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Data Robotics DroboPro 8-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/iSCSI Storage Array DRPR1A21
Availability:
In Stock
Price:
$1,505.99
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| Part No: | B0026NCWAU |
| Manufacturer: | Data Robotics |
| MFG Part: | DRPR1A21 |
| Customer Rating: | 3.0 / 5.0 |
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** To view our special discounted price add the item to your cart **
- Up to 8 disks of instant expansion
- Single or dual disk redundancy
- Triple Interface - iSCSI (Gigabit Ethernet), FireWire 800 (400 compatible) and Hi-Speed USB 2.0
- Up to 16 x 16TB Smart Volumes
- BeyondRAID technology
Engineered to be both simple and scalable, the revolutionary BeyondRAID technology incorporated into DroboPro frees businesses of making the difficult and confining choices commonly associated with storage management. Why trade simplicity for safety, ...
| DO NOT BUY | 2010-08-13 | 1 / 5 |
| I want to start by saying that I had heard many favorable things about Drobo and their "beyond RAID" technology.
Honestly, it's not terrible, but my experience overall made me return the unit at the end of the following day.
Here is why.
I was installing this as an iSCSI target. I have a lot of experience with iSCSI on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Windows.
The DroboPro behaves like NO OTHER iSCSI target I have EVER worked with. The DroboDashboard software couldn't find it on our network, ever.
Open-iSCSI running on Debian Linux found it without issue though after I had preconfigured it over Firewire.
Here's where the real headaches started. DroboPro does not "officially" support more than 2TB LUNs formatted with EXT3, no matter what disks you use.
DroboPro doesn't support anything other than HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, and "unofficially" EXT3.
Never mind that an iSCSI target should be completely indifferent about what the filesystem used on it is, nor should it particularly care what size the LUN is.
DroboPro fails this point so badly it's disastrous. I tried 16TB with EXT4, it appeared to work until I went to actually mount the filesystem and then I get tons of iSCSI errors and eventually had to kill the process.
These are likely limitations brought on by their fake-raid. It's a goofy way of managing an array, you don't actually get any control over it.
Instead you decide what size your LUNs will be - they'll all be that size. Then "feed it disks".
So now having discovered this the hard way after hours of troubleshooting iSCSI failures caused by this thing not understanding what I felt was pretty basic task [1 LUN, 16TB, EXT4] I come to find that the problems are all caused by Drobo's lack of functionality as a block device.
Do not purchase any Drobo equipment if you want your data to be safe. In their documentation they constantly stress the need for backups... wonder why.
This might be fine for the Mac weenie as a large timecapule (I've heard bad things in this regard too though!) but for a real production SAN... RUN the other direction.
While looking for solutions to my problems with this I came across a bunch of people who had various issues related to DroboPro/Elite iSCSI reliability across pretty much all platforms used with it - Linux, VMware (ESX/ESXi), Windows, Mac. Nearly all of the complaints were about slow I/O under heavy load or complete disconnects seemingly at random.
You'll be better off with a SansDigital EliteRaid iSCSI -- TRUST me. They do everything from the $200 two drive portable unit all the way up to "Enterprise grade" 50 drive RAID6/60 monster for $60K.
This review was written immediately after finally giving up on the product and returning it to - as such it may be a little confusing and sound frustrated.
I hope this saves someone else from a similar experience.
I do love 's return policy though! |
| When it worked, it was great.When it died.... | 2010-06-17 | 1 / 5 |
| It worked perfectly for about two months then all the drive lights went red. No access via iscsi or their dashboard. Call tech support and they open a case and step me through some very basic diagnostics. It still will not boot with drives in it. Now the case has to go to tier 2 support. The ETA for a response from them is 48 hours.
So after waiting the two days an email arrives asking me to boot it in their equivalent to Safe Mode. The Drobopro still just displays red lights, so I email them back the results. No response after two hours so I call. They tell me my tech support person has gone home for the day and will email me in the morning.... I tell the tech that is not acceptable so he has the other tier 2 tech look over my case and call me back. Our conversation lasted about five minutes with him telling me that it will need to go to tier 3 tech support. I ask how many tiers are there? He responds 3, so it sounds like I might be getting somewhere. My next question is: When will I hear from them? He responds that although there is more than one person in tier 3, they do handle cases in the order they are received and sometimes these cases take time to resolve so he has no idea when they will be in contact with me. I ask if it will be this week, this month? Is there an average response time? He has no idea. So here I wait with a broken Drobopro with four 2TB drives in it. |
| You do not have one, get one...
The ones that cannot get it to work, are still trying to complain about
lazer disks and VCR formats. Follow the directions, works great.
Right out of Box..... get one, it Rocks . . . works as advertised |
| Unbelievably SLOW! | 2010-05-22 | 1 / 5 |
| On paper the Drobo Pro is great, an 8-bay raid box that can take care of it self. In reality however, it's not very good. I wasn't expecting blazing fast speed, but I wasn't ready for this. Connected via Fire Wire 800 my Drobo managed to sustain a 30mbps write speed (Fire Wire 800 is capable of 800mbps), and when you have over 6TB (yes, terabytes) of data to backup this kind of speed is unacceptable. I'm a video pro who needs lots of storage space and lots of speed, however I don't need all of my old footage on my super fast edit raid, hence the Drobo, lots of space and redundancy to protect my data. However, it took my Drobo several days to complete the backup and finish what it calls "Data protection", it's just too slow, and I can't even play back video files. Overall I'm deeply unsatisfied with the Drobo. If you are looking for an 8-bay storage device I would suggest you buy the Areca ARC-5040 Raid Box. Like the Drobo pro it has 8-bays, and it has a host of advanced features that enable you to have it grow over time like the Drobo. However the Areca has dedicated hardware raid built into it, so it can perform like a real raid should, it's fast, easy to use, and costs less than the Drobo Pro.
Don't buy the Drobo Pro, save some money and buy a better product at the same time, get the Areca ARC-5040 and you won't be sorry.
P.S. The ARC-5040 isn't currently available on (they don't sell it), look at NewEgg, they have it in stock. |
| Trouble free storage | 2010-04-20 | 5 / 5 |
| | I've owned two of these devices for more than 6 months now, and they've given me trouble free expansion of my storage. I bought the 8 drive models on the theory that it will save me money being able to buy cheapest drives, and give me maximum expandibility. For example, right now its nearly 2x as expensive to buy a 2GB drive as a 1.5GB drive, so I can load up on cheaper drives and wait for the more expensive ones to come down in price. I also recovered some drives from old computers I had lying around and other dead equipment, so I have drives ranging from 300GB up to 1.5 TB, and everywhere in between, and have nearly run out of slots as it is. With about 14 drives in use, I've had two die over that time, so the natural attrition will probably allow me to never outgrow them. I have been using them with a Mac Mini being my file server. Highly recommended. |
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