Product ReviewsData Robotics Drobo FS 5 Bay SATA2 Network Attached Storage Device NAS GBLAN - Retail Pack
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11%
67%
0%
22%
0%
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With 9 User Reviews
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 Rating: Review Date: 05/29/12  |
Cons: the fan seems to be a little noisy but it is sitting on a shelf above my desk right at face level above my monitor, moving the unit to another location would help this alot.
Pros: very easy to setup even a computer novice would have almost no trouble to get it working. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/27/12 |
Cons: Pricey and a little slow
Pros: Extremely easy to use and maintain Comment:
This is the easiest NAS I have ever used... its literally as simple as sliding your drives in and letting the drobo do the rest. The software is a breeze to use... its the perfect solution for easy secure storage.However... for anything but "storage", its very slow. I do stream media from it, and even bluray's play smoothly over the network to my media server, but I tried installing a game on it, and it was near unplayable. even word and excel documents were very slow opening from it. So for storage, its fantastic, but if you want to actually work from the files on it, be warned, its not quick. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/10/12 |
Cons: Slighly louder than expected but still acceptable. I would have like transfer speeds to be a little faster. (35MB/s over GE)
Pros: Small, simple to use, looks good, easy to maintain and manage. DroboApps is a nice feature for advanced users. Comment:
I'm using the Drobo-FS to back up 12TB of WHS 2011 goodness. The initial data transfer is taking forever at 35MB/s but once that's done, a daily automated rsync should be no problem. |
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Rating: Review Date: 03/30/12 |
Cons: NoiseNot the fastest Nas
Pros: Easy SetupSimple interfaceGood LookingFeatures Comment:
Very good product, flawless finish, great feature and very easy to setup. Price tag is a bit high but for anyone looking for an hassel free Nas almost plug and play Nas it is very worth it. |
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Rating: Review Date: 03/14/12 |
Cons: None so far!
Pros: Dependable, works flawlessly as media server to a PS3 playstation. Get one and get piece of mind. Comment:
The only issue that I had when the Drobo appeared slow was a faulty Hard Drive which Drobo had identified. I have 5 - 2gb blacks and it works like a charm. I am considering getting another to add to the network. I've often thought that if the house ever caught on fire that the first thing that I would grab is my Drobo!! |
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Rating: Review Date: 12/01/11 |
Cons: Read and Write speeds may be the worst of all NAS products available on the market once the drobo goes over 85% capacity.
Pros: No mainteneance Required Comment:
Bought this unit in January 2011. I have 5 2 TB drives in it. At first it was ok when I was copying data to it...as time wore on, the read/write speeds kept drop ping. When you hit 85% of "available" capacity, you will notice a massive drop in response times for reading/writing. I recommend you do not fill up your last 10% of storage. Read and write speeds range from 3 MB-5 MB after 85% capacity is reached. Drobo has released firmware trying to address this speed issue, but it still feels 5 years out of date. The trade off is basically convenience (Ease of use) vs performance...they went with convenience.To end on a positive note, if Drobo technicians can solve the speed issues and we can fill these NAS's up to 95% capacity and maintain 30+ MB read/write then I would be much happier.AS my existing drobo is now full, I will be looking for a different product to expand to. |
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Rating: Review Date: 11/07/11 |
Cons: * Initial Price depending on model* Wish it had more connection options... ie: eSata for expansion beyond 5 drives.* No online cloud backup options that I am aware of* Speed???
Pros: * Set it and forget it.* Pop in a new drive and bang, more storage.* Easy to manage with Dashboard.* Works great with Growl + email to send alerts Comment:
After owning my Drobo FS for a year now it has been uneventful in a good way. All I have had to do is order up a drive or two from NCIX when it tells me I'm getting low on space, and then pop them in when they arrive. I'm thinking of picking up the new regular Drobo with USB 3.0 to use with the orphaned drives from my Drobo FS.I put speed with question marks because full 1080P DTS-MA movie files cause my Boxee Box to skip, but I'm not sure if it is due to my powerline ethernet kit only being 200mbs instead of 500mbs and me using the slower green drives instead of 7200rpm drives.I also wish I could backup with whole Drobo FS to a service like Carbonite. The regular Drobo you can because it is connected directly to your computer. I would be willing to pay a little premium for offsite backup. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/20/11 |
Cons: Slow transfer speed over 1000Base-T as well as wireless
Pros: Lots of storage space. Easy to add extra space with varying size drives and still be in a RAID. Dual Disk redundancy.Time Machine support with max space allowed option.Cross platform.Easy setup Comment:
I have set up a few Drobos for clients as well as our office but all of them were directly attached with FW800 or FW400 to either Mac OS X client machines or Mac OS X Servers.This one was going to be the first NAS for myself at home as archive storage.The set up was easy, just as all other Drobos. Even the custom options are easy to understand and set up. I was pleasantly surprised to see that you can set up a Share for TimeMachine and limit the amount of space it can use on the drives. A very useful option.The reason why I only gave 2 stars is because the transfer speed was atrocious. Both over wireless as well as Ethernet. The Drobo, as well as my computer were connected with Cat5e cables to an Airport Extreme Base station with 1000 Base-T ports. And one would expect that the transfer speed over wireless would be slower than over Ethernet. That was not the case. I used a 8GB iMovie Project, which contained both large and small files as a test file. It took 33 minutes over Wireless and 30 minutes over Ethernet. I tested it with both Dual Disk Redundancy (DDR) and without because Drobo notes on their website that the Drobo S can be up to 20% slower when DDR is selected. There was no performance difference.Another thing I noticed was that the file transfer took a long time to even start while transfers from my computer over wireless or Ethernet to the drive attached to my Leopard server (attached with FW 400) started immediately. I compared it to the Drobo 1st Gen we have attached at the office to a G4 tower with FW400 and transferred the same file over the 1000Base-T connection. It only took 8 minutes.Needles to say I returned the FS and replaced it with a Drobo S which is now attached via FW400 (my Mac Mini doesn't have a FW800 port). The transfer speed to it for the same file is 12 min via Ethernet and 22 min wirelessly.I did try watching movie files I had transferred to the Drobo directly from the Drobo and interestingly enough they started playing fine and didn't skip once. So some of the performance is definitely there. And yes, I had installed the latest Firmware. All drives were new 2TB WD drives. I tried a lot of troubleshooting tips found on various websites but in the end I decided that a NAS needs to be able to do more than just allow me to watch video files without skipping. I need to be able to access it as quickly as any other server volume on either a Windows or Mac server and this one clearly was not capable of doing that.The Drobo S on the other hand works like a charm. |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/13/11 |
Cons: ExpensiveSlow Transfer Rate
Pros: User FriendlyCompact5 Bays Comment:
I bought this as a backup/network attached storage. It works great as a media streamer, but transferring hundreds of gigs of files can be rather slow at under 30mb/sec. I am happy with it though and it has good expandability so I would highly recommend for people that want an easy to use raid device. |
overall I am so far very satisfied with this unit, got it on a surprise special for the amazing price of 399.99, had been wanting one for a long time but the high price had put me off, jumped on it when i saw the surprise special.If i could make a few changes to the unit I would make it 6 bay and add more sound dampening material to silence the sound of the fan and drives. this is a great unit and is working great for streaming all my media all over my home network to various devices as well as backing up the files on my ssd just incase it goes.