Two Weeks with Drobo
As some of you know a few weeks ago I splashed out on the Drobo storage robot. The robot seemed the logical upgrade to running four portable hard drives containing my iTunes library, documents and a mass of Moving Image Arts teaching materials and samples.
I think what attracted me to the drobo was the obvious scalability. You need two drives to get you going but the drobo can house 4 SATA hard drives and when all four fill up it is as simple as taking out the smallest drive and replacing it with a larger unit. Better still with drobo the drives don’t have to be the same make nor do they have to be the same storage size. 
Security is also a massive factor. Drobo automatically protects your data, if one drive fails, remove it, add a new drive and drobo will rebuild with no loss of data. You can even carry on accessing the data during this rebuilt period. Theoretically drobo can also recover from two drive failures but we hope we won’t put that theory to the test.
The final selling point for me though was Cali Lewis’s review posted on the site where I bought the drobo. I didn’t realise at the time this was a promotional video from the drobo site but Cali’s enthusiasm for the device certainly clinched the sale. Friend of DigMo!, Automated Home also has a great video and review of the Drobo that are worth checking out before you make the purchase.
In use the drobo hasn’t disappointed, it does exactly what it describes and requires not only no actual setup but there is zero user intervention needed in keeping the system up and running. The only negative for me is the noise. At times it sounds like a small fridge beside me, gently buzzing fan motors. On the most part you don’t notice it until it stops, drobo will then sit in silence for a while until the fans kick in again.
I can’t quite figure out what triggers the fans, they start up even if the drive hasn’t been accessed. During the silent periods I can read and write data and hear the drives being accessed but when the fans are going you really can’t hear any drive activity at all.
When I turn the computer off the drobo goes into standby but the fans can still whirl for 10- 15 minutes. I am hoping this is normal. Don’t get me wrong though, it is not overly noisy. I think amplifies the noise the fact my iMac is (almost) completely silent, if the drobo was beside a typical pc tower I am not sure if you would notice it at all !
The drobo comes with a very handy utility application that shows you the state of play in a really user friendly and graphical form. The drobo even tells you “I am healthy” in the first person as you would expect from any robotic companion I guess.
The utility will also show you how your storage is being used.
I really don’t think I had much choice given the state of my storage than to upgrade to a more robust storage system such as the drobo. I’d probably like a bit of reassurance regarding the noise levels and activity.
The system is a pretty substantial investment and would be made perfect with the drobo share add on. Droboshare turns the drobo into a complete NAS system and already a number of drobo apps have been released such as the firefly iTunes Media Server.
The other benefit of droboshare (on top of being able to share the storage with other users on your network) would be the ability to move the storage robot away from your work area (if the noise is an issue). The big barrier for me though is the £175 price tag. I simply can not afford the investment given the cost of the drobo in the first place.
If you run a number of portable hard drives and have your data duplicated and backed up ‘all over the place’ then the drobo is a real opportunity to consolidate your storage requirements in a really attractive, secure, and easy to use system.
The latest model offers firewire 800 and if you can afford the droboshare it creates the perfect home NAS and media server. Secure storage at the slight cost of a silent work environment is definitely a plus, if only it came with ethernet ! We found the best price to be from Amazon (Affiliate).
I’d love to hear of other user experiences.
I love the Drobo as well. The software however is extremely limited. I would at least like to be able to see what drive manufacturer with what firmware version is in which bay/slot without removing the drives. It would also be nice if one could apply firmware updates to individual drives within the Drobo, not just to the Drobo box. Right now I have four 1 TB drives in the box, two of which are potential 7200.11 Seagate bricks. We’ll see if my Drobo can survive two HD failures. With that said the Drobo is great and I can’t wait until 3.5″ 4 TB HDs roll out. Of course it would take the Drobo days to rebuild if one 4 TB HD failed, but that is a small price to pay for security. It is only a matter of time before I need another Drobo to back up my Drobo.
I’d love to hear user comments about the noise, especially when it goes into standby mode. Should I even be turning the drobo off ? is it save to leave on all the time ?
“I’d love to hear user comments about the noise, especially when it goes into standby mode.”
The room I work in is so noisy, I don’t hear a thing from the Drobo so I can’t comment on that.
“Should I even be turning the drobo off ? is it save to leave on all the time ?”
If you are concerned about the heat, I don’t think that is a problem. That is however, based on my very scientific method of placing my hand behind the Drobo fan. Doesn’t feel very hot. If your concern is dust then that will always be a problem over time for any electronic device that is left on 24/7
The fan in the Drobo keeps the temperature under control. Even after the Drobo has been put into standby mode, the Drobo could be busy with an activity like protecting data.
The fan would still keep coming on in such a case. Make sure the Drobo is kept in a cool room and with ample room between the back of the Drobo and the wall, to allow for free ventilation.
The heat generated by the drives in the Drobo also have an effect on the fan turning on. The Western Digital Green drives are supposed to be good in terms of keeping the heat down.
The fan should not be overly noisy. Sometimes, if the front face plate is not put on snugly, it could add to the noise when the fan turns on. It is recommended that you always perform a safe shutdown of the Drobo if you plan to leave the Drobo unattended for an extended period of time, like when going on vacation.
This will protect your data from any power outages while you are away. For the correct method of shutting down your Drobo, please refer to Article ID 0175: How do I safely shutdown my Drobo?, in the Knowledge Base at http://www.drobo.com/support/knowledgebase.php
Hi, I found your blog very interesting. I wrote an article about the Drobo based on experience (but not actually owning one) and I’d like your assessment on it.
http://www.waitingoutside.com/2009/03/storage-backup-solutions-for-photographers-drobo-freenas-time-machine-and-others/
Many thanks!
And once again a vendor rep replies – i’m liking this!
I’ve had my Drobo (FW800+USB2) for about 6 months now, with 3 x 500GB drives in it. I cannot recommend it enough, it’s everything I expected from the blurbs & videos you mention.
I use it for both backups (inc TimeMachine) as well as primary storage for heaps of video, and it’s such a relief to know that a single drive failure is just not an issue any more. And I’m about to increase capacity with a pair of 1TB drives, which should be a no-brainer. Try doing that with traditional RAID without having to move all the data off it first – you can’t!
However I too am a little miffed by the cooling fan noise & behaviour. Whilst it’s not terribly intrusive (it’s in my livingroom where I’m quite sensitive to noise), and I understand the fan may continue after you disconnect (eg. if it’s redistributing data for redundancy), or even after the drives have auto-spun-down (heat latency), but there are still times when the drives are spun down & it’s not even connected to a computer when the cooling fan comes on! (in <25 degree ambient temps) This makes no sense at all – HDD idle power consumption (thus heat) is negligible. And if you don’t get the front faceplate on ‘just right’ it can audibly vibrate a bit.
But all in all, Drobo is a brilliant solution for simple, robust, redundant, easily expandable storage – 9/10.
If there was 1 thing I wish the Drobo would do, it’s simultaneous FW800 & USB2 access. DroboShare is complete overkill for my situation (a MacMini as media-centre, or a MacBookPro, & AppleTV hacked with ATVFlash, side-by-side), so the MacMini is quite capable of sharing Drobo over the WLAN withought DroboShare, but I can’t connect my AppleTV to it at the same time
– as just one example of where this would be handy.
Drobo say they do defragmentation, but I’d prefer to *also* be able to do it myself with Coriolis iDefrag, but can’t as yet.
I’d been considering a Drobo for some time. The 2 things that stopped me purchasing sooner was the cost of the unit itself. And reports about excessive fan noise.
As a photographer, storage was fast becoming a headache, every shoot I was looking to store anything up to 16GB of new images. I had been relying on copies of images on numerous drives. But after an inevitable failure of a 1TB external drive. I decided to bite the bullet.
I went for a Drobo 2 and thanks to Amazon UK’s offer, a free droboshare.
Setup was a piece of cake. I started with 2 X 1TB drives and began to migrate my data. It has to be said, the migration process is pretty slow. I found using the droboshare I was only getting approx. 7MB/sec transfer rate connected to a 1GB NIC though my BTHOME2 Router. Firewire and USB2 were slightly quicker but not significantly. It took 2-3 days on and off to transfer under 800GB of data.
Having all of my images consolidated in one area is great. I’ve been investigating the best way of indexing to be able to locate images quickly by date, filename etc. So far the best method for me has been to use Google’s free Picasa 3. It’s find duplicates function has helped me to ensure that I’m not wasting any space.
I’ve now been able to seamlessly add a 3rd 1.5TB drive. And I’m considering pulling apart my warrantee expired WD external disk to populate the 4th Slot.
Fan noise hasn’t been an issue, yes it cuts in from time to time. But I found it pretty quiet.
Perhaps someone can correct me. It appears that not only can’t you connect USB and FW800 at the same time. I don’t think you can connect FW800 and droboshare at the same time. Which is a shame because it would make sense to have the speed of FW on a locally attached PC and still be able to share over the network.
It would also be nice to be able to have all connections wired and be able to switch between them instead of pulling cables.
The other issue I’ve had is, I make a habit of putting Drobo into standby before cutting power. Sometimes I get a message that Drobo can’t standby because it’s busy. But to my knowledge no data transfer / rebuild of disks etc. is taking place at the time. Then I have the dilemma of do I still power off my PC which will put Drobo in standby, forcibly.
Generally I feel far more confident about my data’s security. However the issue of accidentally deleted data, theft and fire remain. But I’m not ready to start planning an offsite disaster recovery solution. The expense is too great.
I wonder if Data Robotics are considering handling de-duplication and snap backups ?
@Martin,
you should avoid powering off the Drobo when it says it can’t go into Standby, because it’s likely redistributing data across the disks for redundancy.
i really noticed this behaviour when i removed my 3rd 500GB drive, then replaced it with a 1TB drive, and then a 4th 1TB drive. both times Drobo spent MANY HOURS redistributing data. whilst there was no USB or Firewire data transfer, the drives were quietly churning away for those hours.
as far as speed is concerned, i’ve reached at least 40MB/s sustained transfer over FW800. USB2 will probably only reach half that. the only reason i could achieve this speed when i was originally filling my Drobo was because the data was on a RAID0 pair. if you don’t achieve those sorts of speeds, it’s probably because the location you’re reading-from/writing-to can’t be accessed any faster. for example, a 2.5″ hard-drive in a laptop is slower than a single 3.5″ (or RAID1 pair) in a desktop, and which will be slower than a dual RAID0 pair (or other performance-focused RAID config).
if there’s a network link between you and the Drobo, Gigabit wired Ethernet is the way to go for maximum speed (i.e. to ensure it’s not the weakest link), followed by 100Mbit wired & “Ideal 802.11n” (ie. N-only dual-channel/bonded mode) at roughly similar speeds. a mixed B/G & N wireless network will generally be the speed bottleneck (not counting a plain 802.11b/g wireless network which will almost certainly be the weakest link).
real-world achievable speeds almost always come down to “the weakest link”, which in typical domestic & commercial scenarios is either network/wireless speed (if involved), or single hard-drive speed. in other words, Drobo can easily keep up with most consumer PC/Mac setups.
Hi,
I have a drobo 2 and drobo share (£399 on ebuyer) and 4 Samsung F1 1TB drives in it.
So far so good really happy with the device. What a relief not to have to spread my data manually across different disks.
Nevertheless like you I suffer from excessive fan noise. I liken it to air conditioning in an office. You don’t really notice it until someone switches it off and then you realise how noisy it is. And the fan revs up no matter whether or not you’re accessing data.
Sorry, but the fan noise is intrusive (the device sits under my desk at home) and for £399 I expect better quality fan bearings. Or at least software fan control (to be used at own risk etc).
A shame coz the device is otherwise excellent.
ive got a drobo and a drobo share, before i plugged the drobo share in i could access the drobo over but the network but the problem was i had to keep the computer on all the time.
Ive plugged in the drobo share but i can only access it from the pc and a toshiba cam, and i cannot access it from the apple mac netbook toshiba a200 and the sony which is weird
any help
The whole “robot” marketing technique nearly got me buying a Drobo but we (http://bit.ly/YsfBG) ended up buying a ReadyNAS NV+ from Netgear. My thoughts and overall experience so far is here: http://bit.ly/ClLFK. I hope this helps some people make an informed decision about purchasing NAS style backup systems. Oh and it is whisper quiet too!