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 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.

Depends...

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/

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.

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.

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.

Would be nice if these companies would stop announcing and start releasing.

TB has been out for over a year, and they are only now announcing their intent.

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.

My figures were done using Blackmagic. I hope they have sorted out the speed problems, as they are a good solution for a lot of people. We've moved on now, a mac with a bigger internal drive and external drives getting cheaper meant I could change the way we work, so we don't need a huge storage capability anymore.

And as a reminder to everyone, it doesn't matter what raid system you are using, when your enclosure gets dropped and smashed to pieces, you haven't got any backup. When it happened to our Drobo, I didn't even bother trying it, just reached for the backup and away we go. Make sure everything precious backed up locally and offsite, three copies!!!

My friends think that I am crazy for running CAT6 in my apartment between my network components but I want as much speed as possible. They also think that I am over the top for having the Drobo backing up to the WD (Synology on the way) and having main backups of my photo libs to various drives...

I like the idea of Drobo just as a place to put old HDs in a pool to (eventually) die. I have many smaller HDs of various sizes I can pull out of older computers, and a single enclosure that pools them together seems like a useful thing to me. I wouldn't use it for primary storage, but it might work nice as a "continuing" back-up of back-ups that can grow over time.

Lately, it seems, my data storage needs are growing faster than HD capacities, and I've had to add more drives to the mix rather than upgrade to larger drives. I have external enclosures all over the place, now. DAS is very important to me, though. NAS does not meet my requirements and never will.

What I really wish for, is official ZFS support in OS X. It would make things a lot simpler all around.

OK. So 4+ HDD's can get FW800 speeds. Not impressive. I know it is not made for actual connected use and should be for backup only but c'mon. I have other things to do and 4+ HDD's should get you at least 250MB/s+ regardless of the RAID level and inherent overhead. Truthfully 4 HDD's should net you 400MB/s. Just saying it is a miserably slow tech.

Got to love the way you are raising the bar here. First you complain that it can't even saturate USB2 (20-30MBps) so it isn't worth buying with a faster interface. Now you are suddenly setting the bar at 250MBps? If you read my earlier posts I note that the current gen speeds are not mind blowingly fast, but they are at least the equivalent of my other internal (non SSD) drives during normal use.

I also think most current gen Drobo users would disagree with your assertion that it is not intended for connected use. That is EXACTLY what mine is used for - it is my central audio/video storage/streaming volume. For that role it is perfect for me. No more dealing with running out of space as my library grows or re-organizing my data across multiple drives as they fill up. Plus as drives reach the end of their 'safe' lifespan, I just swap them out with new and bigger drives one at a time.

I've tried most of the 'roll your own' solutions out there, and for total cost (especially when you factor in the ability to mix and match drives) and ease of use the Drobo won hands down for me at the time I decided to buy it. Is it 'perfect', no. Is it the right choice for everyone, no. But most of the reasons being tossed around for not buying are more fear mongering than fact:

One reason is that it is too slow for normal use, but that has not been true with at least the current Drobo S. It WAS true with the prior gen devices. If your need for this type of device is maximum speed for video capture/edit/etc., a Drobo is NOT the device for you - you want the new Pegasus drives.

Another reason given is that it is proprietary. So are most of the RAID solutions out there. If you have to go disk by disk through the disks in a failed raid array trying to recover data and piece together the bits of files spread across multiple volumes - you have a serious failure in your backup strategy somewhere. RAID is NOT backup, it is redundancy/protection and usually allows for zero downtime with limited drive failure scenarios.

A third reason is that hardware failures corrupt the data. Same is true for any RAID solution. Bet most 'roll your own' proponents would recommend using the on-board MB software raid solutions to keep the cost below a Drobo, and there are plenty of horror stories about data loss and drive incompatibilities/failures with those.