Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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

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!

I love the idea of a Drobo and it has a lot of nice features, but for my particular needs, and my experience with the company's pre-sales information and post-sales support, I have to give this product a FAIL.

First of all, let me say that the Drobo S is the only model that supports ESATA, which is substantially faster than FireWire 800, which is why I wanted this. My plans were to use it with a Mac Xserve. I called Data Robitics before purchasing and asked them specifically if it would work with an Xserve with the ESATA cards they recommend for the Mac Pro, as they don't list the Xserve explicitly in their FAQ. Yes, they said, no problem, people do this all the time. The sales person even checked with the Xserve expert.

I'm not sure how that could be true as one of the cards they recommend specifically states that it does NOT support the Xserve and the other one didn't work either despite many fruitless attempts at support with the card's manufacturer and a replacement card in case the first one was defective. No go. So I tried the next higher model of ESATA card from one of their recommended manufacturers and the card worked fine in my Xserve but completely failed to see the Drobo. ESATA card manufacturer says it is Data Robotics fault as they are not doing ESATA correctly with the Drobo S so it won't work and they have been unwilling to fix the problem despite having it clearly pointed out to them. Great.

So I contacted Data Robotics support to ask what gives, you guys said it would work in an Xserve. They first provided me with a canned response pointing me to the FAQ that says what cards to use in a MAC PRO. Grumble grumble, did you guys even read my question? So I replied that they didn't actually answer my question and neither of those cards work. So if your sales and tech guys say it will work in an Xserve, please tell me how.

Five days later and no response. Complete FAIL, this product and this company get one star.

After spending a huge amount of time reviewing raid systems, i finally dove-in and bought the drobo s. The flex to use current drives, and drives from different manufacturers, seemed hella bonus. The system, however, has never worked. it starts and stops constantly, has lost data, has NOT integrated seamlessly w/ other sata drives that did great as mac pro internals, and their customer service is flightly.

Also, BUYER BEWARE THESE PRODUCTS DO NOT WORK AS PRIMARY EDITING DRIVES IF YOU ARE EDITING ONLY ON FIREWIRE 800. The Drobo reps will tell you that they works as well as any internal Raid 0 or 5 array, BUT THEY DO NOT. When you get into tech support, they will tell you, essentially, that the drobo should only be used as a back-up system, and not as your primary, constantly updated data storage. DROBO DOES NOT PLAY-WELL WITH FCP OR OTHER EDITING SOFTWARE. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT WITHOUT DATA THRU-PUT SUPERIOR TO FIREWIRE 2.

To add perspective to the other reviews, I purchased this Drobo earlier this year. My computer never recognized the eSATA device although it is configured with the Advanced Host Controller Interface and enabled. So I used the USB interface. User support was nonresponsive. Email support tickets were submitted to them. No answer. When I called, they said they never received the support ticket, and then she said "Did you respond to the the email acknowledgement by typing only between the arrows? I had not. I treated it like a regular email. None-the-less the supoort person was useless. So i continued with just the USB interface.

Then last month the Drobo stopped working totally. I skipped submitting a support ticket on their web site. I called. I was led through an endless series of rebooting my computer and the Drobo with no results. Because I had the unit for 6 months there was no warranty. However if I bought their $100 extended service they would replace it. I obviously wanted to salvage a $700 investment let alone my backups. They sent me a new unit. The eSata connection now worked! Hmmmm....
Now however their "Drobo Dashboard" does not recognize the unit. I can still backup to it with Acronis but without the Dashboard only displays "No Drob found". Removed and reinstalled software to no avail.

Because of the price I really expected more. I would not recommend anyone go this route because of the poor support - especially since this is geared more for the home office of home user who may need more support in getting things configured correctly. And the reality is this. If it fails again all my backups are gone. I would need to purchase another Drobo to get my backups and restore. Does anyone really want to be tied to this scenario?

My rating is a tossup between 2 and 3 stars so I decided to give it a break and go with the 3 stars. I bought the Drobo S to protect an extensive library of photographs and because it was supposed to finally have an esata interface. USB performance has never been adequate when you need to work with images on a real time basis. I have used several external esata drives and have always been satisified with their real-time performance. I had a number of problems installing the Drobo S; it turns out that you have to install it with usb and then switch over to the esata interface and my issue was that I had to call tech support to find this out. I ported over 270gb of raw and finished images and switched to the esata interface and the problems began. Photoshop CS4 would not pull the images over from the Drobo S; Photoshop CS4 hung, Windows 7 hung and it was almost impossible to kill the task. And when you finally killed the task I had to shut down the PC and Drobo S and start them both up again. And sometimes the Drobo S would not start and be available to the PC. All in all trying to run Drobo S over the esata interface was a dreadful experience! I finally pulled the esata cable and went back to the usb cable thinking that I would start all over again and try to figure out where I had gone wrong. Lo and behold - after going back to the usb interface everything seems to be working just the way I thought it was supposed to. I even didn't have to reload all the images and Photoshop now works just the way it should, all of which means to me that the esata interface clearly has problems. Luckily my PC has a very fast Core i7 processor so even at usb speeds the performance is acceptable and I'm finally happy to be running, albeit not using esata like I was supposed to have been able to do. I still have an open task of going back at Data Robotics tech support to try and figure out what went wrong. Basically I believe that if everything worked right here that this device would be worth what you pay for it; try figuring out how RAID works and what it costs to implement and I think you'd look quite favorably at the Drobo S.

Usually I do not write reviews about any products, if it works well I'll go on with my life and if it doesn't I'll just do the same.

This time however I feel I was ripped off by this company so I'm writing this review.

I have lots os films, pictures and files and was in search for a reliable storage device. I purchased Drobo S USB3.0 together with four 2TB WD hard drives.

Every thing worked fine for about a month except a nice day I turned my computer on and there was no Drobo drive letter. All though the Drobo dashboard was telling me my drive was fine I could not access it.

I registered at the support and was treated by several unexperienced analysts. After 3 weeks sending emails, log files, screen shots, computer information, etc.. I received an outrageous email informing me my technical support was about to expire and if i wanted to continue receiving support I should pay for it. So after 3 weeks I just gave up and re-formated the drive.

Now everything is working again, I lost some os my films, some files, most of which can be replaced, but worst of all I totally lost my trust on Drobo claimed data reliability.

I would never buy this product again and can't recommend anyone to do so, since I do not live in US I just can't get my money back something I would surely do if I had the opportunity.

We decided to use this unit to store our ftp files, which are too large and numerous to put on the server (over 1TB).
It exhibits a very odd behaviour though- if you restart the server it is connected to, the unit shuts off with the server, then turns back on with the server (so far so good). However it then shuts off again once the "log on, ctrl-alt-delete" dialog box shows up. Tech support first said that was not likely, then verified it on their own computers and told me "that's just the way it is"
Amazing: in other words, if you restart the server remotely you better have someone on site to turn the Drobo unit back on for you. How this company finds this acceptable is unfathomable to me.
At that point I was stuck with it because it was "in production" and we could not afford more downtime. Still, it is worth mentioning for others to beware and for the company to FIX THIS ISSUE for those of us still with them.

Works as advertised. Hooked up to a slackware linux server through esata. No problems and transfer speeds are as expected.

Update:
I have had the Drobo hooked up to a linux server when doing a reboot or a power failure and the Drobo causes a problem when coming back up. Since the first gen has a slower e-sata connection it does not respond fast enough to the hardware detection and causes time outs when the os queries the detected drive. The solution is to disconnect the Drobo until boot up is finished. Power up the Drobo S and wait for it to finish its boot up. Then connect the e-sata and mount the drive. This can be very problematic for someone who remotely maintain a linux server boot is livable for how I am currently using the device