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Drobo Finally Announces NAS Drive

8 points by zargon 17y ago

jawngee 17y ago
I have a strong dislike for Drobo's. They might be good consumer devices, but I inherited a company using them in the place of a proper RAID (which we are now yanking out and replacing with Promises). Biggest problem is how slow they are. The next big problem is that once at a certain capacity, terabytes of space mysteriously disappear.
krobertson 17y ago
I really have a hard time trusting these kind of devices and would rather stick with a real system using real RAID or ZFS. I had a ReadyNAS a few years ago and liked it, up until the power supply died. Suddenly I couldn't access any documents and needed to order a new power supply and wait for it come. It may be convenient, but the parts aren't easily swappable. I can't pull out the controller and rives and plug it into something else. If it was just a normal system, I have plenty of spare parts laying around or can easily drive to Fry's and get almost any part there. Instead I found how to modify an ATX power supply to work for it, powered it up long enough to copy all my data off, then ditched it.
bonsaitree 17y ago
Meh. Who's going to pay the Drobo premium when equivalent or better performance can be had, with more a bog-standard (e.g. reliable) hardware and filesystems, for less? I guess those customers who care about the visual aesthetics of their NAS device.
- wmf 17y ago
  You're ignoring the real benefit of Drobo: mixing heterogeneous drives. Unfortunately, the cost of that feature is now really high, since it seems like regular RAID has gotten faster and cheaper while Drobo has stayed expensive and slow.
  - bonsaitree 17y ago
    Exactly. Despite reliability and batch/lot issues with drives of vastly different SMART error rates and ages, the KEY Drobo feature appealing to the "lower end" of the RAID prosumer space WAS heterogeneous drives. In the current market, Drobo has managed to price themselves OUT of that space while simultaneously NOT keeping up with performance on the higher end. Drobo is now in the uncanny-valley of proprietary RAID systems.

8 points by zargon 17y ago

I have a strong dislike for Drobo's. They might be good consumer devices, but I inherited a company using them in the place of a proper RAID (which we are now yanking out and replacing with Promises). Biggest problem is how slow they are. The next big problem is that once at a certain capacity, terabytes of space mysteriously disappear.

krobertson 17y ago

I really have a hard time trusting these kind of devices and would rather stick with a real system using real RAID or ZFS. I had a ReadyNAS a few years ago and liked it, up until the power supply died. Suddenly I couldn't access any documents and needed to order a new power supply and wait for it come. It may be convenient, but the parts aren't easily swappable. I can't pull out the controller and rives and plug it into something else. If it was just a normal system, I have plenty of spare parts laying around or can easily drive to Fry's and get almost any part there. Instead I found how to modify an ATX power supply to work for it, powered it up long enough to copy all my data off, then ditched it.

bonsaitree 17y ago

Meh. Who's going to pay the Drobo premium when equivalent or better performance can be had, with more a bog-standard (e.g. reliable) hardware and filesystems, for less? I guess those customers who care about the visual aesthetics of their NAS device.

wmf 17y ago
You're ignoring the real benefit of Drobo: mixing heterogeneous drives. Unfortunately, the cost of that feature is now really high, since it seems like regular RAID has gotten faster and cheaper while Drobo has stayed expensive and slow.
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  Exactly. Despite reliability and batch/lot issues with drives of vastly different SMART error rates and ages, the KEY Drobo feature appealing to the "lower end" of the RAID prosumer space WAS heterogeneous drives. In the current market, Drobo has managed to price themselves OUT of that space while simultaneously NOT keeping up with performance on the higher end. Drobo is now in the uncanny-valley of proprietary RAID systems.