Comments on: Drobo Firewire 800 Review

By: Mac

Mac — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:04:36 +0000

I have had a first generation drobo for about 3 months. I am using it as a backup so the USB2 speed is not a problem. It is sitting within arms length and I have no noise problems from the fan, just some noise from the two hard drives. I am using Windows XP and everything seems to work as advertised. I am very happy with it.

By: T.J. Powell

T.J. Powell — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:43:31 +0000

I need storage space for an iMac. I have read lots of reviews online about the Drobo. They are either very good or very bad. It seems like the bad comments are coming from people hooking it up to PCs and not Macs. Does anyone have further input on this?

If I do not get a Drobo, what other solutions have people used? I would want to hook it up via Firewire 800 so that I can get the best speed/performance.

Thanks

By: pmcd

pmcd — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:30:54 +0000

to davidF: I meant the Airport Extreme (the one with gigabit ethernet).

philip

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:37:30 +0000

I did some testing of my new Drobo unit under Ubuntu. Didn’t test firewire 800 but did test USB2 and Firewire 400. Results from my testing are available at:

http://www.whitehats.ca/main/members/Malik/malik_drobo/malik_drobo.html

Regards
Jamie

By: Abud

Abud — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:51:47 +0000

Hi, I would like to know if the FW 800 issue has been fixed if the DROBO is ran under Windows 7 ?

By: davidF

davidF — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:40:13 +0000

Philip McD you said “I should add it works great off an Apple Airport Express Base Station.” Do you mean an Airport Extreme? I hope it does work off an Express as I am really keen to get this working but haven’t found a way to do airdisk from an Express Base Station. Thx Dave

By: Philip McD

Philip McD — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:01:38 +0000

I’ve had a 1st generation Drobo for about a month. It’s great. I am confused about the no booting issue. It boot’s just fine on a Mac. Maybe not OSX server or Windows? But it definitely boots under Leopard via USB. I assume the 2nd generation one will too. I should add it works great off an Apple Airport Express Base Station.

philip

By: John Krause

John Krause — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:46:59 +0000

I have issues with the glossy screens on the newer iMacs. I would like to reduce that glare but I am somewhat confused as to the best solution of those that I have seen on the web. I respect your advice. Do you have any thoughts. Thank you,John.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:14:42 +0000

The fan on my 2nd generation drobo drives me insane. It cycles on for 10 minutes, off for 10 minutes, and it’s annoying. My desktop is near silent- quiet power supply and zero noise solid state hard drives, so I don’t want to hear anything. The drobo should not be cycling its fan when the unit is just sitting there doing nothing and if it does, then it should do so at a very low fan speed, not max on or totally off. Annoying. I’ve griped about this to data robotics numerous times but not in a few months so I will gripe again and see if anything changed.

By: D. Marshall

D. Marshall — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:27:54 +0000

Have 3 drobos (2 Gen2, 1 Gen1/USB). Both Gen2 will not function via FW800/400 when connected to Windows 2003 R2 (I have seen reports of like issues with XP and Vista). If the devices are attached you will receive a BSOD with both the UniBrain and Microsoft Drivers. The FW800 card is a Siig (recommended by DR until you dig deep into there knowledge base where you will find numerous reports of FW issues. Basically the Drobo is not compatible with FW cards based on TI chipsets. Most cards are TI based, including the Siig). We have the drobos attached via USB and if we do heavy reads or writes to them they lockup and have to be power cycled to get them back. This is referenced in the knowledge base but buried.

By: Spike

Spike — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:20:23 +0000

I just got a FireWire 800 Drobo. It has been amazing. The transfer speeds were certainly not as fast as that type of connection allows for, but considering how much is going on with the data as it’s transferred, I’m happy. I tested my Drobo out in a few ways. First of all, I had two 1TB drives in there, one Samsung Spinpoint F1, and one Hitachi Something-or-Other. I had the Drobo stuffed, less than 50 MB free. While playing a high def video, I yanked the Hitachi. Movie kept playing without a hitch. I put in a 1TB Western Digital Green Power to replace it, and the assimilation took nearly 13 hours. Definitely could have been faster. However, I did not need to tell Drobo I was going to remove this drive, or that I was going to add another. And the data was 100% accessible 100% of the time. Now I’ve added two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives to the array. They assimilated instantly.
Several days later, after adding another 1.5 TB worth of data on to Drobo, all of which is safe in other locations, I got curious. So I pulled a drive out of Drobo, and in about 30 seconds, it began its rearranging of the data among the remaining disks. This was going to take 19 hours according to Drobo. I stuck the drive back in, and within 5 minutes, all four bay lights were green and Drobo was reporting good health. After that, I got more curious. I put my Drobo into standby mode, and disconnected it from my computer. I then removed all four disks from the Drobo, and put them back each in a different spot. Drobo didn’t care. It took a noticeably longer time to boot itself up than usual, but no more than two minutes.
I have not yet had any drives fail in the Drobo, nor have I had to deal with their customer support. I did take down Tom’s email address, in case I need to contact someone in the company, but so far everything has been as good as they said it would be. The other techs where I fix computers all agree Drobo is powered by wizards and the extra storage space Drobo is able to deliver over standard RAID configurations comes from the same dimension all of our left socks disappear to. As far as I can report, Drobo is my perfect storage solution.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:53:00 +0000

I just purchased the 2nd Gen Drobo three weeks ago. I also purchase hardware to upgrade my network to gigabit, 4 new hard drives, and a FW 800 PCI card. All this to discover I’m stuck with just USB interface because of the missing drivers for Windows. Tech support told me three weeks ago they’re working on it, but today I was told they’re not. Problems with the current PC USB 2.0 interface:
1) The bottleneck is very noticeable when streaming video. If anyone else on the network accesses the Drobo the video lags or skips.
2) The drive is intermittently slow to find on the network.
3) Benchmarking access speed is 3x slower than my external FireWire 400 external drives.
I have more specs if anyone is interested.
Drobo support will not respond to my emails after the first one. Nor will they let me return the device.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:53:11 +0000

Terry:

Thanks for the informative posts here. I am considering purchasing a Drobo and the information here has been very helpful.

I do however have a couple questions that you might be able to answer. I use a Mac at home and have a 1TB Time Capsule hooked up for my Time Machine backups. The questions I have are:

- Can the Drobo be partitioned to look like several different drives?
- I’m sure Drobo supports Time Machine backups, but can I use Drobo and the Time Capsule for dual backups (probably more of a Mac OS X questions, I know).
- I have several external drives that I presently have information stored on. Can those be taken apart so that I can use the drives in the Drobo? Do you know if most of them are SATA?

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.

mike

By: Jack G

Jack G — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:47:16 +0000

I have the Drobo-2 and am dual-booting XP Pro (32bit) and Vista 64-bit and get BSOD with Firewire 800 – this isn’t surprising since it’s a known issue. What really surprises me is that this problem has been around since at least October and it’s now Jan 09 and there is still no fix. You would think they would let people know about this issue before they purchase the unit and to be honest it borders on false advertisement by not doing so. I spent $500 for a device that doesn’t work as advertised (at least yet). Not very professional.

By: Ronn

Ronn — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:47:23 +0000

FYI I have the Drobo Gen 2 w/4TB and it will not work at all over firewire (400 or 800) with Windows XP Profession. Blue screen. Works fine over USB but if I wanted USB (and I do not) I could have bought Gen 1. One Hour on hold today with DR Tech support, countless emails, nothing. Worst support I’ve seen in a while. Their mention of the issue on the website is useless – says use SIIG card (I am) and Windows drivers (I am).

Screw DR.