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I'm not sure on how to reply, because experiences with a Drobo seem to be extremely hit or miss and it is all very anecdotal. My drobo with all WD green drives

I'm not sure on how to reply, because experiences with a Drobo seem to be extremely hit or miss and it is all very anecdotal. My drobo with all WD green drives is as silent as my Mac minis and MBP are, while a friend of mine has one also with similar drives that's so loud it's very difficult to sleep in the same room with it (and yes, it rivals his Mac Pro in terms of noise). I've not had a single problem with my drobo since I got it almost two years ago, while others keep having them fail repeatedly and replaced repeatedly until they give up and find something else. I've also come across people that think their drobo is great and infallible, and then go and realize they have no backup for the file they just deleted off their drobo. And come across people like me that back up their drobos because a drobo is purely redundant, which doesn't cover cases like accidentally deleting files off it and losing the drobo to fire/flood/theft and more, only situations like a dead hard drive or two. I love my drobo to pieces and recommend it to anyone that wants a solution they don't have to manage...with the caveat that it's their data and therefore their responsibility to take care of it, and a drobo can only be one part of the solution. data robotics customer support definitely has a bad reputation that is probably warranted to an extent, but not many NAS manufacturers, nor you if you roll your own solution, can do much when things go very, very wrong with your device for whatever reason. (Note that I use my drobo only as direct storage. The drobo NAS solutions always seemed a bit hacky to me...)

jwr 16y ago
Well, in my case the failures are obvious and objectively present. You can't really discuss expectations if your device just lost all your data due to filesystem corruption. You don't discuss "infallibility" if your device tells you: Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806282 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105544 HFS+-fs: WARN: Turning journaling back on even though Journalling was not on at mount. HFS+-fs: WARN: We may be setting the Journal bit on an unjournalled filesystem but it is OK. So please don't soften the issue — it fails. It failed for me multiple times already and I expect it to fail again. I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first one — but then, what's the point?
- Dirt_McGirt 16y ago
  > I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first one — but then, what's the point? RAID is _not_ a backup. If you don't understand this, you'll never be satisfied with any RAIDish products.
  - andrewvc 16y ago
    True. RAID is about reliability and performance, and it seems the Drobo isn't winning points there either.
  - bradleyland 16y ago
    It's true that RAID is not a backup, but backup strategies are rarely any good if they back up data "instantly", which is what redundancy provides. So you're stuck with a catch 22. If you back up instantly (without versioning), you may backup bad data. Boooo! If you backup, say, daily, you still stand to lose a days work when your array fails. Boooo! RAID should increase reliability, not decrease it. Any RAID solution that results in a net increase in data loss is not a good solution.
    - mason55 16y ago
      This is why I love Time Machine
    - silencio 16y ago
      That's a catch 22 that can be minimized or even avoided altogether. My main drobo backup is automatically versioned and backed up every 12 hours (to a single external drive, since I don't need to back up everything on my drobo). I've got older backups dating from like a week (work-related) to half a year or more old (for the important docs that don't change that I should keep around regardless...like old accounting/tax stuff) stashed around my home, online, and in a safe deposit box at my bank. And of course occasionally I test whether or not my backup is actually backing up the things I want and that I can successfully restore from it. If I back up bad data, I have older but good data to recover from. If my drobo catastrophically fails, at the worst I've lost data that is probably not going to be difficult to replicate/replace because of how new it is. I don't have to start ripping my hair out at the idea of having lost an incredible amount of data ranging from irreplaceable photos of my life to work and more. In the ideal case, raid should increase reliability, and they do, only for one definition of reliability. But freak accidents and poor design happen, and it's silly to rely only on a raid for reliability.
loewenskind 16y ago
If the experience is so hit or miss that speaks against trying your luck, no?
- silencio 16y ago
  Failure is inevitable and it is only a matter of time until it happens. You're going to be finding the same issues with any other nas/raid solution and with the drives you use in them. Maybe drobo is more likely to fail than the others or something by unfortunate design (and with droboshare, I could believe the fs corruption), but they all have the potential to fail in some way. (You're also talking to someone that's had more SSDs than hard drives die on her in the past six months...) When I was shopping around for drobo alternatives (back when I couldn't stomach the price just yet to buy one and I was getting a bit sick of my hacked-together raid in one of my computers), product reviews and blog entries read exactly like what I see here with the drobo being hit or miss. There were people that were all "DO NOT BUY!!" because they lost all their data next to the people just gushing over how much they liked theirs cause it was working like a charm. This is a tough market, because people don't want to lose their data, and when (not if...) they do they get quite pissed. It's really up to you to determine your needs and to find a device or twenty that meets them. I rather like the drobo because it's zero maintenance. I don't trust my data to it, I only trust it to keep working when a drive has failed. But that's about all I can expect from any such device. The whole market is pretty much hit or miss for people - it's a hit until it misses, then all you can think about is how it missed.

jwr 16y ago

Well, in my case the failures are obvious and objectively present. You can't really discuss expectations if your device just lost all your data due to filesystem corruption. You don't discuss "infallibility" if your device tells you: Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806282 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device SCSI error : <2 0 0 0> return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105544 HFS+-fs: WARN: Turning journaling back on even though Journalling was not on at mount. HFS+-fs: WARN: We may be setting the Journal bit on an unjournalled filesystem but it is OK. So please don't soften the issue — it fails. It failed for me multiple times already and I expect it to fail again. I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first one — but then, what's the point?

Dirt_McGirt 16y ago
> I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first one — but then, what's the point? RAID is _not_ a backup. If you don't understand this, you'll never be satisfied with any RAIDish products.
- andrewvc 16y ago
  True. RAID is about reliability and performance, and it seems the Drobo isn't winning points there either.
- bradleyland 16y ago
  It's true that RAID is not a backup, but backup strategies are rarely any good if they back up data "instantly", which is what redundancy provides. So you're stuck with a catch 22. If you back up instantly (without versioning), you may backup bad data. Boooo! If you backup, say, daily, you still stand to lose a days work when your array fails. Boooo! RAID should increase reliability, not decrease it. Any RAID solution that results in a net increase in data loss is not a good solution.
  - mason55 16y ago
    This is why I love Time Machine
  - silencio 16y ago
    That's a catch 22 that can be minimized or even avoided altogether. My main drobo backup is automatically versioned and backed up every 12 hours (to a single external drive, since I don't need to back up everything on my drobo). I've got older backups dating from like a week (work-related) to half a year or more old (for the important docs that don't change that I should keep around regardless...like old accounting/tax stuff) stashed around my home, online, and in a safe deposit box at my bank. And of course occasionally I test whether or not my backup is actually backing up the things I want and that I can successfully restore from it. If I back up bad data, I have older but good data to recover from. If my drobo catastrophically fails, at the worst I've lost data that is probably not going to be difficult to replicate/replace because of how new it is. I don't have to start ripping my hair out at the idea of having lost an incredible amount of data ranging from irreplaceable photos of my life to work and more. In the ideal case, raid should increase reliability, and they do, only for one definition of reliability. But freak accidents and poor design happen, and it's silly to rely only on a raid for reliability.

loewenskind 16y ago

If the experience is so hit or miss that speaks against trying your luck, no?

silencio 16y ago
Failure is inevitable and it is only a matter of time until it happens. You're going to be finding the same issues with any other nas/raid solution and with the drives you use in them. Maybe drobo is more likely to fail than the others or something by unfortunate design (and with droboshare, I could believe the fs corruption), but they all have the potential to fail in some way. (You're also talking to someone that's had more SSDs than hard drives die on her in the past six months...) When I was shopping around for drobo alternatives (back when I couldn't stomach the price just yet to buy one and I was getting a bit sick of my hacked-together raid in one of my computers), product reviews and blog entries read exactly like what I see here with the drobo being hit or miss. There were people that were all "DO NOT BUY!!" because they lost all their data next to the people just gushing over how much they liked theirs cause it was working like a charm. This is a tough market, because people don't want to lose their data, and when (not if...) they do they get quite pissed. It's really up to you to determine your needs and to find a device or twenty that meets them. I rather like the drobo because it's zero maintenance. I don't trust my data to it, I only trust it to keep working when a drive has failed. But that's about all I can expect from any such device. The whole market is pretty much hit or miss for people - it's a hit until it misses, then all you can think about is how it missed.