Customer Reviews

Drobo Beyond Raid 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA 6GB/S Storage Array with Drobo PC Backup

5 star:		(287)
4 star:		(96)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(69)

 

 

Normally I don't write reviews for all of the products I buy, but based on the bad reviews that people have given the drobo, I felt I needed to offset some of the unfair & misleading comments.

I have had this drobo for about a month. I have had very little interaction with the drobo itself. That is becouse once it is set up you forget it. That is wonderful for this kind of storage device.

It really is as simple as putting the drives in, install the software, and begin using it. I first saw this at Macworld in January 2008, but held out for the firewire version. I am using on a mixed environment network with no compatibility problems. It is very fast, and very easy. I am using mine for all of my videos streamed to our TVs. IT ABSOLUTELY WORKS WONDERFULLY! It can simultaniously stream mp4 videos to 2 TVs while having data copied to it.... all without any hiccups. That is impressive for a device like this.

For those of you have have read (or are about to read) some of the negative reviews here, allow me to comment on them:

First complaint: Add (4) 1TB Drives - only get 2.7TB of useable data space. There are two reasons why. First the equivalent of the largest drive is being used incase or drive failure or to be able to do drive expansion.

Second, the device says that you can put up to 16tb of storage in it. This means that WHEN 4tb drives are available, you can put up to 4 of them in this device. Does that mean that you will have 16tb of useable storage. NO. Why? Becouse hard drives are sold based on an inaccurate counting system.

While EVERY SINGLE HARD DRIVE MAKER (or company selling storage space) counts how much space you have based on 1gb =1000mb, this is totally false! The truth is that 1gb = 1024mb. This means that they are shorting you 24mb for every GB you buy. I realize that on 1 GB, it is only 24mb lost, but on a TB that starts adding up.

Also the system uses some of the storage to index your drive so it knows how to find the data on your drive. This is why when you buy a computer with a 80gb hard drive and look at usable data it will say about 75GB.

Second complaint: "This is a RAID system" while the drobo does not use raid 5 per se, it does use something very much like it. To get a raid 5 array, you need 3 or more drives that are all the same size. Regardless of how many drives you use, you lose the amount of storage space equivelant to one of the drives. This goes to the protection of the array. In other words, if one drive fails you replace it with another identical drive which will rebuild the array and to prevent data loss.

Most implementations of raid 5 do not allow the storage space to grow, and if they do, it is very expensive for the raid controller card and very difficult to implement. What makes drobo different, is you get the benefits of raid 5 protection, with out of lot of its costs and complications.

For example, you can put in any 4 sata drives, and it works, regardless of there sizes. Also, if you replace a drive you can replace it with any sata drive, not the same ones you used before. Both of these are a big deal because it is what makes what drobo does very unlike raid.

Third complaint: "Drive rebuilds/expantions can take 2 to 5 days". OK, this one is true. But lets think about this, there is a good reason why this is true. You have data on all four drives. But it is writen to those drives in such a way that if any one drive is removed from a system and replaced with a new drive the drobo can rebuild all of that data.

Look, that is pretty impressive. And I would imagine if you had a drive crash you would rather wait a few days to get your stuff back as opposed to losing it all together. But if you are rebuilding data for several terabytes... yes it is going to take a while. And the same is true for raid 5.

Ultimately, the drobo does what it says. It is a very consumer friendly implementation of raid 5 like protection at an extremely affordable price. I would LOVE for someone to show me a raid-5 device (or something like it other then the drobo) that you can buy empty for under $500 that can connect to both USB and Firewire 800.

In conclusion, I have used many types of raid 5 implementations. So I can safely say: if you want raid 5 without the headaches, get a drobo. If you want a mirrored drive (raid 1), a striped drive (raid 0) or JBOD (just a big disk) - then the drobo is not for you. There are other products that will better serve your needs.

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UPDATE 11/18/2008:
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When I purchased the drobo, I initially put in two 1TB drives and two 320GB drives. After nearly filling it up I added another 1TB drive. Shortly there after I decided to add another 1.5TB drive. So this means I have done 2 expansion rebuilds. The process in both cases took about 10 hours and was flawless. Just to be sure I did it at night and didn't use the drive while this was going on. So my statement above about 2-5 days is way off and not true. I am sure that this will be a happier solution.

Also, based on the way that the drobo allocates space for future growth, I wish I had purchased two 1.5TB drives. IF someone is interested in learning more about this, I recommend looking at the drobolator calculator at [...]. But otherwise I am still very happy with my drobo.

Someone added a comment to this review that "it fails semi-randomly and takes data with it & that customer service is useless". Well this I can not comment on as I haven't had this problem nor have I noticed that the support was useless. I did have one minor issue and called support. They weren't the best support team, but far from the worst.

Statements like that need to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes people get a bad unit or talk to someone at support who is the bad apple of the group... or juts having a bad day. That isn't an excuse for them, but a reality. But again, I don't have any experience with support being useless by any means.

When it comes to data protection, I am about give the secret to security. You will never hear something more true then this: The more you value your data, the more copies of it you should have. For example, priceless pictures on your hard drive are just begging to disappear. Backing them up to a device like the drobo is a much safer solution. Burning a copy of them and putting them in your closet is even better. Making another copy and keeping them somewhere else (outside of your home) really prevents data loss (think fire, theft, etc). Another backup onto the internet... well you my friend can sleep well at night knowing that your data is safe.

Now, I am not saying that you have to be this paranoid about data. But if you have data that can never be lost, remember this simple rule about backups: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

Ultimately, I stand by my opinion that this is a great device. I am in the process of getting a few more for our company.

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UPDATE 11/22/2008:
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A few things I have thought about since my last update. I had clarified why 4 drives only yield 3 drives worth of available storage. Incedently, this is also true of raid5 or other raid like storage that is based on raid5 principles.

First the drobo is not for everyone. If you are concerned about having the maximum available amount of your data as possible, this device isn't for you. As their website CLEARLY explains, the drobo uses a fair amount of data to protect you incase of a single drive failure. It also reserves some storage for overhead and for future expansion.

Second, before purchasing this check out the drobolator ([...]). This is a calculator that shows how the drobo will address the hard drives you put into it. You will see exactly how much storage will be used for overhead, protection, future growth and available to use. If people were familiar with this page alone, it could help solve a large portion of the drobo's misconception.

Finally, I have tried to respond to the questions and comments of this review. So, there may be additional information there.

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UPDATE 8/19/2010:
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I updated my explaination about why 4 drives of data only yield 3 drives worth of data. This is labeled as "the first complaint".

I own both 1st and 2nd gen drobos, so I can do direct A-B comparisons. Note that I've set up both models with the identical hard drives: 3x 1TB WD green 5400rpm. These hard drives are ideal for the drobo: They are plenty fast enough, but spin at 5400 rpm and so are quieter, consume less power, and produce less heat than typical 7200 rpm drives. (Putting 7200 rpm drives in a drobo is pointless.)

The drobo has so far done everything it is supposed to do. I've even yanked out a drive when it's turn on to test the raid rebuild. It rebuilt fine, and I lost no data. The rebuilt on a 2TB volume took almost 1 day, but it did work.

Apart from the slow speed of USB and even Firewire compared to in internal raid array (which is something a lot of people complain about unfairly, since it is not data robotics' fault!), I have just one complaint: The device is loud. Don't believe their marketing materials that say that the 2nd gen drobo is quieter and cooler than the 1st gen. They don't provide any dB measurements, or anything quantitative. I can tell you, qualitatively, that both 1st and 2nd gen drobos are quite loud. The appear to use the same crappy fan, which is probably the culprit. When the fan is off, even with all drives working, the device is silent (those wonderful WD green drives are soooo quiet). But as soon as the fan turns on, the fan noise is annoying. I may be forced to void my warrantee by spending $20 on a proper fan. Whey didn't they fix this problem in the 2nd gen model? It seems like a big mistake to me.

If you aren't putting this device in a quiet room, then I have only positive things to say (so far!). If you're putting it in a quiet room, then it'll probably work but will probably annoy you a bit. I don't think there's a better alternative product out there, though, so I give 4/5 stars.

To Data Robotics: Please, please, please put in a good quality fan. And never turn the fan off: Run it at 1000 RPM at all times, and ramp up the RPM with the temperature. It's such a simple thing to fix!

See note at bottom for update to the story here. Drobo CO did come through and get our data restored. I am impressed by that.

****************************************

I will revise this review later if story turns out to be anything other than what it now appears to be. We use a Drobo as main disk array for Apple Mac that we use for video editing.

Everything has worked fine for about 6 months. We have Drobo loaded with 4 WD 1,000GB drives. Everything is top notch equipment, with very strong surge protection and uninterruptable power supply, top of the line Apple computer. Okay, that's background.

The other day, Drobo stopped booting correctly. Called Drobo, and they nicely sent us another unit. Same problem. Now they are saying to run certain software to further diagnose. Problem is that drives have to be recognized of course to run that software. It appears at present that something catastrophic happened in the Drobo unit that caused all four of these new 1,000GB WD drives to fail at the same time.

We are now investigating which company to send them to in order to try to get the data off of the platters themselves. Once we have our data back, if we ever have our data back, and we buy new drives, what are the odds that they are going back into a Drobo unit? We will now spend hundreds of dollars to try to recover what we can at the platter level.

The Drobo techs have been nice enough, but they act like this is some problem of ours other than a major failure of their device. Which I guess means it IS a problem of ours, to fix.

Update number one: There will be more. We had our computer tech expert come over and check everything that we have checked and that the Drobo techs had us check. He concluded there is nothing for it but that the drives are indeed now ALL dead and we have now sent the drives off to the experts in town that recover files from platters. I'll let you all know how that works out. Unbelievable.

Update number two: Got assessment back from recovery company. The drives are all dead. It will cost us $ 8,000.00 to get our data back off of the platters. (That is, of course, on top of the costs of four dead 1 Terabyte WD drives and a Drobo unit we'll never trust again. Nor any replacement, frankly.) We are not sure yet what we will do. Drobo has indicated they may try to do something for us. I'll let you know if they do. (or don't)

Update number three (a couple weeks into this): Nothing really happened since update two except that we are working through our best options for recovering or reproducing the information we lost on the drives.

Update number four: Drobo has offered to check our platters for us and see if they can recover our data. The independent company's bid for $ 8,000.00 is partly that high because of the proprietary RAID algorithm that Drobo uses (would have been a lower cost bid if it was more industry standard). Maybe Drobo can recover the data more efficiently since they will better understand their own RAID design. I'll keep you posted from here!

Update number five: We received the unit back from Drobo today. They got it all working again and we have all our data back. I am impressed that they were able to do this and that they were willing to do this. I wish they had suggested this option from the git go because it would have saved a lot of time and other efforts by our team. But, they really did come through in getting this done for us. I have not talked enough with our team person in charge of this to know if Drobo was able to diagnose what happened but I do know it's working now and we have the data back.

This product worked great for 6 months, then disaster!

While I was working, right before my eyes, suddenly the Drobo dashboard turned red! The message said that my 1.2TB of data could not be protected!

The Drobo drive then unmounted never to be seen again.

I spent most of December on the phone with tech support. I followed their suggestion and spend another $108.00 for Disk Warrior to recover my data. That didn't work.

They sent a new Drobo. Still no data.

Finally after a month of hours on the phone with tech support, I gave up.

Since then I have reformatted the drives. (There was no drive failure, only a Drobo failure)

The drives are working fine in my new enclosure. The Drobo is going into the trash. I could never trust it again.

This is not an unusual event. Search the web for "Drobo Failures", "The darkside of Drobo" etc. before you buy, I wish I had.

Update:
A very nice lady called me from Drobo on Friday.... Said she would call me back on Monday with a solution, maybe even a refund... Still waiting for that call... She's 4 days late. NO CALL!

This company is not to be believed or trusted...

My V2 Drobo is fantastic! Very much worth the week wait.
I was hoping for Firewire 800 - and here it is! I am so tired of managing 5 separate hard drives on my desk. I have single a 2 TB disk now. First - the install - I plugged it in - and it popped up ready to go. I liked that a lot! Then - it was time to copy over all my stuff... This puppy screams. I can do a backup of my mac now in hours - I show over 40 MB/s transfer rate to it! It makes my Lacie look pokie!. It is quiet, sleek and looks awesome in my office. I wonder if they work with Apple to get such a beautiful look?
I got mine on the Drobo Store - but most places look to have the same prices. Since I got it - I am using it to backup all my data as well as keep all my photos, DVDs, itunes available for daily use. I would die if I lost my itunes investment. This looks like a really safe way to go. On the request side - I would love it if the Drobo people would make it in other colors - I think a white one or even a cool deep blue one would be killer. Big smiles for my Drobo!

First off -- it works fine if and only if you don't have a lot of load on the Drobo. Much like if you bought a car that would only go less then 35 miles per hour -- or come apart if you went faster.

If you have a lot of I/O load it *WILL* reboot itself after a few hours. You *WILL* lose data.

Going through support is painfully slow.

I opened a trouble ticket over a month ago with the problem above. Over the course of the month we reformatted the Drobo from HFS+ to NTFS, attached it to another computer, tried a different USB cable, replaced the power supply, *AND* replaced the Drobo itself. Every variable was swapped out to try to suss out the root cause. In all cases, when under load, the Drobo would eventually reboot itself. Every time it reset, the data that is was in the process of writing would be lost, leading to corrupt files.

Zero progress was made after a month of toil. Support was unable to fix the issue and eventually tried to ignore me.

This is not what I expect from a company that is selling "reliable" and "safe" storage.

It all depends on the kind of car you drive and what you do to it... Does your car have a manual transmission? Do you change your own oil? Have *you* replaced the computer chip with one that's been hacked for improved performance (extra credit if you hacked it yourself) and/or have you rebuilt your carburetor (more extra credit if you replaced the fuel injectors with a carburetor). If yes, either because you enjoy tinkering or want to squeeze the last bit of performance out of it, and if you want to do the same kinds of things with your storage system then you may want to look elsewhere. Drobo is probably not for you.

If, however, you have a car that tells you when it needs service (mine sends me email) and includes the kind of service it needs and you don't mind that it takes six seconds to get to 60 mph (hey, I'm not completely out of touch with performance) (and it turns out neither is this thing) and you want the same kind of differed responsibility in your storage system then the Drobo is a pretty good deal.

It's pretty simple, start with two drives, any size. The only decision you have to make is how big you want the total storage to appear. I started with two 250 GB drives and told Drobo it should pretend to be 8 TB. (You're setting the maximum total disk capacity that could be installed and it can be upto 16TB. The tradeoff is the larger it is the longer it takes to boot.)

One thing that is important - Connect the Drobo to your computer, not a hub. I will not gurantee that a hub will make things worse and would bet that it can't make things better. Also make sure it's USB 2.0. If your computer is less than a few years old, it is.

How slow is it, you ask? Good question and one deserving enough of an answer that I took the time to collect some data. (Spoiler Alert: It's actually pretty fast for the cost.)

I created a test folder consisting of 520 image files (jpgs, Nikon raw, and a few video clips) that totaled exactly 1GB. Here are the transfer times I measured:

- One internal drive to another internal drive: 29 seconds
- An internal drive to the Drobo: 48 seconds (I measured with 2, 3, and 4 drives installed; all measurements were within a few seconds)
- An internal drive to a "regular" USB-connected drive: 61 seconds
- AVIs and ripped DVD files played from the Drobo without any problems.

From my perspective, for an external USB-connected drive the Drobo is actually pretty fast.

Now, please bear with me while I discuss RAID (wait, strike that last word) Protected Storage arithmetic. If a storage system, such as the Drobo, is using multiple disk drives to protect your data against any single drive failure then it needs to have that data duplicated in some manner. Otherwise, if you have two disks installed and one of them fails then some of your data will be lost. So, the effect of needed to maintain copies of your data is that you can't "use" all the space available on the disks you have inserted for data storage, some of it must be used for data protection. Think of it as a data protection tax.
(I had thought about a second analogy, asking if you would rather live in New York city or a cabin in Montana and figured enough was enough.)

The biggest "tax" is if you are only using two drives. With two 250 GB drives the storage available to *me* was 231 GB. That's because you always lose something for Windows overhead (Mac guys and gals, you get overhead too.) and after that Drobo uses I'm guessing RAID 2 (wait, strike that) keeps two copies of your data, one on each drive. Anyway, that's a 54% tax.

With three drives, totaling 750GB, I had 449GB available to me. That's about a 40% tax. Adding a fourth 250GB drive, getting my total to a whopping 1TB, gave me a usable capacity of 682GB. or a 32% tax.

I'm not sure why the tax rate goes down as the number of drives goes up (actually I am - with two drives every file needs to be duplicated on both. With more drives there is only one copy of any file, it's spread out across all drives, and a little bit of extra bits are added so that even with one drive missing the part of the data that went with it can be calculated).

The important thing to know you're going to be better off having at least three drives and ideally four. (Yes, I know there are some cases where the two drive configuration may give slightly better performance and with this system you shouldn't worry about those details.) Finally, 32%, to me, is a reasonable storage overhead to know that all I have to do if a disk breaks is to replace it and in the mean time I can keep working. I know which drive breaks because I get a distinctive red popup on my screen and a red light goes on next to the drive that needs replacing.

What happens when the Drobo fills? It tells me and even suggests which drive to replace with a larger one. I can, for example, pull out one of my 250GB drives and put in a 1TB drive. (They do not have to all be the same size.) Drobo will, behind the scenes, move enough data onto the new drive so that everything is protected.

What happens when a drive goes bad? Alerts pop up on your screen and a red light go on next to the drive that needs to be replaced. For a little while, while your data is being redistributed across the remaining drives a second failure could result in lost data. However, as long as there are at least two working drives left after the redistribution is completed you are again protected against drive failure. Assuming you have sufficient available capacity, you can start with four drives, have three of them fail, and still be able to access your data while the replacements are coming in the mail (from Amazon, naturally).

Full disclosure part one - Drobo is not a backup solution. You really need to take your important data and copy it off someplace. Granted, with this device it's far less likely that a single hardware failure will cause data loss. However, there's still the possibility that your son/daughter/spouse/cat/dog/whatever/you hit the wrong key and delete something important and don't notice it until your recycle bin has been empties and the drive sectors have been overwritten.

Full disclosure part 2 - The Drobo enclosure was given to me by the manufacturer so I could write this review. I borrowed the drives from a friend who had removed them from his storage system. (not a Drobo, he's one of them guys what likes to fiddle.) Me... I have something a bit more sophisticated than this as well. I offered to do the review because I remember when this was introduced and what it promised. When I saw some of the reviews I was curious about why it wasn't living up to that promise. After using it to develop this review I plan to keep using it.

The disparity in reviews seems to be a question of expectations. If you expect this USB connected device to be as fast as an internal drive you'll be disappointed. If you expect to have data protection without the storage overhead (tax) I described you'll be disappointed. If you expect the device to protect your data from a hardware failure when there is already a hardware failure you'll be disappointed.

However...

Bottom Line: If you already rely on external USB drives and want a set and forget storage system that continues to work after a disk fails and which you can seamlessly grow by plugging in higher capacity disks and tells you what needs to be done in a very easy to understand manner (I won't user the term "idiot lights" because I don't want to offend...) then this may be exactly what you need. (I'm sure as heck going to be using mine.)

BTW, I feel that honest, effective reviews can take the place of first-hand experiences that are lacking in online shopping. I've always appreciated the help I've received from other reviewers and work hard to return the favor as best as I can. I hope you found this review helpful and if there was anything you thought was lacking or unclear leave a comment and I'll do what I can to fix it.

Ok, so when I heard about this item I thought what a great concept. I was highly optimistic about this product (despite the poor reviews) and ordered it based on a few online professional recommendations. Right out of the box it was a breeze to set up. I popped in my 2 750Gig drives and drobo did its format and prep thing. I copied over 180Gig worth of data and several hours later everything looked great.

This is where it all went bad. I copied the contents of the 180 gig folder to another folder on the drobo. After about 2%, the drobo rebooted. Thinking this was odd, I erased the partially copied folder and tried again, drobo again rebooted. I called out to tech support (who was extremely friendly) and they opened a case. I was told they would review it and a tech would get back to me in a few days. Why does it take days to talk to tech support? Tonight I decided to try and copy my data back from the drobo to my PC, about 10% of the way windows gave me an error message that the file could not be found. I opened the drobo drive and would you belive, all the data is gone. Drobo reported itself as healthy with 100% free space.

Sum up, the drobo is great in theory and perhaps in a few revs they will get it right. Until then, don't trust this with your data.

Ok, So I wanted to update my review a bit here. Drobo tech support called me back 3 weeks and 1 day after I opened my case. I mentioned I returned the drobo due to a lack of support. He told me that he wanted to get more information and asked if it were ok for him and a customer service person to call me back (as I couldnt talk at the moment since I was at work), I agreed to talk to them the following day. It is weeks later and I still have not heard from them.

Our small production company bought two of these Drobos on the advice of a friend. We needed to expand our storage capacity to hold HD video files, and the X-Serve RAID is no longer available. At first, they looked promising because they connected Firewire 800, and the first couple of files we moved over seemed to work just like the RAID. Now, there were some small things like the strange way the storage capacity meter works and the fact that the Drobo Dashboard program liked to pop up unexpectedly, but everything else seemed fine until I tried to move a large file (around 70 GB) over to the drive.

Suddenly, it went nuts, flashing its lights and locking up the computer. After leaving it for over an hour, there was no progress on the bar, the "beach ball" was still spinning, and the lights on the front of the Drobo were still flashing. I shut down the computer, left it off for a while, and then turned it back on. The lights continued flashing, and the Drobo was no longer recognized. We pulled it out of the chain and called our supplier. Drobo took OVER A MONTH to send us a replacement. We had owned the thing less than a week, and already it had problems. Still, Drobo waited A MONTH to send us a new one.

The new one was installed, and it seemed to work alright with just a few small files on it. Today, I was using Final Cut and tried to make the Drobo the destination for two more large files. This time, it came up with a message telling me a drive failed. Thankfully, it's still saving the two other files.

I called again, and they say they'll send another drive. At this point, I'm wondering if we should bother.

UDATE April 2011: I now use the Drobo S 2nd Generation, with five 2TB Caviar Green Drives. Very fast and whisper quiet compared to my original Hitachi Drives. When you stack alot of drives, the green drives are much better. I use the regular Drobo I reviewed here as a backup with DroboCopy utility, which is part of the Drobo Dashboard software. I perform an incremental backup clone of one to the other, and have multiple drive packs. The Drobo S is better for running your Lightroom libraries files externally.

UPDATE APRIL 2010: Pulled out the 1TB and upgraded so they are all now 2TB Hitachis; worked like a charm. Edited a couple weddings with 1200-3000 RAW files and it keeps up. This is also now my shared drive on my Snow Leopard Server (which I'm still figuring out). On a non-technical note, the drobo and my new 27" iMac look oh sooo beautiful together on my workdesk. A nice, clean, reliable setup.

Quite some varying opinions on this device, here is my 2 cents. I am a pro photographer with about 35,000 photos in my library, and overall like the device. I use a Unibody 15" Macbook Pro with 512 graphics card. With everything in one pool, I'm finally able to delete and organize my growing library. I also use an external Raptor on eSata as a scratchdisk for photoshop. I've loaded it with Hitachi 2TB Drives and it boots up quickly, writes at a consistent 33mb/s and reads around 60mb/s. In real world use, it works speedy with large lightroom and photoshop tasks, as well as feeding video to my TV across the network Here are some general notes, followed by Pro's and Con's:

Note: Limitations of All Raids/Drives

- Do not fill drives to the max; that is just dumb. This will lead to corruption, and the drive can't be defragged or maintain itself. Especially if you add/replicate/delete huge amounts of files at once like me, you should have at least 300gb of free space at all times. Quit being cheap and expand early. Like rope, buy more than you THINK you need.

- Some drives have well documented troubles with raids. For example, WD Green, which has TLER that can make it timeout and the raid believe its corrupted and reject them one after the other; you need to individually hook up the drives and turn off the feature in the drive's firmware. Not Drobo's fault.

- If you order 4 drives at once with very close serial codes, yes, they may all four fail at once. Always test brand new drives for a few weeks before relying on them.

- BACKUP! I have two offsite backups that I rotate, along with a third that stays as one state in time. Drobo allows you to pop a set of disks in an out, so if you have a second drobo, you can back up this way.

- Raid 5 style devices are slower and reduce useable space. You need to use big drives.

- Raids can be limited to specific hardware, not just Drobo. You must pop them into similar hardware if the enclosure dies.

- 4 drives are noisy. Get over it.

- Aperture 2.0 is slow with all drives, not just Drobo. Switch to Lightroom - I did.

- Blinking status lights are IRRITATING and BLINDING when I'm using my computer at night. I'm glad Drobo hid it under the plate.

Pros of Drobo:

- Unlike other raids, you can pop the drives back in any order. Very useful if you want to have multiple backups and don't want to buy extra drobos. If the enclosure breaks, you just pop them into a new one without a hassle.
- Real-world useage and editing with Lightroom and Photoshop is speedy and reliable.
- Lights let you know how the drive is doing and when you need to expand. Also, the blue lights tell you how full the drive actually is.
- Boots up pretty quick from a standby; however, on a cold start (you unplug it and then plug it back in) it will take longer to initiate.
- Drives pop in and out very easily WITHOUT the need for extra cartridge housings. If you use the drobo for backup or have a second one, you can have multiple sets of 4 drives and take them in and out of the enclosure as needed.
- Very flexible! You can add data as needed.
- Great for photographers with huge libraries. Works snappy with Lightroom.
- I daisychain my firewire photo equipment and prefer it over eSata.
- Read speed is about 60mb/s (but writes not as quick). Write speed is very consistent. Real-world usage is very fast with large 22megapxl images and tiff files.
- A no-nonsense solution. It just works without a lot of tricks or knowledge.
- Stays cool with four Hitachi 2tb. Some say the holes around the side aren't enough, but with the big fan, the narrow air passageways actually create a fast airflow through the enclosure. A large grill in the front lets air just sit around rather than move.
- Fan stays pretty quiet. My house is kept at 70 degrees.
- It does not have irritating BLINKING status lights that light up the room at night when I'm editing photos. Its funny people complain that the read/write light is hidden under the front plate, as I have had to disable these irritating lights in other enclosures.
- It looks pretty and understated on my desk.

Cons of Drobo:

- The new Drobo S is way overpriced.
- You still need to be somewhat computer savy to properly use any raid device.
- Maybe not fast enough for video editors: you would be better off with a Raid 10.
- From a cold start when unplugged, it make take longer to initiate.
- I get the feeling Drobo was intended more for Apple users, since many Apple people prefer firewire over eSata.
- For the price, should have had eSata, although I prefer Firewire 800.
- Write speed stops at about 33.3mb/s in my tests; but, compressed TIFF files often don't save any faster than this anyway. Write speed is consistant at 33, however.
- Perhaps the front plate should have been lockable for a multi-user environment.
- You will get the theoretical max of the drives in you're OS, not the actual remaining. I just keep the drobo dashboard open.