I had recently posted about receiving a new Drobo storage unit. I was really excited about the potential of this product. The ability to easily upgrade to larger drives as they got cheaper, plus the easy installation were great selling points. It really was as easy setup to open the box, open the drives, plug the drive into the unit, plug in everything and the software CD. All good for Drobo. Or so I thought
One of my drives arrived DOA. I am fairly comfortable with this because I heard a clunking sound when the drive spun up. So I sent it back to Gobal Computer. This was Friday and the drive left the same day I got the RA number. I have NEVER had a hard drive fail in my 24 odd years of owning computers (god I am getting old). This left me feeling pretty comfortable about using Drobo with the remaining three drives. So on Friday night I started moving Data over onto the Drobo.
The first data test was a speed run. I use a 10/100 network via a Linksys wireless router. I tried moving 2.5GB from a laptop downstairs to the Drobo. No fancy speed meter here, just watched the clock. 2.5GB took 14 minutes from one of my laptops to the Drobo. Jason had posted that he was interested in seeing the transfer rates. So I took the same amount of data and transfered it to an external FW800 drive I had connected to the same desktop. That transfer took 7 minutes. So the Drobo, as expected, was no speed demon,
On Saturday night, I started moving more data over to the Drobo. I started with some Norton backups of last years business data. This was a 178 GB volume that I had planned on moving to the Drobo and then decompressing it onto the device. Windows said this was going to take 340 minutes. Eeek almost 6 hours. Ok, it's a lot of data and Drobo is only a USB connection. At least is was just crossing over the motherboard of the desktop and not the network.
About 2 hours into the transfer Drobo started acting funny. About every ten minutes, the Drobo Dashboard started blinking that "I am protecting your data" and the lights on drobo flashed back and forth between red and green. It would go through it's data protection sequence for about 8 minutes and everything would be back to normal. It did this three times, then told me that drive three had failed. At this point drobo says it cannot protect me against a further drive failure and goes into a rebuilding cycle to distribute the data over the two remaining drives. This took about 22 hours.
Ok, I'm thinking that this must be a bad batch of drives. I went to Drobospace and did some research and found that Drobo failing drives is not unusual. This led me to take the bad drive out and install it in my another desktop with a free SATA connection. Sure enough, Windows saw the drive and was able to partition and format it. I was able to replicate this again in an external enclosure. So now I have a good drive, but Drobo will not see it.
This left me with an overall bad feeling about the Drobo. The bad part about this is that Global (I got help from them later) only allows exchanges for DEFECTIVE items. Well the drive is not defective, it works fine. Drobo just cannot use it. So out 120 bucks plus not feeling too comfortable about the Drobo unit.
On Monday, as suggested by one of the forum mods on Drobospace, I called Drobo tech support. I have to say that it was very nice that I could get on the phone with them in about 15 minutes. I was not impressed with the guy I ended up talking with on that call. He gave me an email address and told me to send me the diagnostics report. Now, the Drobo Dashboard does not have a report link. I told the tech this and it took him 5 minutes to figure out that you have to access this from the Windows system tray. I should have thought of it myself and was very disappointed that the guy Drobo puts on the phone doesn't know his hardware.
I was planning on using this unit too store my business data. As a photographer, my digital files are my life. This experience left me cold enough about the unit that I called Global Computer to see about sending it back. After some initial run around, I got in touch with Todd who worked pretty well with me. He was able to order a product for me that was not on Global's website, and let me return all of the drives and replace them with Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives. In a world of everything online, it was nice talking to someone who knew their product and was able to access products not readily available to the public. Todd is at (888) 445-2725 ext. 1590 and I highly recommend talking to him if you are going to order something.
Anyway, now I had a Promise Technology NS4300N and four 500GB drives for basically the same prices as the Drobo with drives.
For the home user the Drobo may be ok, but I would go with one of the readily available, proven, NAS products.
I will post more on the promise tomorrow.
Posted by srivinus at August 28, 2007 06:19 PM