Data Robotics Drobo

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I have a love hate with my Drobo after owning for 4 months. It is slow, the Firewire 800 port is crap as many have made mention of this in their reviews. However, I love the fact I can slot in any drive of any size. You are paying a premium for the Drobo simplicity but so far there's no alternative. It took over a day for me to copy 1.5TB but luckily subsequent syncs, if minimal file changes, is much quicker. The fan can get noisy if you have on your desk, I keep mine underneath. Sometimes it does cause my other Firewire 800 devices to disconnect - I have 4 separate FW800 ports on my Mac Pro. I also hate how their support forums are only open to registered Drobo owners so prospective buyers can't read about all the support problems. I like the new Drobo models but they are way too expensive for what it does so I'll probably buy another Drobo FW800.

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I'm in the process of setting this unit up. I populated it with 2 1TB drives. The unit reserves more space for file protection than it does for actual file storage. Fully populated with 4-1TB drives will get you less than 2TB of storage space. I already had that in another external 2TB JBoD NAS unit. If you're looking fr expansion, this isn't what you want. This is not what you're looking for to save an expanding multimedia collection. Too much wasted space.

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I love this machine. Makes it so easy to update  on the fly if need be. I also feel safe that my data is protected and I don't have to worry. I am planning to buy another one of these unit again in the future as a media storage for all my backed up music and movies.

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I travel out of town all of the time to client's sites and I take this Drobo system with me to have access to all of my data when I need it. It is an intelligent data backup system that allows for a complete SATA2 hard drive failure without any data loss, and that was proven when one of my older SATA drives bit the dust.I currently travel with it loaded with 500GB, 750GB, 1TB and 2TB drives that can be swapped out for larger drives if and when I need them for up to 8TB. This second generation Drobo has USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 interfaces, and I love the latter for fast backups of my 500GB drive in my laptop.I have purchased two of these Drobo units from NCIX in the past as individual computer backup systems and am very happy with them. In fact, I just took delivery of an 8-bay DroboPro to connect to my Home Office Server to give me up to 16TB of storage space via the Internet.I am not an IT tech, so this plug-n-play intelligent device was much easier and flexible for me than a RAID set-up would ever be.If you need a backup and/or storage system, this is a no-brainer. This review was modfied by poster @ 01-20-10 07:59 AM

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Great device, easy to install, no problems at all after install of a 4-slot 30 days ago. Great to have a firewire device although for older machines it does not have a firewire 400 slot and the only downside is the cost. Purchasing an 8 slot for my office.

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I have nothing but good things to say about the drobo. I have used all types of drives of various sizes with the unit and it has taken everything I have thrown at it. I have yet to have a problem with this product. Easy, no fuss backup solution exactly what I want in a product. Others unfortunately have had trouble with drobo products but I have encountered non thus far. Great product.

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This is a great invention - total adaptability to dynamically changing storage needs, built in back up, total ease of use. Plugged this baby in three weeks ago and it has been performing with outstanding speed. Initially, I am spooling off my saved music, photos and files for transfer to a new computer. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to keep a back up of important files. Access is as fast as if resident on your C: drive. Highly recommend it.

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I had been waiting for drobo to drop  in price after the release of drobopro and it looks like I got it at just the right time; on sale for $370 and a $40 MIR.$330 for drobo is unheard of and I had to snatch it up.It literally took no more than 15 minutes to start to transfer my files. I have mixed drives and works flawlessly.Check drobo site for more details, don't want to be redundant.

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for years and years when ever I needed more storage I'd buy external hard drives. invariably these drives failed, some of them quickly (what can you say when the cat knocks over an external HD?). Even though I had backed up my data onto DVD's, invariably, even if data wasn't lost, it took time to recover the data.The Drobo is high priced, but is well worth the money. Although I still back my data up onto DVD's and also onto other external drives, having the knowledge that if a drive in the Drobo should fail my data is safe, is worth any price!I'm looking forward to buying another Drobo in the future, connecting to it at a remote location and storing a copy of my data off site.

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I have had the Drobo V2 for a year now and have been very impressed by it. It was easy to set up in the first place. I bought it with four of the notorious firmware-cursed Seagate 1TB drives, all four of which (along with two replacements Seagate sent me) failed. Despite the failure of all these drives, I lost no data. I keep about 2-3TB of data on it, since I use it to feed the media systems in my house. While I own most of the movies and music on the drive, some of the files are student projects that could not be replaced. It would have taken me a lot of work if I had had to replace all of my own media, and I would have lost the student work. Each time a drive failed, it was an easy matter to pop in a new one. I now have 5TB of WD green drives in it, and I know I don't have to worry. I'm even thinking about adding a second one, especially now that the prices are so much cheaper than they were when I bought mine.

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We have 3 of these Drobo 4 bay units now. I work with all sorts of high definition video formats so it's great having this 100% fire and forget auto backup system that they put in the Drobo... it gives you one less thing to worry about.The best part is, even a technically incompetent monkey like me can operate the thing. A drive fails or starts breaking down or gets bad sectors or whatever, green light turns to red light and Drobo flashes at you... pull out the bad drive, Drobo tells you to insert  the new drive and as soon as you insert  it, Drobo starts to recreate  what was on the broken down drive without any further button pushing or head scratching. It's great.But what I want to know is if anyone out there has one of the 8 bay models yet, and if they've had any problems with it, and how it held up when something went wrong... I'm not convinced that getting back one extra power plug is worth paying twice as much per terabyte of safe storage.So if u get one of the 8 bays, please post a review after you've had it for a while, ok?ThanksPS-> Don't listen to the cheesehead who gave this thing 1 star. It works, and works well. We work our drives almost 24/7 so we tend to get more drive failures than most people do. It's happened 4 times in two years, and every single time backup involved pulling out the bad drive and putting in a new one. Period. Done. That dude is probably a repair technician who feels his job security threatened by fire and forget lol. This review was modfied by poster @ 08-16-09 04:52 PM

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I got this on sale at NCIX with an additional rebate of $50. I waited for the price to drop  before purchasing, I suggest everyone do the same.After trying to spec out what it would cost to build my own mATX NAS/Raid5 solution, it seemed clear that the Drobo price was reasonable. Furthermore, although cheesy, the promise of "BeyondRAID" and its expandability was what sealed the deal for me -- being locked into a static Raid solution seemed foolish for home use.I have set this up by attaching it to an old PowerBook via FW800. Performance is excellent. This little server rig is being used for portable home directory synchronization, as well as media streaming. I am very pleased.There are obvious drawbacks to the Drobo, but the one thing I did not expect was the strange bell-like disk noise emanating from it. I was going to keep the Drobo beside the television, but you can really hear the disks inside this unit -- it's quite eery. I have inserted 2 x 1T Caviar Blk, certainly not the world's quietest drives, but the Drobo chassis seems to act like some kind of echo chamber. The irony is, the unit is actually quieter when the magnetic faceplate is removed??? Odd, but then again, YMMV with different drives. If I could go back and do it again, I might opt for the Caviar Green.The other thing you may not be prepared for with this product is the very strange BeyondRAID setup. I did a lot of tinkering trying to find the optimal setup. In the end, I really think that if want to buy this, you should be prepared to use a single partition setup. You will also want to ensure that you explicitly define the partition size as the maximum 16TB capacity, even if you do not currently employ that much storage.All that said, I have found this to be a good product, and will highly recommend it for home use. But do your own research... You'll never be happy with a product unless you know what you are getting.

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Finally purchased the Drobo 4-bay unit with Firewire 800 after researching and hesitating for months. So far am extremely pleased with it.While there was a time I would have by default said "the more complex, the better", I find the simplicity of this unit very appealing. The green light lets you know everything is fine, the blue lights count up in 10% increments how much space you have left. Currently have a couple of drives plugged into it but plan on adding another soon.Data Robotics takes great pains to make you think this is a "storage robot", etc and something quite revolutionary. It's not earth-shattering stuff, but it's very useful and a cool concept.The greatest compliment I can give it is that I forget I have it. There's no maintenance, no upkeep, just a big block of storage available on my Desktop. It keeps my critical data redundantly available here, but is, of course, not meant to replace an off-site backup for the REALLY critical stuff.No complaints - great purchase - just need to find homes for my collection of USB Drives that I haven't already cracked open to free the SATA drives inside!

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I got this for my father but I since I configure everything for him anyways, I spent a few days toying around with it before handing it over. I put 3 1.5TB Seagate drives in it and we have another 1.5TB drive on the way. First impressions upon opening the box was that the Drobo is a High Quality part. It's packaging and documentation is VERY reminiscent of something from Apple. The device itself feels well build when compared to other home DASNAS type devices. Although it certainly does not compare to business class NASSAN devices. The magnets on the drive door was a nice touch that added to it's Mac like appearance. Now on to the more important stuff, the drobo's functionality is much like that of a mac. If all you want is a bit of extra storage for 1 computer and nothing more than the Drobo does it's job just fine at almost double the price of the competition. If you want any "extra" sort of functionality that you would expect from any other device on the market then go look elsewhere. This is what bugs me most, Drobo is a device that competes in a market full of fully featured devices that cost much less. It's as if Mac users are content with a device that costs double and performs half. Drobo also misrepresents it self a secure storage. Anyone who knows about RAID knows that it is more likely to cause problems than solve them. RAID does NOT = BACKUP. The fact that you can not disable RAID on this device really irks me. The Drobo dashboard is also useless. Instead of adding functionality to the device, they put a button that say "Flash Lights" !!! Are you serious!! Instead of allowing for a verification of the Array or the ability to disable RAID, they add a button to make the lights flash!! who are their consumers? 12 year olds?Anyways, after reading many glowing reviews from MAC sites and NCIX, I thought I would set the record straight! DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT UNLESS YOU ARE USING IT WITH A MAC AND HAVE LOTS OF MONEY TO WASTE!!!

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I had one of them for a quite a while and working well and I just added another one. They both are working really fine. However, there is one really dreadful drawback: If you had formatted it for a certain size and later on when you want to increase its capacity to one that is greater than you have originally formatted for, you would have to re-format the entire unit. This means you have to copy several tera bytes of data to somewhere else, reformat the disc and copy back all those data. This takes really long time, days, if not weeks. There should be more expedient way to increase the capacity beyong that originally formatted for.

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I used this product for a week now, and I like it. The setup was easy and it works great. The price here was the best I found on the internet.

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I initially had problems with the 1TB drives, but after a firmware upgrade everything is running smoothly. Tech support are arrogant but do know what their talking about.You don't need to use the supplied software, unless you need to upgrade the firmware (only need software on one computer).Highly recommend it. This review was modfied by poster j 06-05-09 04:53 PM This review was modfied by poster @ 06-05-09 04:37 PM

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Very quiet, so easy to use. I have 4 - 1tb WD Caviar BLACK drives in mine. I feel pretty safe and I am using it as a primary file drive drive. I do the video projects on the internal SAS drives and when done, I move them to Drobo.

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I've been using one for about a year and the device has worked flawlessly. Having recently replaced two drives (to increase capacity) I've had the pleasure of witnessing its ability to handle hot-swapping and am very reassured that my data is protected. I plan to pick up a second.

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Value, features, quality all get 5/5. Performance gets 4 only because there is no eSata, otherwise 5. This system is so amazing that I want an 8 drive unit...please. I see only one negative review by a person who is obviously not technically astute...the Oct 25th reviewer must be a Troll because 30,000 units have gone out with this only one negative review. I called the company and waited only 30 seconds to talk to a rep who really really knew her stuff. With 30,000 units out they must be doing somthing right. Redone shooters are using this unit, mission critical post production facilities are using this unit. I give this technology top marks and thank them for saving our data at a reasonable cost.