Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices

It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.

I used to feel like you. Then I got a Drobo. Now I've got three (2 1st gen, and 1 2nd gen) and have never looked back.

The very fact you equate Drobo with RAID tells me you know very little of the device, the company, or its products.

I have 48TB (3 x 16TB) arrays, but only about 8TB total spread across all three boxes.

When one drive fills up, I buy a larger one and slap it in.

When one drive goes bad, I replace it.

All live.

All online.

All hot-swappable.

I believe it was Mark Twain that once said "Better to keep one's mouth shut and for everyone to think you're a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Drobo is not RAID. It's "beyond RAID". It's what RAID would be if it was ever allowed to grow up.

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Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/

Which is no different than for any DAS solution (even some SANs), RAID arrays included.

It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.

I don't think you understand how a drobo works, you could actually lose more than 1 drive and the only thing you would have to do is replace with new drives, the drives would integrate and rebuild the information automagically.

It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.

I don't think you understand how a drobo works, you could actually lose more than 1 drive and the only thing you would have to do is replace with new drives, the drives would integrate and rebuild the information automagically.

Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/

It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.

If you're not replicating the data elsewhere, you're still running an enormous risk anyway.

Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/

This can happen with any of these SOHO boxes, such as Drobo, Synology, or QNAP. The latter two are "traditional" RAID, but don't use hardware RAID, rather they use MDRAID, Linux's software RAID. If the unit dies, you had best be good at the command line in order to be able to mount the drives elsewhere.

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Sure - but I'm fine with 0 at this point.

With 0, I have two identical disks. One fails, I still have another disk. That's all I need right now.

0 is striped. You lose one, you're done.

0 is striped. You lose one, you're done.

Oops - typo - had it right in my first post.

The data is replicated in a sufficient manner for what it is. I'm not a bank, and yes I could afford to lose it if it came to that.

I do find it extremely interesting that people zoom out of the woodwork to defend Drobo, including one member that's been on here since 2004 but with only one previous post in the last 8 years before today.

My point was, and remains, that Drobo uses proprietary methods. You run a risk with Drobo because of this. They've also had performance issues - and pricing issues as well.

Mentioning these things somehow brings the Drobo fans to a boil. Certainly glad to see Drobo improve on things but they're not for me. Nor should they be for a lot of other people once the risks are understood.

I have a Drobo S and have been perfectly happy with it. I have on-site and off-site backups of the data on it, which you should have for any data you really care about regardless of the device its on.

That said, I find Drobo draws 90% of its criticism from people who have never owned one and say they never will. There are a few vocal people who have had one fail and are pissed because they were too stupid to backup their data. But most of the actual owners are happy with them in my experience.

No storage array is a backup (none, not one you built, not one with two disk failure protection... none. An electrical surge, fire, theft, etc. can always take out the entire thing). A backup is a copy of your data that is in a physically different location.

I like the Drobo because I didn't want an array that had to be built once with all the disks that would be included in the set from the very start and in order to increase the storage pool you had to migrate the data off and start over.

Nor should they be for a lot of other people once the risks are understood.

You asked a question and there is your answer. You basically call people ignorant and never fully explain your position well. Essentially, falling back on calling people stupid at the end of every explanation shouldn't leave you surprised when they come back annoyed at you. If you genuinely are interested in that group of people it might behoove you to ask more questions so you can better understand why they like something so you can better explain why those reasons are not something you rank high in your purchasing decisions. Just a thought.

From their web site:
"Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain"

What do they mean by a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain?

You can go from thunderbolt to VGA or DVI but not the other way around. Basically they're saying you can terminate the chain after six devices.

I work in Archival/Records Management, and our saying is "three places". "At least two" leaves too much margin for error, though it is the practical reality for most individuals taught to back up. :)

Here's a good primer for regular folk. If a company like Pixar can have this kind of two pronged data disaster (the textbook definition of mission-critical data, I would say), there's really no limit to the potential FUBAR for anyone else.
http://blog.longnow.org/02012/05/30/how-toy-story-2-narrowly-escaped-oblivion/

My biggest issue with Drobo is that DR advertises it in a way that either explicitly or implicitly makes the non-technical users feel that it is in and of itself both a storage and a backup solution. It is a good 'grow as you go' storage solution that does provide protection against the most common type of failure (single drive failure) - but it is NOT in and of itself a backup of itself. Almost every 'my Drobo lost my data' stories from irate users come from the fact that they were relying on the device both as storage and as the singular point of backup for critical/irreplaceable data.

The second most common failure is what many users experience. A single drive fails with a second (or third) drive close to failure. The heavy I/O as it relays out the data to the new drive kills the second drive (or even third) that were marginal already.

Oh, I understand how a Drobo works just fine.

That's why I'm sticking to RAID 1.