To Drobo or Not to Drobo: That is the Question
October 5, 2011 11:36 AM   Subscribe

Talk to me about Drobo.

I need a backup system for my three macs. I want something that is plug-and-play, requires little fiddling with, and which works well with OS X Lion and Time Machine.

In other words, I want something that I can plug into my router, which my three OS X Lion computers will recognize and which will work with Time Machine in order to facilitate easy backups.

Things I am not interested in: RAID, arcane command-line interfaces, bad documentation, crappy support, etc.

I think that Drobo offers everything I am looking for (and likely more) with none of what I am not looking for.

I am looking to have 2TB of storage in the Drobo device, though I understand storage can be expanded as necessary.

I am less concerned about price here than I am about its features.

What are your thoughts given the above?

Thanks!
posted by dfriedman to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I do not like my Drobo. It has proven hard to set up, as it won't talk to my old OS X 10.5 server but will talk to Win XP running in VMWare, so I have to run a VM just to configure and control it. It does talk to a 10.6 machine, though.

I also stuffed it full of 2 TB disks to hold backups of my large data set collection, and it keeps reporting drive failures which I am convinced are due to drive overheating as the drives work fine elsewhere and feel very hot when I pull them from the Drobo. There isn't much circulation in there. In addition, I am on my third as the first one died within 10 minutes of arrival and the second died the same way as the original power supply was bad and they had me keep it initially.

I am a computer science professor, and other professors I know have had problems as well. Perhaps we are too demanding of them, and a more casual use wouldn't produce any problems. One of my non-professor friends has one, and hasn't had any problems with it. When it works it is pretty easy to use.
posted by procrastination at 11:47 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]


I backup a household of 4 macs to a mac mini with a drobo attached. It has been basically no problem, no drive failures over the last 2 years. I suggest going with low speed drives for it (5400rpm) as they will generally run cooler and have a lower failure rate on average.

The device has been as plug and play as they come. The biggest advantage the drobo brings is in the event of a disk failure you can replace it and it will rebuild all by itself. If you need more space, pop out the smallest drive from a healthy array and put the new larger drive in and let it rebuild. Rebuilding may take a while but it's basically user intervention free.

Our household is 100% lion, but I have run it through Leopard and Snow Leopard.
posted by iamabot at 12:12 PM on October 5, 2011


One addition, while you can almost certainly use it as a time machine disk off of the airport, you might be happier using it off of one of the actual machines because of the drobo dashboard tools that will alert you if there is a problem with the device.

The counter to this is the Drobo FS, which you can hang off of one of the gig ports on your router.

If you do go this route and only need 2TB of storage in aggregate, go with 4 or 5 1tb WD green drives that spin slow and you'll be fine.
posted by iamabot at 12:20 PM on October 5, 2011


I have a Drobo that I've used quite a bit on both Windows and the Mac, and have previously been positive about here on AskMe. Unfortunately I ran into a pretty major disk failure issue where it would crash constantly, that took me serious serious clever IT-ness to fix. We're talking dismantling things, finding old cords, soldering ports I didn't have onto the system board, pirating a ton of disk repair apps, and letting it run for literally over a week trying to repair it. It really was a mess.

Now, having different hardware myself would have let me avoid much of that, yes, and much of the insanity of the details is not Drobo's fault, but my point is that when it DOES fail, because of the cleverness of how it works and the rarity of it, it can be an insane thing to repair. And for that reason, I have to vote against it.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad product otherwise. if you're careful to only use it as a backup, and have it as primary storage for NOTHING, it's likely fine. Hell, I still use it, but it's just one of three places minimum that my key files exist, and I think three is the absolute minimum to really feel safe. (I have about 6 TB of media that lives on regular disks, which are constantly updated offsite to crashplan, and which I occasionally sync with an xcopy script to the Drobo.)
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 12:29 PM on October 5, 2011


I have experience with a couple of previous generations of Drobos. Not the currently shipping ones. One has been in operation everyday for backups for a group of 6 iMacs and an Xserve in a small business since 2008. "Proven hard to set up" has not been my experience. It was used with 10.5 server previously, and is now being used on a 10.6 server. It has been amazingly solid for a consumer level product. If I had to replace it once a year, it might still be cheaper than managing a complicated raid setup. Native software would be nice, but you actually look at it so rarely I can't imagine anyone having a problem with it. I do not know how well it will work with a router, I have not used one in that capacity.

In general, people seem to be divided about Drobos. Early on they _may_ have had some quality issues. It has seemed to me that they get a lot of the same sorts of criticisms that companies get when they make something better for the layman. Just because someone might want to spend days rebuilding a raid volume does not mean everyone should.

I think the way to approach them is as an appliance, and not putting all your eggs in one basket is prudent advice with any backup system.

Let us know what you end up deciding, and how it works out.
posted by -t at 12:42 PM on October 5, 2011


I worked with a Drobo Pro and Drobo Elite in a video production environment. I do not recommend them for any mission-critical storage. The Drobos are relatively easy to set up and the included software is intuitive, but we had numerous problems with drive failures, errors and random unmounting & mounting (even during file transfers!) Also if you swap out a hard drive, the Drobo will need to reorganize the contents of the drives, which can take up to 48 hours. That's a long time to not be able to write anything to the drives. Look into other storage options.
posted by allseeingabstract at 1:05 PM on October 5, 2011


I used the first generation drobo, despite having a healthy array, still lost some data and when it wasn't busy losing data on me, it was slow. Like 11MB/s slow. I got rid of it in a month.

I'd say best bang for buck in terms of performance would be a Linux box with a mdadm array (that's what I've got now and I could not be happier) but you say you don't want a techy solution, so go with QNAP or Synology, which is a more user friendly interface to pretty much the same thing.

However, I'm curious as to why you want to spend all this money on some RAID NAS device. Buy a 3TB and be done with it. Buy a second 3TB drive if you want two backups. If it must be accessible over the network, share it from one of your macs. Or buy one of the time capsule things apple makes just for this purpose. Or buy an old used Mac Mini and a USB enclosure and have the Mini act as a file server. All of these options would be cheaper than a Drobo and in my experience, significantly faster.
posted by Brian Puccio at 1:16 PM on October 5, 2011


Response by poster: Buy a second 3TB drive if you want two backups. If it must be accessible over the network, share it from one of your macs.

Really dumb question. Are you saying that you can plug an external hard drive into one Mac and connect Time Machine on a second or third Mac to that drive via the first Mac? If that's correct, then, yeah, I don't see why I would need a NAS device. I assumed that the only way to do this was via the router.
posted by dfriedman at 1:29 PM on October 5, 2011


we had numerous problems with drive failures, errors and random unmounting & mounting (even during file transfers!)

Yeah. Still, to reiterate my above, I truly don't think it is necessarily any more error-prone than any other solution, it's just that when it fails, you can't use any of the many standard methods to fix it.

Also if you swap out a hard drive, the Drobo will need to reorganize the contents of the drives, which can take up to 48 hours. That's a long time to not be able to write anything to the drives.

In my experience, while the fancy ones may be better, that's not how it works. You can use it just fine while its rebuilding. I've been concerned as to what happens if another drive fails while that is running, but it keeps working as normal in the interim, and you'd never know it was in rebuild unless you look at the blinking lights.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 1:31 PM on October 5, 2011


Best answer:
Really dumb question. Are you saying that you can plug an external hard drive into one Mac and connect Time Machine on a second or third Mac to that drive via the first Mac? If that's correct, then, yeah, I don't see why I would need a NAS device. I assumed that the only way to do this was via the router.
Sure. Here's a detailed writeup, complete with screenshots.. There's many other references to this solution on the internet. Given the cost of cheap USB hard drives and your lack of a need for a more sophisticated solution beyond 2-3 TB of dumb storage, it looks like you can easily solve this problem for much less money and aggravation than a Drobo.
posted by Brian Puccio at 6:06 PM on October 6, 2011


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