Drobo FS DRDS2A31 5-Bay NAS Enclosure

Got my Drobo FS for the house as I have built up a large collection ok pics and edited home movies of my children growing up. I've spent much more than this on the various digi cameras and my time so I decided to make an investment in the well used and praised Drobo. Packaging is good and the instructions are in good english; the initial setup took less then 15 mins and that includes reading the manual as I went along. There are lots of support videos on the Drobo website and youtube too So it's a good idea to watch these before yours gets delivered.
It's not made by Apple but the philosophy in ease of use is very similar (more expensive than it's rivals but far superior in function).
The Drobo FS is as easy as it gets, you just plug it in to your network with the supplied ethernet cable (no USB, Firewire) and add up to 5 Hard Drives. They can be any capacity or speed or by any manufacturer, the only stipulation is that they must have SATA connection, not the old IDE type.
I populated my Drobo with a collection of old drives from various storage devices I had accumulated over the years And bought a new 2TB drive too.
The set up of mine is as follows: 2TB, 1TB, 500GB, 320GB. This gives me 1.6TB of usable storage, the rest is used by the Drobo to perform it's magic.
The magic is that, if one of your drives becomes unstable (the system will tell you this) all you have to do is pull it out without doing anything else before or after and when you get a chance, replace it with another drive.
It's as simple as that. You can even configure it to keep your data safe if up to two drives fail at the same time. Tb drives a getting cheaper all the time now, so I think the Drobo is a fantastic investment because you can keep adding to it, discarding drives only when they physically breakdown rather than when reaching their ¾ capacity.
It functions fairly quietly even though the back of it is taken up mainly by a massive fan to keep your drives from overheating. In fact, the size of the fan probably keeps the unit running quietly because it doesn't have to spin as fast to create a good airflow.
The software is simple enough, it's just very easy to create more partitions or delete them as necessary.
The speed of writing to the drive is very good and I can get an upload speed of 18MB/s from my iMac when transferring files to it.
The only issue I have with it is that the power supply is making the most horribly high pitched noise which is driving my crazy. I have emailed Support at Drobo and will wait until Monday to see how they propose to resolve this minor niggle, I'll update this posting accordingly.
The purchase of the Drobo was indirectly recommended to me by the many serious media professionals that I know use this device and swear by it.
Just checked my emails and I have a reply from Drobo asking for my contact info, presumably to send me a new unit.

The Concept

What a wonderful concept. I was sure that the Drobo FS would be the end to all my troubles with respect to backup of data. If a disc fails - or even two discs - the Drobo FS restores the data. What more could a computer user want? I was sold on the concept at an early point in the evolution of the Drobo. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before I bought one. The network solution seemed right for me. It had to be a Drobo FS.

Design, Construction and Operation

It is an attractive box with Apple Mac type appeal. Also relative to other backup systems the Drobo FS is relatively quiet when in operation. iDisc insertion and withdrawal is however less positive than I had hoped - a result of not incorporating trays for each drive into the design - and the rubber seal at the front has a tendency to detach.

The software is all that one wants when everything is working, but when problems arise the user is to a great extent in the dark.

The Purchase

Early January 2011 I purchased a Drobo FS and 5 Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB 5900rpm 32MB Cache 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives to populate the Drobo FS.

The Purpose

The purpose of the purchase was to facilitate Time Machine backups to a common storage unit from a Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 (PowerMac G5) system, a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac iMac, a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, and a 2GHz PowerPC G5 iMac.

The Technical

My Drobo FS, the PowerMac, the iMac and the 2.66GHz iMac are all connected to a GigaBit Ethernet LAN. A ZyXEL GS-105B 5 port Gigabit Unmanaged Desktop Switch connects through a CAT 5e cable to the GBit Ethernet port on a Vigor 2820 series ADSL modem/router. The computers connect to the ZyXEL switch using CAT 5e cables.

The Data

The PowerMac G5 desktop system is the only machine with any significant disc storage. It has 2x1TB internal discs, 2x5TB Sonnet Fusion D500P storage systems and a number of external firewire and USB2 drives. The real challenge to be faced by the Drobo was thus to produce a Time Machine backup from the PowerMac system. The desktop system runs under Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Before purchasing the Drobo FS, one of the Sonnet arrays was used seamlessly and trouble free for the TimeMachine backup of the PowerMac. The internal discs in the PowerMac are used only for applications. One internal disc is used as a bootable mirror of the other. It was my intention, once I got the Drobo/TimeMachine system to function properly to use one of the Sonnet arrays as a mirror of the other. The Drobo FS was thus to be a second line of defence against loss of data.

The Issue

The Drobo FS does not work with the situation I presented to it. Time Machine, my Power Mac G5 and system configuration, and a large volume of data do not integrate. All seems well as 1TB is backed up and as 2TB is backed up. However, as more and more data is added to the Time Machine backup the system stalls. I tried this repeatedly over 3 months and I have documented a journey through every route I could discover including three months contact and communication with Drobo Technical Support and I still have no resolution to this issue. I want this to work and that is why I have worked so hard to find a way to make it work. I did however eventually have to give up. This journey is documented on my own personal website. Anyone interested is welcome to read it on request.

At the same time Time Machine and Drobo are working seamlessly with smaller quantities of backup data from three other computers and DroboCopy and SuperDuper all get on with their own backups to Drobo without issue.

There is an issue and it may be configuration specific and it could be very specific or it may not be that specific.

Conclusion

I used my Drobo FS on a network with Apple Macintosh computers and so my conclusions are based on experience gained whilst working with that configuration of hardware and software.
I have also spent 40 years working with computers and so I expect that I could claim a high degree of computer literacy.

My experience with the Drobo FS combined with my knowledge of commercial requirements for backing storage would lead me to urge caution with respect to expectations about the utility of Drobo FS systems for even more demanding home applications. I feel that where there is a limited backup storage requirement from clients on a LAN the Drobo FS may satisfy requirements, but for users with large quantities of changing data, including media resources, it could be prudent to look elsewhere for a solution.

One of the claimed great attributes of a Drobo system is its potential expansion capability. Even if there were no issues with backup, however, there is certainly a potential issue of network speed and the transfer rate of TBs of data to and from the Drobo FS.

The concept is great but the implementation beyond the small domestic environment is in my opinion immature and limited. When issues arise diagnostic information is basic from the software provided.

It is perhaps interesting to read the range of opinions in the various forums and blogs on the Internet before making a purchase.

I bought this as a bomb proof NAS solution. It bricked itself on a firmware update from Drobo (using the automated update service) and lost all my data. Drobo Support unable to help.

Avoid like the plague.