Drobo Review: Frickin’ Awesome
- June 8th, 2007
- 20 Comments
Drobo is being marketed as the world’s first “storage robot”. Call it a buzzword, but it does act like a robot. It’ll keep your data in tact, it detects read and write errors before they become critical issues, and it has four hard drive bays. Drobo itself is just merely a long, black square with LED indicator lights, hard drive bays, and USB cable. Add your drives, plug it in, connect it and you’re done. Drobo relies on no software, making it an excellent choice for both Mac and PC users.
The guys at Drobo were kind enough to hook me up with 2TB in hot-swappable hard drives, which was very kind of them. Just shove ‘em in and partition them and you have yourself a big chunk of storage on your desktop. I used Disk Utility in OS X no problem and decided to create two 1TB partitions in case I needed to keep certain data separate.
Drobo contains four drive bays
One of the cooler features about Drobo, is that it’s automatically redundant. For instance, say you’re watching a video that is stored on Drive 1. You can pull Drive 1 out while it’s being used and your video playback will be uninterrupted. Very nice. This could be useful if you’re in a rush to get data into Drobo and have to yank out a drive right away.
Having 2TB of storage is nice though, especially when it’s being run via an SATA II connection. Filling it up has truly been a challenge. I’ve copied 400GB from my external drives and downloaded about 100GB so far, but I’m not even close to filling up Drobo. Having all this storage via one, single USB cable is really a treat. It keeps my other ports free and takes up less space than multiple enclosures. That’s the beauty of Drobo. I can add however much storage I need. If I only need 500GB, I’ll add in a few older drives and be done with it. If I need 2TB, I have that option available to me.
However, Drobo isn’t for everyone - especially poor people. Drobo costs $499 and that’s without hard disks. You figure maybe $250 for a hot-swap 500GB drive multiplied by four and look what you’ve spent. Nearly $1500 on an external storage solution. Pricey, yes, but Drobo does come with a space for a Kensington lock so no one can walk off with your terabytes of pornography data.
Drobo got back!
Read and write times are pretty good on Drobo. It’s probably thanks to the SATA + USB 2.0 connection and I’m pleased it responds fast. Sure there’s bound to be a little bit of a lag when Drobo comes out of idle mode, but when it’s up and running, you’ll forget you’re using an external device half the time. Gone are the problems of clunking and booting up that have plagued external enclosures for years.
So is Drobo worth it? Should you buy it? If you need a lot of storage or want to keep it managed and you have the cash, absolutely. Drobo keeps your USB ports free, which is a godsend when I go to hook up a peripheral or two. The hard drive indicator lights are simple and let you know what’s going on with your drives. Furthermore, the ability to add drives as needed is always a plus in my book. Drobo is a home run by all means. And though some people may miss out on the chance due to pricing, the rest of us can enjoy having massive amounts of data available without fear of losing it.
bpm2000 (Who am I?)
1 year ago
too expensive. much too expensive.
Mark Shuttleworth (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Why no just wait till Apples OS X Leopard is released with support for the ZFS filesystem that has the features of the Drobo?
Cafefrenzy (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Looks totally sweet! I would buy it if it were a gigabit NAS unit. I’ll stick to just filling up my HTPC with more drives for now…
DavidC (Who am I?)
1 year ago
I own one of these - and it ROCKS!! I can add/delete drives on the fly. I have used it on my Mac and along with win 2003, XP and Vista. I have 1.4TB of stuff on it and it just runs.
Fun gadgets (Who am I?)
1 year ago
This would be cool to have, but no-way would I buy it at that price. If it had a gigabit port and would act as NAS, I’d bite since I could use it on all of my machines easily. However, $500 for a USB enclosure with hardware RAID (basically) is just WAY too much!
Jason Schramm (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Where do you get your hard drive prices? Did you even look it up? I was able to find 3 500GB SATA drives for around $110 each. Multiply that by 4 and you get $440. But you can always start with 2 drives for $200 and get more as you need them.
thermo (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Spent the cash… wasn’t worth it. The device is SLOW! If you are copying a large file, forget about trying to access anything off the thing. the usb is much slower than a single drive.
Decided to take advantage of the money back guarantee… that was a royal hassle.. took a month to finally get my money after numerous phone calls.
overall result… not worth consideration.
Boris (Who am I?)
1 year ago
thermo
Do you think adding FireWire compatibility would improve Drobo’s performance?
danaldonova (Who am I?)
1 year ago
FYI - For anyone looking to buy a drobo, the reference code / coupon REFDANA will save you $25 at their online store through July 31
Wombat (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Hahaha, that danaldonova person keeps spamming every website with the mention of his/her referral code it’s sooo freaking annoying.. At least tell people you are getting a referral fee for pushing their product. Yeah… that’s right he/she is one of those “Evangelists” that is employed by Data Robotics to spam his referral code so that he can gain $25 each time someone uses his referral code to purchase the machine.
geez.. ‘fez up and tell people the honest truth about your code, it’s just being polite and considerate =\
lordofallisurvey (Who am I?)
1 year ago
who cares if he’s getting a referral fee? If it knocks another 25 bucks off the price for me, I’m happy. If he gets something out of it too, good for him!
cookiemonster (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Wombat - How do you know he gets $25? you an “evangelist” too? Sounds like jealousy to me.
p.s. How do you ‘fez up? put on a fez?
avtguedyev (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Thanks for this site!
hifue.info
j.c. (Who am I?)
1 year ago
“Drobo does come with a space for a Kensington lock so no one can walk off with your data.”
Wouldn’t this only secure the Drobo enclosure? It seems like a thief could simply open the Drobo’s front cover and slide the drives out.
danaldonova (Who am I?)
1 year ago
The Coupon Code REFDANA is good for $50 off your new drobo at the drobo. com store during the month of August!!!
Gary (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Bought it. Installed it. Drobo failed within three days taking all of our data with it. This is a version 1.0 product. I should have known better.
Use it at your own risk. Make sure you back it up onto another device. Once it fails, there isn’t much chance of recovery. Don’t expect much help from tech support. My first call, after indicating that we were a business and we were down, was not returned for two days.
While I will acknowledge the cool factor associated with this product, it is still unreliable, and therefore useless.
BTW, we had full backups to recover from the failure, but it took time and effort to get back to where we started. I am considering sending a bill to Data Robotics for my trouble.
Anonymous
1 year ago
Love the back it up idea. Just what I want to worry about with my backup device; that I have to back it up. It sounds interesting but I’m waiting for Windows Home Server !
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Ross (Who am I?)
11 months ago
Add a Gigabit port, and I will buy immediately. Why should this be a one computer box? I love the idea of hot-swap raided NAS that you can add to the network on the fly!
Other features that would be cool: Add card slots for my SD cards to upload my photos instantly. What else - maybe a wireless nic?
drobot (Who am I?)
11 months ago
obviously a lame “thanks for the free product” review… nothing else to say here…
Heath (Who am I?)
4 months ago
This reviewer doesn’t understand how the thing works. The data isn’t stored on each drive separately it is stored on all the drives as a whole. You can’t yank out a drive and throw in another “if you’re in a rush to get data into Drobo.” It will interpret that as a failure of part of the data set and then start a rebuild using the replacement drive (erasing it first). How does that “get data into the drive”? Also, there is no SATA II connection (except internally). It has USB2 only out. Maybe ESATA later on another version. Get better or quit.