Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

On paper the Drobo Pro is great, an 8-bay raid box that can take care of it self. In reality however, it's not very good. I wasn't expecting blazing fast speed, but I wasn't ready for this. Connected via Fire Wire 800 my Drobo managed to sustain a 30mbps write speed (Fire Wire 800 is capable of 800mbps), and when you have over 6TB (yes, terabytes) of data to backup this kind of speed is unacceptable. I'm a video pro who needs lots of storage space and lots of speed, however I don't need all of my old footage on my super fast edit raid, hence the Drobo, lots of space and redundancy to protect my data. However, it took my Drobo several days to complete the backup and finish what it calls "Data protection", it's just too slow, and I can't even play back video files. Overall I'm deeply unsatisfied with the Drobo. If you are looking for an 8-bay storage device I would suggest you buy the Areca ARC-5040 Raid Box. Like the Drobo pro it has 8-bays, and it has a host of advanced features that enable you to have it grow over time like the Drobo. However the Areca has dedicated hardware raid built into it, so it can perform like a real raid should, it's fast, easy to use, and costs less than the Drobo Pro.
Don't buy the Drobo Pro, save some money and buy a better product at the same time, get the Areca ARC-5040 and you won't be sorry.
P.S. The ARC-5040 isn't currently available on Amazon (they don't sell it), look at NewEgg, they have it in stock.

UPDATE: 11/20/2010
Made the mistake of updating the firmware on my Drobo Pro, now it's dead. After the firmware updated Firewire stopped working, so it was connected via USB. Once it remounted it needed to perform "Data Protection", this went on for TWO weeks, until it crashed. (NOTE: the Drobo Pro is running on a macmini server that isn't used for anything other than acting as a storage server) Now I can't get the Drobo Pro running. It's a good thing I only use the Drobo Pro as a backup to the backup. Avoid Drobo at all costs. My main backup is an Areca ARC-5040 and it has never given me a problem, save the aggravation and buy the Areca over the Drobo Pro.

After owning a regular Drobo 2nd Gen for a few months I was impressed enough to get a Drobo Pro for my business. Right off the bat I had problems with my computer seeing the device and with it not being seen within Drobo Dashboard. I have spoken with customer service twice and had numerous email correspondence with no luck getting the Drobo Pro working right. Finally I moved it off my G5 (which is what I wanted to use it with) to my Mac Mini server because they recommended I use it on an intel mac since power PC's are know to have poor performance with Drobos. The mac mini works great for a few hours but then the write speed drops down to 10 MB's a minute. Then after a while it will become unresponsive and has to be manually shut down to start this process again. I have been trying to copy a few terabytes of data to it for weeks now with no luck.

The product simply is no reliable and I would not recommend it. Save your money for the next generation which might have these problems fixed or for another solution that is proven.

Customer service is friendly and responds quickly but has been unable to resolve my issues as of yet. Hopefully my Drobo is defective and a new one will work as advertised.

I will update this review if my issue gets resolved.

-----Updated 3-3-10-------

So after a lot of testing and firmware updates the device still was pretty slow. The rebooting and crashing issues were resolved with a firmware release 2 months after my purchase. but it still was pretty slow with writes and semi unreliable when writing big chunks of data over a few hundred GB's. I have to say though that Drobo Tech support and customer service was very nice and easy to get a hold of. They ended up giving me a refund outside of Amazons typical 30 days and with no restocking fee. Also I know other people out there have had good luck with their Drobo's so my problems may not have been typical. So if you're considering this product I would say go for it since they stand behind their devices and will issue a refund if they can't make it work for you.

Also note that I have a Drobo 2nd gen that has been going 24/7 for a year and is working great. I even had a drive die in it and it worked as advertised, it sent me an email alerting me to the failure and began doing its thing making my data safe again on the other installed drives. They also are pretty frequent with updates for the dashboard software and firmware so if something is a little off it's likely they are aware and working on it.

Maybe I'll try the new SATA Drobo or get another 2nd gen. All said I would not buy this specific drobo again but will definitely consider their other products in the future.

I've put it through the ringer for over 6 months. I've lost one drive, and Drobo restored all data without a hitch. I have replaced 4 1TB drives with 2TB (all Hitachi) without any loss of data, etc.

I can't say that I have had the same luck using RAIDs. I love the new non-RAID concept of Drobo. I personally haven't had as many performance problem as others reported, and I work with huge video files 9GB - 60GB typically. I can sleep at night now knowing that our company data is safe.

UPDATE: Datarobotics has ruined a great product. The Drobo Pro now disconnects during simultaneous read and writes, and is even more difficult than ever to connect with, also its performance has degraded since the updates. Saying all of this from usage on an Apple Snow Leopard server, 10.6.3 I have had to since then move over to typical NAS devices just for stability and speed. Too sad. I wish I knew how to downgrade the updates (both software and firmware).

Things to consider:

- During drive replacement or upgrade Drobo doesn't protect data, and dependent upon the amount of data you have, it may take 2 days to restore a new drive(s)

- Better performance achieved by connecting to second NIC, so you have a dedicated connection directly to Drobo

- On my personal Mac, I have had some connection and setup issues, but once you have everything configured, things just work without incident.

- Drobo is shared by my Mac with the rest of the company. No issues there. I'm buying a 16TB version next and this time connecting that to an Apple server for file sharing and access control. I recommend this, however I haven't had any issues sharing from my personal Apple Tower.


- Don't use Seagate or Maxtor. If i've ever lost any drives in all my PC and MAC years (20+) they have ONLY been Seagate's and now I can add Maxtor to the list. Perhaps, I've just had bad luck, but proof is in the results! I highly recommend Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, and perhaps even Western Digital over Seagate hands down.

I have owned my drobopro for almost three years now and like the previous users comment the speed is not as fast as a raid server. I never could get the iScsi to work either, maybe it needs more tweaking, but unless it works out of the box with simple setup I am not going to use it. My connection speed is USB2 so I don't get fast speeds but this is acceptable to me. If you want a fast raid server, where you are editing videos and need the fast transfer speeds, don't get the Drobo(Pro).

My drobopro is my main file server for photos and home video, and its fast enough. If the ease of having a protected data with raid redundancy and the ability to mix different disk size with automatic rebuild is more important than transfer speed, the Drobo is a good choice.

In the past I had a dedicated 3ware raid 5 card file server, but the problem was I always need to upgrade 4 disks at one time when server got full. So all the old smaller disks I had no use. Now with DroboPro I can use these old disks and add bigger disks as needed. To me that was most important, with the ease to upgrade my disk space capacity without the need to purchase a whole set of disks, and rebuild copy time.

With any raid and including drobo its not a replacement for backups. Use an online backup service or get some external disks and make regular backups. I read some people who lost all their data because the drobo died or corrupted their data or what ever their reason but if you don't backup your data you got no reason to complain since any system can fail.

I have had no drobo failure or data corruption in the past three years. When adding a new disk, the rebuild time takes about one day, but you still have access to your data, and its not wasting one day of your time, drobopro is rebuilding in the background. When I had my own raid file server it took two days of my time to rebuild it so I hated this.

It worked perfectly for about two months then all the drive lights went red. No access via iscsi or their dashboard. Call tech support and they open a case and step me through some very basic diagnostics. It still will not boot with drives in it. Now the case has to go to tier 2 support. The ETA for a response from them is 48 hours.

So after waiting the two days an email arrives asking me to boot it in their equivalent to Safe Mode. The Drobopro still just displays red lights, so I email them back the results. No response after two hours so I call. They tell me my tech support person has gone home for the day and will email me in the morning.... I tell the tech that is not acceptable so he has the other tier 2 tech look over my case and call me back. Our conversation lasted about five minutes with him telling me that it will need to go to tier 3 tech support. I ask how many tiers are there? He responds 3, so it sounds like I might be getting somewhere. My next question is: When will I hear from them? He responds that although there is more than one person in tier 3, they do handle cases in the order they are received and sometimes these cases take time to resolve so he has no idea when they will be in contact with me. I ask if it will be this week, this month? Is there an average response time? He has no idea. So here I wait with a broken Drobopro with four 2TB drives in it.

I want to start by saying that I had heard many favorable things about Drobo and their "beyond RAID" technology.
Honestly, it's not terrible, but my experience overall made me return the unit at the end of the following day.

Here is why.
I was installing this as an iSCSI target. I have a lot of experience with iSCSI on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Windows.
The DroboPro behaves like NO OTHER iSCSI target I have EVER worked with. The DroboDashboard software couldn't find it on our network, ever.
Open-iSCSI running on Debian Linux found it without issue though after I had preconfigured it over Firewire.

Here's where the real headaches started. DroboPro does not "officially" support more than 2TB LUNs formatted with EXT3, no matter what disks you use.
DroboPro doesn't support anything other than HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, and "unofficially" EXT3.
Never mind that an iSCSI target should be completely indifferent about what the filesystem used on it is, nor should it particularly care what size the LUN is.
DroboPro fails this point so badly it's disastrous. I tried 16TB with EXT4, it appeared to work until I went to actually mount the filesystem and then I get tons of iSCSI errors and eventually had to kill the process.

These are likely limitations brought on by their fake-raid. It's a goofy way of managing an array, you don't actually get any control over it.
Instead you decide what size your LUNs will be - they'll all be that size. Then "feed it disks".

So now having discovered this the hard way after hours of troubleshooting iSCSI failures caused by this thing not understanding what I felt was pretty basic task [1 LUN, 16TB, EXT4] I come to find that the problems are all caused by Drobo's lack of functionality as a block device.

Do not purchase any Drobo equipment if you want your data to be safe. In their documentation they constantly stress the need for backups... wonder why.
This might be fine for the Mac weenie as a large timecapule (I've heard bad things in this regard too though!) but for a real production SAN... RUN the other direction.
While looking for solutions to my problems with this I came across a bunch of people who had various issues related to DroboPro/Elite iSCSI reliability across pretty much all platforms used with it - Linux, VMware (ESX/ESXi), Windows, Mac. Nearly all of the complaints were about slow I/O under heavy load or complete disconnects seemingly at random.

You'll be better off with a SansDigital EliteRaid iSCSI -- TRUST me. They do everything from the $200 two drive portable unit all the way up to "Enterprise grade" 50 drive RAID6/60 monster for $60K.

This review was written immediately after finally giving up on the product and returning it to Amazon - as such it may be a little confusing and sound frustrated.
I hope this saves someone else from a similar experience.

I do love Amazon's return policy though!

I'm genuinely surprised at all the one star reviews and horror stories about the DroboPro here, because in my experience, over the past two years, while I've had some product quirks, I've never lost my data.

My DroboPro has always been connected via FW800, so I can't comment on the iSCSI aspects of this product. I have 8x2TB Western Digital green drives, with dual-disk redundancy enabled (Data Robotics' proprietary version of RAID6) and transfer speeds at 85% full average about 50-60MB (400-480Mbps), which I think is fine. I didn't buy this device for speed, I bought it to keep my data safe, which it has.

Over the past two years here are some of the quirks I've had:
- On three or four occasions, after booting into Snow Leopard, the entire volume was marked as read only for no apparent reason. A simple reboot fixed this, but considering my iTunes library is on the DroboPro and it's set to open at launch, getting random error messages about podcasts downloading is confusing until I realize the volume is marked read-only for some reason.
- I've had to have the unit itself RMAed twice. Once, because the fans were too loud and the second time because the unit was stuck in a reboot loop. I do have Data Robotic's enhanced warranty plan, DroboCare, so they were overnighted to me. No issues at all with customer service and all I had to do was put the drive pack into the replacement unit and everything just worked.

I also originally started out with 8x1TB Western Digital green drives. Over the years, I upgraded all of the 1TB drives to 2TB drives. I also had two drive failures from natural causes. This means I've had at least ten occasions where the DroboPro had to relayout my data and I've never lost anything. Relayouts take about 20-60 hours, depending on how full the volume is and I highly recommend that anyone with the DroboPro enable the "dual-disk redundancy" option.

Is the DroboPro perfect? No. Is it a speed machine? No. But have I ever lost data? No.

As always, best practices for data protection mean this shouldn't be your main storage, you should have a backup of whatever is on your DroboPro.