs/bad-features. Reading on the Web, FS has been the issue of quite a few bad reports on reliability, bugs and features. Whereas, Synology has been almost all praises.
To sum it up, I think that it's very good business to personaly take care of customers. However, you have got to have solid reliability and performance in the storage business, along with cutting-edge features. And it seems to me Drobo has fallen behind.
So, while I'd like to thank you for your kind offer, I have to say that I have finally lost both confidence and belief in Drobo (whereas in the past I swore by Drobo).
I'm using a DroboElite via iSCSI to hold all of my virtual servers (24 so far), TimeMachine backups, and copying 200GB of a file server nightly with plenty of room to grow. You need a good understanding of networking to make this work plus dont ever use anything USB in a corporate environment that you depend on...just like anything else in IT, it takes a little bit of work and research...you also need to get the black drives from WD not the green ones...just sayin
ReplyDeleteLost 4TB of data and they cant explain how it happened. "We have never seen anything like this before"
ReplyDeleteI made the transition from Drobo/Droboshare to a Synology DS1511+. I feel like I have seen the light of day after a long night! Using twin GE interface (LAG) the DS is lightning fast, has a very rich management and applications environment, is rock solid and just plain superb. I made the copy from the external HDD that I had move the data from Drobo, to the DS via USB, not via network. Excellent functionality!
ReplyDeleteHaving made the transition from DroboGen2/Droboshare to a Synology DS1511+, I cannot believe how I have been able, for two years, to put up with such a slow, unreliable and badly managed product such as the Drobo. The difference of the Synology in speed, reliability and manageability is astronomical! Drobo Dashboard is so plain and spartan, that it seems like the difference between DOS and Windows 7! Especially the ability of the Synology UI to multitask and relegate all tasks to the background, continuing to run them while offline is fantastic. I copied 2 TB of data from an external USB disk to the Synology unattended, without having even to have a computer present. Gone are the days of waiting for copies to complete. You may say that Drobo/Droboshare is the lowest product of Drobo, however Synology has the same functionality across their product line, from the lowest end to the highest end! Drobo is the classic case of a brilliant idea (disk flexibility and automation) executed in the worst possible way...
ReplyDeleteI have owned the Drobo FS (5 Bay) for over a year. I have never had a more frustrating experience. I have 3 2TB drives and 2 3TB drives for a total of 8.14TB of usable data. I am copying over 10.5GB of data over as we speak. I am getting 2.8MB/sec and it is expected to take over 54 minutes to copy. This is plainly unacceptable. Data Robotics will say it is because there is low capacity available (250GB). In my book 250GB is not low capacity. Even when there is 1TB available I am lucky to get 16MB/sec. I have it hooked into my gigabit network router. I hate this product more than anything. What I am told is that its the chip that makes it so slow, and they had a faster proc it could read and write faster. Not sure if thats true, but why are the competitors so much faster? Also my Drobo will disconnect randomly when transferring over 20GB...so I need to break my transfers into smaller bites. If anyone knows a product similar to the Drobo that can be expanded as you go (IE add bigger drives w/o destroying the RAID) please let me know. I need another solution!
ReplyDeleteAlways mount the drobo FS via SMB in Mac OS X. Major issues with using AFP.
ReplyDeleteI have similar experiences with Drobo. Low network performance and random disconnects in big transfers. Filling it up causes even lower performance, up to total system failure! As for disk flexibility (ie unequal disk RAID sets and easy expandability), there are a couple of small NAS manufactures that provide that, namely Synology with SHR and Netgear with X-RAID. I suggest you drop Drobo as soon as possible and switch over to one of them. Drobo is a brilliant idea, horribly executed.
ReplyDeleteI purchased my Drobo on April 4th from Amazon. Today is April 20th and I just printed out the return ticket. What a hunk of junk. I spent 1 hour with tech support the first day getting W8K R2 to see the thing.
ReplyDeleteYou just whisper to this thing the wrong way and it goes off into space. The sequence of events you need to follow (and don't dare do it out of order) just to power down? I mean, launch dashboard, wait until it discovers Drobo, tell Drobo to shutdown, wait, wait, wait, and then I can shutdown Windows?
And I thought Windows was junk. Ha! Drobo = king of unreliable data storage.
Gosh I wish I had done my homework before buying this "thing." Notice how I keep calling it a thing - as it doesn't even deserve to be called a hard drive.
The final stake through the poor little things heart was today after my 3rd tech support incident when the guy said it was software RAID. Dude, you should have NEVER said that. I immediately logged into Amazon and printed off the return ticket after we hung up.
Everyone knows software RAID is junk - everyone!
Thanks to all who said return it before the 30 days is up!!
My advice - take their advice and return it while you can. Don't buy it if you haven't already done so. If you have, he he he, fess up, go ahead, you're amongst friends, tell us how many tech support tickets you've had so far. Come on, be truthful.
I work at a company that uses the Drobo Pro FS as it's backup unit. What a terrible idea. The maximum upload on it is only 20 MB/minute. Trying to do a full backup of over 500GB in a RAID 5 configuration with full 7300RPM 1TB drives inside, takes close to a full 24 work day. This is using Cisco switches with the NICS forced to Full duplexing. My other complaint was that the front end management GUI is TERRIBLE. Why do you need a front end gui in the first place? I have a synology box at home that has full https access and I can configure everything, from anywhere. Having to use the interface is time consuming, painful and clunky. I can't even use it unless I have a dedicated workstation with the drobosoftware installed, because there's no way in HELL I would ever install it on a Server.
ReplyDeleteNow that we're seeing the backups take this long, we're rededicating it to a file server. Given the performance and clunky Active Directory integration, and lack of anything useful other than file serving, we're better off buying a clone PC with plenty of HD bays and loading it up.
I've walked into a company with an existing drobopro which I have promptly managed to remove as a primary storage device. It had been in place for a little over 12 months when I started so very lucky they never lost their data. I could not do firmware updates and after weeks and weeks of back and forth with drobo support they have replaced the unit under warranty even though the warranty has expired. The replacement unit is now hooked up as an onsite backup to complement the existing offsites. I wont trust it with any data but may as well use it for something. Problem I have is that every time I restart the server it drops the share. Still not sure if it's the drobo or the server itself at fault but sure is annoying.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to rate their support out of 10 they would get an 11. I mean really replacing a unit that was at.least 3 months out of warranty as well as the prompt and actually helpful responses I got whenever I logged a request. Thats impressive.
Would I recommend anyone buy a drobo? hmmm... Lets just say they would be better off storing their data across a striped array of floppy disks... in a fire.