Hands On Review of the 1st Generation USB-only Drobo from Data Robotics

[iplayguitarhero1]

having magnets so close to your hard drives don't seem like a good idea =/

[alexeipolozov]

Thanks your this review ! I didn't hear any noise from your drobo. I ordered a Drobo v2 and I'd like to know whether the noise you're talking about is coming from the fan or from the hard drives ? I ordered 'green' hard drives which are supposed to make less noise, but if the fan is noisy, I cannot do anything about it, except to put some music.

[raoulpop]

@alexeipolozov When I did the review, this was fan noise. The fan issue has been since resolved by Drobo. Any noise you hear from your Drobo now is likely hard drive noise, unless you've been using intensely and the fans have gone into high speed mode to cool it.

[brazilrocker25]

hey i was just wondering, can the drobo be used as a simple external hard drive and not just for back-ups? i'd like to be able to use it as an improvement from my lacie 1tb drive, and use a time capsule for backing up over time machine. help is much appreciated thank you

[raoulpop]

@brazilrocker25 Sure, I use my Drobos to store media and other files.

[ponymare2323]

this video was very useful because i lost a lot of data in the pass so I think this would be a could way of keeping your data safe. and you did a could job of this vidoe keep it up. thank you

Ponymare2323

[jwhite47]

I have 2 x Drobos both with 4 x 500 GB 7200RPM Seagate HDDs. The Drobo is very cool but there are a few more issues which Ive noticed that were not addressed within this review.

1) There is an annoying wiring noise and the magnetic cover vibrates making an annoying buzzing sound on both of my Drobos.

2) If you allow to have 2TB disk size this will cause your PC to slow down dramatically

3) It is not only large but very heavy also

4) Your pc wont boot if you have legacy USB mode enabled

[scbondbdgr]

Is it worth the high price? I'm looking at a four bay sata enclosure which will combine (concatenate/JBOD) with USB and Firewire as a plus.

I've seen a cheap enclosure that is basic and does just what I need. The Drobo looks nicer and has Firewire but for that I have to pay two and a half to three times as much. Personally, I think the cheaper one is expensive when it's just combining hard drives.

[raoulpop]

JBOD has no data redundancy features at all, so your data wouldn't be safe if one of the drives happened to fail. You'd lose your data. Drobo has 1 and 2-drive redundancy, which means that even if two of your drives would fail, your data would still be safe.‬

This particular model I reviewed here has 1-drive redundancy, but the new Drobo S, DroboPro and DroboElite models, all of which I reviewed on my website, all have 2-drive redundancy.

[scbondbdgr]

But with data redundancy means less data. I'm not bothered about RAID at all really, the amount of times RAID is actually needed by a regular person at home in terms of failure are probably very low.

Is the Drobo worth that high price?

[raoulpop]

That's a question you're going to answer for yourself after you lose some data. Data is only precious after it's lost.

[scbondbdgr]

Well when it's just video files and maybe music (which will be on my iPod as well) I can always just re-download them, it's not a huge problem. Now please, would you say that the Drobo is worth the money rather than just being awkward?

[raoulpop]

For me, it was worth enough to get four of them. What you do with your money is up to you.

[scbondbdgr]

Ok, but what made you get the Drobo over say a cheap one from Addonics that still has similar features?

[raoulpop]

Lots of reasons, which I've already written about in detail on my website. Go to it (I can't put the URL here because YouTube won't let me, but you can find it on my profile page) do a search for "Drobo", and you'll get all of my Drobo reviews, where I've explained everything in painstaking detail.

[scbondbdgr]

Ok, cheers. I'll see if I can justify buying one.

[maphantom]

i dunno is it smart to have magnets near hdd (dors have magnet)

[raoulpop]

It hasn't backfired so far, my Drobos (I have four of them now) have all been doing fine.

[MroiZooiZo]

@maphantom Magnets doesn't actually damage the harddrive unless they are VERY powerfull. There are also a fairly large magnet inside the harddrive it self.

[maphantom]

i dunno just sayin im no expert

[scbondbdgr]

You're correct actually, no magnets near a hard drive is highly advised by the manufacturer. They may not be significant enough to do damage but 'may' is a two-way word.

[AlienSexDog]

This is the most ridiculous demo ... what it the point of running a RAID over USB .... minimum FireWire 800 preferably eSata

[thescallykiller]

if i buy a drobo now will the issue of the upper 2tb limit be fixed, meaning does the drobo come with the fixed usb 2.0 firmware update

[raoulpop]

I believe that issue has to do with the file system that you format the Drobo with, like NTFS or FAT32. HFS+ has no such limitation. In other words, you can format the Drobo volume to 4TB, 8TB or more, up to 16TB.

[thescallykiller]

can i rip open my 1tb western digital my book and take out the hd and put it in a drobo? i have 120gb space left and are looking at other hard disk storage solutions

[raoulpop]

You could, but make sure to back up your data first, because the Drobo formats any new drives you put into it.

[3dkshun]

not bad

[roger767]

you should open up the MyBook, take out the drives and pop them in your Drobo.

[TonyJE67]

great video. one question for you. do you know if i would be able to setup drobo as a NAS attached to either a Time Capsule or Airport express to use as a media server to stream shared content to a mac or apple tv?? if i go airport express, i would partition drobo to use part for Time Machine and then use the remaining storage for media server attached to Airport express. is this possible??

[raoulpop]

You can probably attach it to a Time Capsule or an Airport Extreme (NOT an Airport Express), but I haven't done it, so I can't tell you if it would work for sure or not.

[sleggat]

Really great. I spent a lot of time on your blog reading the Drobo review and I really appreciate all your replies to comments there and here.

[drillthrall]

Thanks for the video. I have a question.  Can you right-click the drobo on your PC and turn on sharing so other computers can see it?

[raoulpop]

Yes, you can share it just like any other drive, on both PCs and Macs.

[thejokermansending]

whats the problem with WD? what kind of issues did you face?

[yellowsponge123]

Can you access files without sync, like starting a game, program etc?

[graffickattackDOTcom]

Great review but I have 3 questions. Have you tried bench testing video transfer rates from the Drobo? I would like to know if this could serve as a sufficient storage device to streaming video? I understand that there is the network box that can be attached to the device, "Drobo Share"for that particular function. And my last question what particular sata drives would you prefer to run on these? From what I've heard the transfer bit rate is 25mB/sec and buying a 7200 RPM HD would be overkill.

[raoulpop]

I've only compared approximate transfer rates, no bench testing yet. But I'm sure there are others who've done more accurate tests. Yes, it can serve for streaming video. I stream movies stored on the Drobo to my TV through Apple TV, and it works fine. Most SATA drives nowadays are 7200 RPM, so that's what I bought. Don't have the Drobo Share, mine are connected through USB, but shared over the network from my Macs.

[PabloManUK]

Hi raoul, thanks very much for the video.

very informative indeed.

a couple of quick questions though..

1) why were the 2 lights flashing red near the end of your video?

(if you are accessing files, does it cause lights to flash?)

2) if you have 1 large drive, say 500GB, and you have 2 smaller drives of 100GB each. can you remove any sinbgle drive? eg the 500 GB, and still have access to all your data?

[raoulpop]

1) They were still flashing because it hadn't finished syncing the data. Since I had over 300 GB of data that needed to be synced and checked, it took several hours to make sure every bit was there.

When I access files, no visible lights are flashing. If you take the cover off, there's a small, green activity light that flashes, but it's not visible when the cover is on.

[raoulpop]

There must be something wrong with YouTube's comments, because I posted an answer to your second question yesterday. Here goes again...

2) Yes, you can remove any drive and still have access to all your data. That's because the Drobo will only let you write enough data to the drive set to allow for such an occurrence. Go to the Drobo website and check our their Drobolator tool, which lets you calculate available space when using drives of various sizes.

[Castrumpet]

Thanks for the info! I will probably be getting one of these for my main storage and another for backup and double redundancy. Anyone used two units before?

[raoulpop]

I have two Drobos, but I use them on different computers. One of them stores our videos and other files, and the other stores our photos. The one in the review is the one I use to store the photos.

[bilsta57]

Yes,You could connect it to your main computer and use apple file sharing afp And that can also be used for time machine for all! computers on your network... so basically you setup apple file sharing then add that whole drive to share then it tells you your afp address for example afp://10.1.1.9 then in finder go to the menu bar and click Go>Connect To Server> then enter your afp address e.g afp://10.1.1.9 and click connect... Forget Time Capsule lol

[naiieem]

Is it possible to have more then one computer connected to the drobo in a network type config??

many thanks.

[raoulpop]

No, it's a USB device. But I believe it can be connected to something like the Airport Extreme from Apple and shared across a home network. I haven't tried that though, so I can't tell you for sure.

[pagesix1536]

Yes it can be connected that way (they have examples on their website). You can also just share it out on the network. On a Windows box this is a simple drive share. I use a Windows 2003 server and share out the entire Drobo.

[bilsta57]

Yes,You could connect it to your main computer and use apple file sharing afp And that can also be used for time machine for all! computers on your network... so basically you setup apple file sharing then add that whole drive to share then it tells you your afp address for example afp://10.1.1.9 then in finder go to the menu bar and click Go>Connect To Server> then enter your afp address e.g afp://10.1.1.9 and click connect... Forget Time Capsule lol :P.

[seamuswarren]

I've got two 80GB drives I removed from a PC tower when the CPU died. These are each NTFS drives that contain music and photos etc. When you first get the drobo, are you required to insert two blank hard drives? So I'd get myself two big hard drives, insert them and then insert the two 80GB NTFS drives?

Sorry if I'm asking to many questions. Your assistance is appreciated as is your video submission. :)

[raoulpop]

Short answer is no.

The Drobo doesn't care what size or file system or brand the drives are. They just have to be SATA drives. When you stick them in, it'll reformat them automatically and use them. You specify what file system you want to use when you initially set up the Drobo, and then it uses that from there on. You're not actually formatting the hard drives then, you're formatting the virtual Drobo drive. It's a shift in thinking, and it can be confusing.

[raoulpop]

But remember, the moment you stick those drives in the Drobo, the data on them will be erased. It doesn't matter what drives you stick in first, just make sure you no longer need any data on those drives.

[seamuswarren]

If you remove a hard disk from the Drobo, don't you lose access to the data on that removed disk?

[raoulpop]

No, not really. The data is spread on all the drives in the pool, so removing a single drive doesn't do anything but eliminate the data redundancy. Your data is still there. When you put the drive back, Drobo will check the data across all drives to make sure it's properly synced, and then it'll re-instate the redundancy.

[numpty1972]

This is a good option until SSD become much bigger, and much cheaper(which may be some time off). Btw if I had 4X500GB drives in Drobo, how much of the 2TB is available?

[raoulpop]

They've got an online calculator that lets you see how much space is available given drives of various sizes. YouTube won't let me post the URL, but just do a search on Google for Drobolator, and you'll see it.

[raoulpop]

I think I tried to post the link to the Drobolator, the online tool that lets you see that, about 4 times, without luck. The answer is 1.4TB. But try out the Drobolator and you'll see.

[numpty1972]

Thanks for the info. Worth it for the running backup.

[suden59]

Just a side note: I wound up sending my Drobo back because sometimes when the fan kicked on, it would make a buzzing/vibration kind of noise. Just wondering if you have experienced this? I'm really hoping that it was a fluke with the unit I had as I really love the whole Drobo concept-even though it's USB only interface, the expandability/redundancy features far outweigh the negatives. I do have another Drobo on the way-I figured it was worth a second chance.

[raoulpop]

No, mine works just fine. The fan is very quiet at all times. I think yours may have been a fluke, possibly something loose in there, not security tightened.

[suden59]

Well, that's good to hear-thanks for your input. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

[suden59]

Nice in-depth review. Just one quick observation: the noise factor is really also dependent on which brand of hard drive you purchase. I have the Drobo with two 500 GB  Western Digital Caviar 16SE hard drives, and they are relatively quiet-especially compared to Seagate drives which I have owned. For me, the main noise issue would be the fan on the Drobo. But it's all very subjective, of course.

[raoulpop]

It's quite possible, though I haven't found WD drives to be quieter than Seagate drives myself. I could be mistaken, of course. A few years ago, I know that was the case, but it doesn't seem to be the same now. I've got a Seagate drive installed in another external drive enclosure (the NewerTech miniStack I showed in the video), and I can only hear the fan from that enclosure. The drive itself is pretty quiet.