Data Robotics DroboPro 8-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/iSCSI Storage Array DRPR1A21

by Data Robotics

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 14.1 x 12.2 x 5.5 inches ; 16.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 21.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0026NCWAU
• Item model number: DRPR1A21
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 15, 2009

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

DroboPro™ is the first business class direct-attached storage array that manages itself. Engineered to be both simple and scalable, the revolutionary BeyondRAID™ technology incorporated into DroboPro frees businesses of making the difficult and confining choices commonly associated with storage management. Why trade simplicity for safety, or stability for expandability? DroboPro delivers both enterprise-level data safety and unprecedented expandability, featuring single- and dual disk redundancy combined with instant capacity expansion. Once you experience DroboPro, you just might forget the differences between all eleven traditional RAID levels. If you do, don't panic. You're experiencing the peace of mind that comes with every Drobo® product.

Up to 8 Disks of Instant Expansion to 16TB and Beyond
Grow your storage in line with your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace your smallest disk with a larger one, even when all eight disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found in DroboPro enables you to mix and match disk brands, capacities, and speeds. With DroboPro expansion is automatic and instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

No Headache Dual Disk Redundancy
Enable Dual Disk Redundancy with a single click, without ever losing access to your data. Running out of space? You can even switch back to single-disk redundancy with a click. Unlike moving between RAID 5 and RAID 6 levels, there's no need to reformat or migrate data from the array, potentially saving you hours or days.

Triple Interface Featuring iSCSI
Attach DroboPro directly to the server or workstation or to a shared server or workstation on your network to provide access to multiple clients. Interface options include iSCSI (Gigabit Ethernet), FireWire 800, and Hi-Speed USB 2.0 (iSCSI is a high-performance protocol that has become extremely popular with businesses, but it can often be complex to manage. DroboPro introduces zero-click iSCSI connection for both Windows and Mac OS X.)

The Virtues of Smart Volumes™
Create new volumes in seconds and manage up to 16 x 16TB volumes over time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management technology in DroboPro allows volumes to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. The labor of resizing and migrating volumes is replaced with the simplicity of intelligent engineering.

Supercharge Your Backup Strategy
Backup and recovery demands continue to grow and your basic tape infrastructure is probably not keeping up with growth of your data and your need for speed. Replace your aging tape infrastructure with the DroboPro as your disk-to-disk backup target and enjoy Drobo speed and reliability. Certified with Symantec Backup Exec 2011, the DroboPro provides unparalleled backup and recovery price/performance and reliability to ensure that data is always available in case of disaster.

Rack Mount Ready, Desktop Quiet
DroboPro is equally at home in a rack mount environment as it is on your desktop. Dual smart fans automatically manage their speeds to optimize both cooling and operating noise. (DroboPro rack mount sold separately.)

Small Box | Big Storage
Description	4-Bay Direct-Attached Storage for Professionals	5-Bay Direct-Attached Storage for Professionals	5-Bay File Sharing Storage for Professionals	8-Bay Direct-Attached Storage for Professionals	8-Bay File Sharing Storage for Business	8-Bay iSCSI SAN Storage for Business
Type	Direct-Attached	Direct-Attached	File Sharing (up to 10 users)	Direct-Attached	File Sharing (up to 100 users)	iSCSI SAN (up to 8 servers)
Model	Drobo	Drobo S	Drobo FS	DroboPro	B800fs	B800i
Interfaces	USB 2.0, FireWire 800	USB 3.0 / 2.0, FireWire 800, eSATA	1 x Gb Ethernet	USB 2.0, FireWire 800, 1 x Gb Ethernet iSCSI (single server)	2 x Gb Ethernet	2 x Gb Ethernet iSCSI (multi server)
Drive Bays	4	5	5	8	8	8
Drive Type	3.5" SATA	3.5" SATA	3.5" SATA	3.5" SATA	3.5" SATA	3.5" SATA
Form Factor	Desktop	Desktop	Desktop	Desktop or Rack mount (3U)	Desktop or Rack mount (3U)	Desktop or Rack mount (3U)
BeyondRAID™	X	X	X	X	X	X
Thin Provisioning	X	X	X	X	X	X
Drive Protection	Single	Single or Dual	Single or Dual	Single or Dual	Single or Dual	Single or Dual
Smart Volumes	Automatic	Automatic	Automatic	Up to 16	Automatic	Up to 255
Drobo Sync					X
Drobo Apps			X		X
Power / Cooling	Fixed	Fixed	Fixed	Fixed	Fixed	Fixed
Management	Drobo Dashboard	Drobo Dashboard	Drobo Dashboard	Drobo Dashboard	Drobo Dashboard	Drobo Dashboard
Drobo Care™	Optional	Optional	Optional	Optional	Optional	Optional

 

Don't forget to buy your Drobo Care!

Drobo Care 1-year Warranty	Drobo Care 3-year Warranty

 

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast, easy to use, June 27, 2009

By 

Steve Mokris (Athens, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Data Robotics DroboPro 8-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/iSCSI Storage Array DRPR1A21 (Personal Computers)

Dead simple to use compared to any other RAID-ish system I've seen, and more flexible. You can mix drive sizes and it (usually) makes good use of the space (be sure to prototype your configuration first using their online drive calculator). Plus you can replace small drives with larger drives on-the-fly. Rad.

The network iSCSI connection is more than fast enough to edit several simultaneous streams of video.

Some issues:

1. It only supports HFS+ volumes up to 16TB. According to Apple's Technical Note TN1150, HFS+ can technically support volumes up to 8 Exbibytes, so this seems like an arbitrarily low limitation on the part of the DroboPro. I'd rather just create a single humongous volume, and keep expanding actual capacity as larger drives appear, instead of creating multiple 16TB volumes...

2. It doesn't perform Data Scrubbing. So if data gets silently corrupted by bad harddrives, I probably won't know about it until it's too late -- whereas with proactive Data Scrubbing (like that provided by ZFS, for example), inconsistent blocks could be automatically blacklisted.

With these two issues solved, the DroboPro would be perfect.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most exciting storage product at this price point., June 20, 2009

By 

Mitch Haile (San Jose, CA and Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Data Robotics DroboPro 8-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/iSCSI Storage Array DRPR1A21 (Personal Computers)

Storage innovation has been ongoing over the years, but there hasn't been a whole lot of "new stuff" lately, and at price points like this, there hasn't been much change at all. Traditionally if you wanted to buy a cheap disk shelf, you'd be looking at something from Apple (discontinued), Promise, possibly Adaptec, NetGear, Iomega for a cheap 1u-style NAS head--at perhaps 4x-8x the price of this Drobo Pro.

But this isn't a NAS head, and it contains 8 drives (though it works fine with fewer). Instead, you're buying a block device that you can use over iSCSI, FW800, or USB.

The key benefit Drobo is selling is the zero management of RAID and volumes and the Drobo Pro delivers on this in a massive scale. Growing a volume is as simple as adding another disk (or swapping out the indicated disk with a larger one). The concepts of RAID-5 or RAID-6 need not be understood or considered by the user other than a checkbox of "do you want this thing to survive two concurrent drive failures?". Rebuilding is taken care of.

Drobo comes with a simple GUI to monitor capacity, show overhead for protection, configure email alerts. I did run into an issue where Drobo wouldn't work with my internal mail server due to a TLS problem, which I haven't debugged much--the mail server supports TLS, so I am not sure what the problem is. The iSCSI set-up was dead easy for me--I plugged in the Drobo with USB (just to get it configured), set the iSCSI IP address, moved the Drobo to the network closet and plugged in Ethernet, and the Mac automatically found and mounted the Drobo volume.

The construction of the unit is solid. It weighs a beefy 20 lbs (empty), and the fit and finish is superb. The drive trays are easy to work with--no screwing drive sleds onto drives or dealing with a flimsy aluminum chassis per drive. This puppy is solid. It comes with all the cables you will need (GigE, USB, FW800, power). I have some enterprise storage systems in the closet along with the Drobo, but none of them intrigue visitors the way the Drobo Pro does. Plus, the Drobo is practically silent with 8 drives in it--No 1u or 3u enterprise system is this quiet.

Performance is very good for the price point--I can do 100 MB/s in test I/O very easily. Xbench shows far better I/O scores than an Apple software RAID, and, mostly, better scores than a single SATA drive. There does appear to be some overhead for the data protection, but it's marginal and beats out cheaper RAID options.

I am mostly using the Drobo Pro for test storage for software I am writing but I am seriously considering buying another Drobo Pro for real live storage for my workstation and reducing the local SATA and FW800 storage.

For the price, there's nothing else out there like this. Sure you can buy some NAS systems from various vendors, or some big honking RAIDs from California Digital or other vendors--but no one bridges the management gap like Drobo does.

Some notes: I have only used the Mac software; I have no idea how Windows support is. I also have been looking into the Linux side of things, where it gets a little more complicated, and the documentation isn't there yet--but Drobo does note Linux is beta at the moment.

The Drobo Pro is well worth the cost for anyone who needs iSCSI or bigger capacities than the regular Drobo affords. Sure, there's just one Ethernet port, and only a single power supply, but this puppy is silly cheap for what it is. Higher end features will mean a higher price, but not everyone needs those features for small office products. For me, this is a winner. I hadn't owned a Drobo before this, but I expect I will be buying more Drobos in the future.

UPDATE 28-Sep-2009: Note that this is a block device. Some other device has to provide and manage the filesystem. If you plan to use this with multiple computers over Ethernet to the same volume, that's not going to fly so well--though the DroboPro should be able to serve up separate volumes (LUNs) to different hosts (haven't tried this myself). iSCSI is just a way to serve up blocks, not provide a shared filesystem. If you are looking for a shared filesystem, you either need some other device/computer to provide NAS (e.g., CIFS or NFS services) with the DroboPro or buy something else. The appeal of iSCSI over Ethernet is cheaper cabling and simpler infrastructure vs FibreChannel. Hope this helps.

66 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, June 30, 2009

By 

Christopher Spence "Lucky Dad" (New Hamsphire, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Data Robotics DroboPro 8-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/iSCSI Storage Array DRPR1A21 (Personal Computers)

I've heard good feedback on Drobo products but after trying a Drobo Pro we had a lot of problems. The first unit we tested performance was 20-30mb/s with frequent "freeze ups" where it would drop down to 5mb/s. Local storage on this same box gives 130mb/s with single raptor drives.

We got a replacement unit that was completely dysfunctional, it rebooted continuously and was not functional. The third unit a technician received and tested before sending to us. We managed to get 90MB/s out of it for about 5 minutes, then the device dropped down to 60Mb/s on average, still with random drops to 5mb/s (although not nearly as often as first unit but still frequently happens coming out of drive spin down). These tests are with 256K block size, I always test with 32K block size, but when using 32K block size, performance was really low (6-8Mb/s or so). This is tested with 8x Western Digital Black Dual Processor Drives w/ 32MB cache. The tech I spoke to only had odd drives like old 40GB drives to test with and did not have any reasonable performance drives in the lab.

The first device was extremely difficult to use, if for whatever reason you put the unit in standby you can fiddle with it for 15 minutes before it would eventually come online, many times only with a reboot. The new unit seems more reliable in this manor, but still can be quirky.

The software is super easy, and it is really designed to be dummy proof, but not as much for VMWare, Multiple Servers, or anything performance sensitive. It typically performs slower than an average single sata drive. Although they are marketing it for VMWare and corporate environments. A big part of this is due to the 256MB memory on the device, where only 64MB is reserved for write-cache. With capacity of over 8TB, 64Mb isn't going to do anything and using RAID5/6 (they use a priority system, but it is basically raid 5/6) write-cache is critical to having acceptable performance rates. The unit does not support jumbo frames, which is a big concern when using Gbit iSCSI. It seems to perform better with Jumbo frames, but after mixed messages from tech support, we finally were told to turn off Jumbo frames as they are not supported.

All and all it is not a system I could recommend or sell to my clients (the reason we tested the unit) as even using windows software stripping across two USB external drives would perform better, not that I ever used such a configuration, our experience seems to put it in that category. The unit is inexpensive as an iSCI SAN but the performance issues makes it unpractical for use as a SAN.