DroboShare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo

by Data Robotics

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 8.3 x 3.4 inches ; 2.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0012MF4G0
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: 905-00001-001
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #37,444 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 15, 2008

Product Description

DroboShare is the ideal companion to the Drobo for users who want to share data over a local area network. The combined solution automates network management, safeguards your data and lets you easily add capacity as needed. With DroboShare, users can now access the information stored on the award-winning Drobo from almost any client on the network, including Windows, Apple and Linux* computers. DroboShare can host up to two Drobos, allowing capacities of up to 8TB of storage today, scaling to 32TB as larger disk drives become available. *Linux support now in beta.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Extremely unreliable, December 29, 2008

By 

E. D. Light "sleight42" (Ocean Pines, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: DroboShare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo (Personal Computers)

To provide a little background on me: I'm a software developer by trade. I have built numerous PCs including a server that was using a RocketRaid RAID-5 controller. I switched to Drobo and DroboShare because, after my RAID array became critical, I could not find an adequate device that could support my desire for RAID 1+0. At this point, I just wanted something that worked. Just to make the point clearly: I'm technically savvy; I have a fairly good idea of what I speak.

I bought a 2nd Gen Drobo and a DroboShare about a week ago. While the Drobo is performing well enough, DroboShare has proven out the opposite.

DroboShare is supposed to act as a NAS head for Drobo. In this simple capacity, DroboShare generally fails. While DroboShare will connect to my network and performs adequately, it does so for brief periods of times. The DroboShare spontaneously loses connectivity to the Drobo within an hour of being connected! At this point, the only way that I can make Drobo responsive once again is to cycle the power! Interestingly, the DroboShare will still respond to pings. However, I could no longer SSH in nor access the storage attached to the DroboShare.

Unfortunately, you can only determine the severe unreliability of DroboShare upon signing up for DroboSpace. Data Robotics sagely made a valid S/N a requirement for registering on DroboSpace. This has the benefit, for them, of keeping prospective customers from realizing how terrible DroboShare truly is. Reviewing the DroboSpace forums, there are a multitude of posts discussing lost connectivity as well as anemic performance (i.e., 15MB/s on a supposedly gigabit device). Also, from reading the forums, it becomes fairly clear that Data Robotics technical support is extremely poor.

Given all of the above, caveat emptor! DroboShare is very much an alpha product that should not be on the market. While it may work for some, it was an utter failure for this user.

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice but too slow, May 28, 2008

By 

Robert Leonhard (Chandler, AZ) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: DroboShare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo (Personal Computers)

This is a neat product, much like the original Drobo device in that is very easy to setup and use.

The big problem, however, is that it is very slow. I expected some added latency with this device but I have to say that it is much more significant than I was hoping. The device goes into a sleep mode after a period of inactivity, so waking it up takes some added time, 3 or 4 seconds maybe. But even after it is spun up, it is still quiet slow, particularly when I am moving files around or flipping through photos. This is the first personal home NAS device I've used so maybe this amount of slowness is typical with these things.

The convenience of being able to access my Drobo easily from any computer in the house is worth it to me and it integrates very nicely with my Drobo, so I am keeping it.

Update 23 October 2008:

I can't deal with it anymore. It is just too slow. I am going to look at other options. I should have just done this in the first place.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too slow for a network drive, July 5, 2008

By 

R. Chiu (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: DroboShare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo (Personal Computers)

The data transfer over the network is slow that it does not meet the standard of today's network drive. You probably won't notice it if you copy a file or two. But if you try to copy large files (over gigabyte), you may want come back in a few hours. Trust me, I have other network drives at home in comparison to the Droboshare. In addition, it's overprice for something that doesn't perform.