Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21

by Data Robotics

Product Details

• Item Weight: 12.9 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 13 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002Y40FQY
• Item model number: DRDR3A21
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 21, 2009

Product Description

The safe, expandable Data Robotics DRDR3A21 Drobo S DAS Enclosure offers blazingly fast eSATA, and the best data storage experience ever. In addition to eSATA, Data Robotics DRDR3A21 Drobo S DAS Enclosure features enhanced FireWire 800 performance and USB 2.0 connectivity. It is a self-managing, self-healing solution ideal for safely storing large files and rapidly growing data. Built on award-winning BeyondRAID™ technology with single or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo S protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. It can hold up to five hot-swappable drives, for on-the-fly drive capacity expansion with zero downtime. So be sure to pick up the Data Robotics DRDR3A21 Drobo S DAS Enclosure today!<BR><BR>

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Product, May 6, 2010

By 

J. Tappan - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21 (Personal Computers)

I am an IT professional with over 20 years of experience working with storage systems ranging from mini frame computers to the latest iSCSI based systems. This device is NOT the fastest ever storage device. Far from it. What it is, however, is a very elegant storage system designed for the average home or SOHO user who needs a large RAID based storage system that can be expanded on the fly using any drives they happen to have laying around. There is no other storage device (in this price range) that has that ability.

If you are comfortable moving all of your data off of your storage device, breaking the RAID set, installing new drives, repartitioning the RAID set, reformatting the RAID set, and then moving all of your data back because you need more space then by all means choose one of the many available RAID based enclosures on the market that are less expensive. If you are not comfortable with this scenario then the Drobo is exactly the device you need.

The simple reason that this device underperforms compared to those devices is purely based on the calculations required by the BeyondRAID technology built into this device. Drobo have tried to address this performance gap with the Drobo S by incorporating a faster processor. This does help greatly and the Drobo S is faster than the standard Drobo over all of it's interfaces. In order to justify the price gap over the standard Drobo they have added an extra drive bay (5 in the S), the eSATA port, and the ability to survive from 2 drives failing simultaneously.

Having said all of that the performance over FireWire 800 is not bad. I am using 5 Western Digital Green 1TB drives in it (which run very cool) and am seeing 70 MB/s on reads and 50MB/s writes. These drives average out at about 75 MB/s for both reads and writes in most independent tests I have seen. That means my read speeds are almost at the drives maximum. Obviously the writes are quit a bit slower, but RAID write performance is almost always slower due to the calculations required.

Bottom-line is that this device does exactly what it is expected to do. Provide the end user with a painless external storage device that can survive one or two drive failures and expand on the fly to accommodate your ever increasing storage needs. The trade off for that simplicity is a "slight" performance penalty over some plain vanilla RAID enclosure.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't work and they don't honor warranties, November 13, 2010

By 

Paul S "Paul" (Portland OR area) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21 (Personal Computers)

I bought 2 Drobo S units in early 2010. Both suffered operational faults when connected to Esata or USB. One just lost 1/3rd of my business image files, never mind that this is supposedly a raid unit where if one drive fails, you don't lose the data. They continually trip off, continually aren't visible in explorer. Customer service finds every nonDrobo related fault they can, pointing their fingers anywhere but their own unit. They say they have to troubleshoot the problem before replacing the unit, never mind that the warranty stipulates no such thing. And there is no end to the troubleshooting - they address a list of probable issues and come up with more - all related to your own nonDrobo equipment. As a professional photographer, I'll never buy anything from this company again. It's a disfunctional product, dishonest customer service, and a company with tech support that can't see the fact that at some point they've spent more in Drobo staff support dollars on a claim than it would cost them to replace the unit.
Paul

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drobo Storage, April 14, 2010

By 

Konstantinos Manos - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21 (Personal Computers)

I had purchased a Drobo storage device last year and I was not so satisfied by it's performance (I have experienced sudden reboots of my PC when moving big files). For this year I needed to upgrade my storage capacity and I performed my survey for alternatives to Drobo devices. From my survey I found that the best one is still the Drobo (in terms of pricing and technical characteristics). I purchased the Drobo S and I have installed 5 disks of 2T capacity. Plugging the Drobo was easy. The good thing is that when installing the new drivers I have stopped experiencing the problems I have encountered with the previous version. Also the USB and Firewire copy are faster! As a customer I feel very satisfied with the product. My problems solved, my performance is better and I have reliable data storage to protect my files. Highly recommended!