Drobo: The Best Mac Home Backup System Ever.

I don’t know anything about RAID or networking hard drives or SATA this or that, but I know that DROBO has worked rock solid for our small office for six months. Adding a hard drive was drop dead simple. Didn’t even have to shut off DROBO. Just opened the door, added a couple of new hard drives, and it was done. DROBO did the rest. All these so-called solutions that require RAID set up are more complicated to set up and manage, often requiring someone with IT knowledge (and hourly rates), and they ALL fail at one point or another. We just wanted to back up files and DROBO sure does that.

Drobo has great PR but the slow speed and unreliable recovery system makes it a clear loser against any SATA single or multiple drive hot swap backup system.

With a SATA system backup is 20x faster and the price is usually less. Drobo sounds great to the uninformed but anyone with large files will scream once the experience how slow the transfer rates are

I have a drobo and it will soon become a backup to time machine and that is all. I had stored photographs on the machine and it recently began telling me thru the drobo dashboard app that I was low on space which was curious given there were 4 1tb hd inside so I waited while it began rebuilding the drives to save the info but it did not tell me a drive was bad. The next day it began flashing green and orange and said a drive was bad then it sat there: no movement or whirring of drives . It said red condition which means “it can’t protect you from another hard drive failure. I contacted support who got back to me on my cell and said just replace the bad drive. The problem is it is supposed to flash red for the drive that is bad but it did not so. With great trepidation I turned off drobo which must be done very carefully thru the drobo dashboard app and lo and behold the third drive down had a flashing red light. So, I ran to the store and got another 1tb drive slid it in the slot and it began rebuilding.  By the way I had to reseat all the drives to get DROBO to start rebuilding because when I first turned it on it started to mount then flashed the red I can’t start lights. So , I dismounted every drive but reseated them in the same slot and it worked ...my chest pain is better now… The bottom drive in the drobo woud not eject , who knows, so when I get the data transferred I will send it back for repair.The issue during the rebuild is that your info IS available but it” cannot protect you from a single hard drive failure meaning if another drive fails during the rebuild your are hosed. If you transfer data from the rebuilding drobo the reallocation process which the drobe app keeps you up to date on takes 130 HOURS…which I thought was a mistake but it did take as long as 80 hours for the drobo to rebuild that 2 terabytes of data all the while you get to stare at a red warning: YOUR’E DATA IS NOT SAFE…. It did work and my data is ok but this is the second drive failure since Nov and I’ve checked both drives with software and they work fine.
By the way, I HAD a drobo share which never mounted a drobo on my desktop-Leopard despite restarts , forum postings etc.
My newest backup scheme is a Rocketraid card-230mbps transfers using a PM box of 8 drives in RAID 6 which will tolerate 2 drive failures and still save your data and so much faster, this combined with bucket explorer and amazon s3 which recently lowered it’s storage prices. check AMUG’s reviews of these raid setups and pm boxes. I’m not a super geek but it really is simple to configure…. DROBO= good concept but dangerous and scary.

ReadyNAS is no end-all-be-all, either. It’s nice as inexpensive NAS boxes go. Try a hot swap hard drive upgrade. NO can do. Configuration? It’s a bear to set up and manage, certainly not for the typical Mac user who wants a plug-in-and-play backup system. Drobo seems fine for that.

Our company used those crappy ReadyNAS boxes for a year before finally ditching them. Half the time they didn’t work, the other half they were being swapped out. NOT a best buy, by any means. We put in a single DROBO late last year and it’s worked flawlessly since. Let’s see.. hmmm. ReadyNAS was never ready, Drobo has always worked. Hmmmm. Which to choose.

I agree with Dan: Drobo is slow and overpriced. I’d add that despite the redundancy, it’s unreliable. I’ve read many reports of people who have lost all of their backups after a firmware upgrade.

The reliable NAS to get these days is the Netgear (formerly Infrant) ReadyNAS Duo.