Opinions on Drobo

[DistortedVision]

I've been looking at getting a Drobo NAS for a while. I was wondering if anyone has any experience of them. I'm looking at getting the 5N. I'm not interested in running apps and I'm aware this one doesn't run Drobo apps. Just looking for a very reliable expandable NAS.

My main concern is what happens if the NAS has a hardware failure itself and not the hard disks. Since its a proprietary system what is the recovery procedure? The other issue is price - they sure are expensive!

 

[Paul.]

I have an older four bay (gen2?) drobo. As far as I understand it, you need to send the disks back to Drobo should the device fail and they will rebuild the storage for you. I have suffered a hard drive failure with it. It automatically shifted my data around and adapted back to three drives and the replacement was hot swappable.

They are great devices, they are remarkably flexible as you can use any size disks and the newer Drobos can recover from multiple drive failure. As long as you regularly back up the Drobo I would consider it.

 

[DistortedVision]

Thanks Paul. Can you not inset the disk set into another Drobo? Wouldn't be that happy to have to send my HDDS to Drobo for the storage to be rebuilt.

The problem is I have so much data around 15Tb at the moment which is spread in 3 different servers at home. Alot of this is from my Humax FoxSat and I currently only backup important personal data. I do not have a backup strategy for the rest as it would be too expensive. I was hoping that the Drobo would be safer than my current setup. Backing it up the Drobo isn't an option.

One thing that really concerns me is that I read that there is no way to recover accidentally deleted files from Drobo. I have fairly good successful with the data recovery software that I use. Fortunately, I don't have to use it often but at least I have it as last resort.

Many thanks!

 

[Paul.]

Ok, it does look like you can move your disk pack (all disks) to another Drobo. It stipulates all disks must be present, and if you buy a 5N it has to be to another 5N. If one of your disks fails during the Drobos failure, it looks like you will not be able to migrate. Thats new to me!

http://www.drobo.com/products/migrations.php

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/274/~/can-i-move-my-disk-pack-from-one-drobo-storage-device-to-another%3F

Drobo uses a proprietary system called BeyondRaid. Any data stored on the disks will show up as .tib (database I assume) files rather than the original files. It is unlikely that recovery software will be able to do anything with these files.

Getting 15TB is going to be expensive...

If you put 5 4TB drives in it, that will give you 14.5 TB of storage. If you switch on dual disk redundancy, you will get about 11TB of storage.

http://www.drobo.co.uk/products/capacity-calculator/

A Drobo 5N with 5X 4TB drives would cost you £1449 to get 14.5TB Single disk redundancy or 11TB Dual disk redundancy.

A Drobo 5N with 5X 3TB drives would cost you £950 to get 11TB Single disk redundancy.

Of course, the great thing about Drobos is that you can put in any disks you have lying around, and grow the disk pack asymmetrically as you need to.

All that being said, I have found my Drobo to be rock solid. It has never lost any data, even when it has spat dead drives out at me. It's been ticking along since 2009, and hooked up with Firewire 800 its plenty quick enough for video editing. It is very fuss free as well, I like kit that lets me get on with what I'm doing without me having to faff with it

 

[DistortedVision]

I forgot to go on the Drobo calculator again since I first looked a year ago. I'm going to have to wait until 4Tb hard disks becoming more mainstream / affordable. My 3Tb are 7200 rpm but my 2Tb are 5900 rpm so they wouldn't even be suitable in a Drobo even if I got one with more bays. Hope the price of the Drobo 5N will fall as well in the next few months but its the cost of new hdd's thats the main issue.

I do still have concerns about the lack of recovery options for file deletion with BeyondRAID.

 

[Amadeus1756]

I do still have concerns about the lack of recovery options for file deletion with BeyondRAID.

Isn't this an issue with the Unix (inode)-based file system rather than an issue with Drobo (most of the mainstream NAS' use a Unix file system I think)?

 

[DistortedVision]

I'm sure it is but it always surprises me that a function as basic as file recovery from an accidental delete isn't feature on any NAS. After all the primary purpose of a NAS is data storage / file server. All the other stuff that they have doesn't really interest me as I use my servers for those functions.

 

[Amadeus1756]

Working in a Unix environment I have got used to deleting files and having them gone for good but I do appreciate that a lot of users wouldn't want/expect that behaviour. There are probably times when I'd agree with them.

I've felt for a long time that there is potential for a new company to come along and make a step change when it comes to home NAS'.