Electronics : Data Robotics DR04DD10 Drobo 4-Bays USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array |
|
|
see more
Rating:  - * The Truth about Drobo ... I'm posting this to help all the folks who have suffered data loss with the Drobo and posted one star reviews and all the happy customers who have posted four and five star reviews because they haven't had a failure yet. I don't own a Drobo, and am neutral about it. But all the controversy is due to a huge misunderstanding that people have about the Drobo. This misunderstanding is encouraged by Drobo marketing, so they are at least guilty of omission if not misrepresentation. No matter how you look at it, Drobo is RAID. It's neatly packaged and easy to use, and may be better than other low cost RAID systems, but it's still a RAID-type system, and RAID IS NOT BACKUP. The goal of a RAID system is increased performance and/or fault tolerance in the case of single drive failure. Drobo seems to do this but it is wrong to equate the ability to survive the failure of a single hard drive with a backup and recovery strategy. If you want an enduring archive of all your work and assets (corporate email, FCP projects or iTunes/iPhotos databases) you need to implement a backup system that will ensure that the data is not lost for any reason. A RAID (or a Drobo) can't do this because it isn't supposed to. RAID-type systems improve reliability by being fault tolerant to drive failure over a period measured in hours. But they don't survive the failure of two drives at once (although RAID 6 can), and they don't survive the failure of the control unit itself. The poor users who suffered catastrophic data loss when the Drobo died, deserve our sympathy but they overlooked the Single Point of Failure in the Drobo, or any unit like it. If you want to ensure your 700GB of data are secure against sudden failure, there are several ways to do it. Assume you have this 700GB of data on a 1TB drive. How do you secure it? 1. Buy a Drobo with four 250GB drives and you may be better off than storing it all on just one 1TB FW800 drive. But if the Drobo itself smokes, you lose just as completely as if one drive died. Remember the Drobo has only one power supply and one controller. This is what happened to the Amazon customers reporting failures. 2. Buy a second 1TB FW800 drive and use Apple Time Machine (if you have a Mac) to keep a backup. You will be able to recover all files with a granularity of one hour. If your main disk fails, you have the TM backup. If the TM backup drive fails, you still have the data on the primary drive. 3. Buy a second 1TB FW800 drive and make a duplicate of the primary every day or week, depending on how long a span of data loss you can risk. This works with or without Apple Time Machine. You can then buy an additional 1TB drive, duplicate your data onto it and store it in an offsite location. First step in securing data: put your computer on a UPS. Next: run some backup application to an external drive. Better: run the backup drive(s) off a second UPS. Best: store an archive or snapshot of your system remotely. Only a backup strategy can secure data against loss. Only tested backups are dependable. Rating: - * Lots of trouble but finally working ... I'm using it with my Vista Home Premium PC. I formatted a 4TB partition just to be future proof. Initially I was using USB2. After installing Drobo Desktop, every time I open/close the Desktop, I get a windows registry permission error. I had to click on Continue to make it work, or Quit (3 times) to close it, so I can power off my computer. The 1st time I copied files to it, I lost a few files and directories, they show up corrupted to Windows, I can not access or delete them. Running chkdsk shows error on the drive. The only thing I can think of is that I only had 750GB and 1TB drives in, so after I copied everything the drive was filled up, the 750GB drive is showing yellow, saying I need a larger drive. However, after I added another 1TB drive, those corrupted files and directories were still inaccessible. I then reformatted it, and recopied everything. And this time everything took, chkdsk showed the drive to be fine. I can power on/off the PC and doesn't seem to cause any problem for the Drobo. It just shuts off when the PC is off, and comes back on when the PC is on again. The manual say to use the Drobo Desktop to shut it down, but it seems to handle power on/off fine as long as the disk are healthy (green lights). A few days later I changed over to Firewire 800 using a Belkin 3-port Firewire 800 card that I just got. The card had a little problem picking up the Drobo the 1st time, I had to power cycle the Drobo a couple of time then it picked it up. All files are still accessible. I'm getting about 23 MB/S writes and 30 MB/s writes. I finally fixed the registry error by using regedit, and fixing the permission of the Drobo registry key. Not sure how that got screwed up. Or maybe I should have it running using Admin account instead of my account. I wonder if the Drobo Desktop installer should have handled this better. Rating:  - * I wish I've got it before ... This product really do what it is supposed to do and more! in comparison with the Western Digital MyBook world editionWestern Digital WDG2NC20000N My Book World Edition II 2 TB Ethernet External Hard Drive and the Buffalo TeraStation it is so much faster when attached to the DroboShareDroboshare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo as a network storage, really easy to setup and install takes a small space and had almost no notable noise and the fan really emits heat and the Drobo Dashboard software is really very easy and requires no routing or configurations, a really must have product. Rating:  - * Drobo Goodtimes So Far.. ... Got the Drobo FW800 a few weeks ago and so far smooth sailing. I love the convenience of slipping in the raw OEM hard drives and being up and running in no time. As a full time editor the Drobo has proven (so far) to be very reliable and much faster than the external lacie FW800 drives I was using before that would lag when opening folders. The redundancy is peace of mind and that is worth the $500 alone. As far as custom service and support is concerned I have heard some horror stories and that is definitely something to consider---I hate bad customer service! Hopefully I won't need them, but if I do I will update this review. Hoping for an eSata Drobo in 2009... Rating:  - * Don't Buy This! ... Update: It has been 5 days and three phone calls to support since the third crash and I still have had no one call me back and help. If I don't hear from them by tomorrow, I'm returning the unit to Amazon. I bought this 3 weeks ago, I have loaded 1.8 Teravbytes of data 3 times. The unit keeps shutting itself off and won't let me load anything else on it. Support has done nothing to help yet. I will update if status changes. BE WARNED. |
A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.
