View Comments TMUP 159: All About the Drobos »

1. @Victor,
   Great job. I'm impressed by your benchmarking. Most sites have confusing benchmarks. By analogy, most benchmarks seem like EPA gas ratings on cars: a test no one really understands reporting numbers that are nothing like what you get in practice. Showing real world examples of using Drobo is brilliant.

   Of course, I have a bias. I own a USB-only Drobo, now connected to a Droboshare, and a FireWire-Drobo connected to a Mac mini. I used to have external drives and also a Linux box stuffed with drives — just too much work. Drobo makes life sweeter.

   Comment by UserSpace — December 16, 2008 @ 8:41 pm

2. Dear Victor, I have had a new 2g Drobo for about three months and it has automatically un-mounted from my MacPro (OSX10.5.6). I have been contacting Drobo all during that time and they have upgraded my firmware to 1.3.0 and that has not helped. I asked to return the unti and they keep saying that it will work. I am very frustrated and have lost months of Time Machine backups, some of which I have needed. For the price, Drobo has NOT been a good buy for me!

   Comment by John Long — December 16, 2008 @ 9:15 pm

3. Well I hope they see this here and reply to you. I think that a good service experience is important. I have not had an opportunity to measure that, but if I do I'll report out on it honestly.

   Comment by typicalmacuser — December 16, 2008 @ 9:21 pm

4. @John Long – Have you had them replace the Firewire800 cable? The unit has changed cables recently. A bad cable could be the reason it is disconnecting.

   Comment by UserSpace — December 16, 2008 @ 9:55 pm

5. John Long,

   Sorry to hear that your experience with the Drobo has not been very good. We would definitely like to fix that. I have informed our tech support that you are still having problems with your drobo and they will be contacting you soon to help figure out and resolve the issue.

   Usha S.
   Data Robotics

   Comment by Usha S. — December 17, 2008 @ 5:55 pm

6. John Long, there you go man. I'm not at all surprised that Usha from Drobo would reply. Please contact them and I'm sure they will take care of you. Thanks Usha for being attentive to the blog and responding to John.

   Comment by typicalmacuser — December 17, 2008 @ 6:17 pm

7. John Long,

   Sorry to hear that your experience with the Drobo has not been very good. We would definitely like to fix that. I have already informed our technical support that you are having problems with your Drobo. They will be contacting you soon to help figure out and resolve the issue.

   ushekar
   Data Robotics

   Comment by ushekar — December 17, 2008 @ 6:23 pm

8. Sorry about the double post.

   Comment by ushekar — December 17, 2008 @ 6:25 pm

9. There you go John. I'm not surprised that Usha from Drobo is on here and wants to take care of your needs. Please contact them and let us know the ending. Thanks Usha for monitoring so that your customers get satisfaction.

   Comment by typicalmacuser — December 17, 2008 @ 6:45 pm

10. Excellent show Victor. I have been thinking about Drobo for a while now and with my ever expanding storage needs (they seem to double on an annual basis) Drobo looks like a good option. Need to budget it in for 2009 tech expenses. I'll be sure to mention Victor sent me when I do take the plunge.

    Thank you for all you do for the Mac community.

    Justin

    Comment by Justin Byrne — December 18, 2008 @ 9:53 am

11. Thanks Justin. I've wanted to do that show for a long time but needed the hardware. Glad you liked it and stay tuned for mre.

    Comment by typicalmacuser — December 18, 2008 @ 10:16 am

12. Great show Victor! I have had the First Gen USB Drobo for 3 months now. My setup is it's plugged into the Time Capsule. We have two Macbooks that access the data (music, pictures, videos) that way. So the Time Capsule does the Time Machine backups on the laptops whereas the Drobo that is plugged in allows us to share the data. This is synonymous to the Airport Extreme in lieu of Droboshare comment you made on your podcast.

    However, I am not sure this is a good long term solution. Reason being is that there is no Drobo Dashboard interface that allows monitoring of the drive. That's only available for direct connection or via Droboshare. So there is no proper way to put the Drobo into standby in order to unplug it from Time Capsule or the Airport Extreme. This can lead to data corruption of the file system. Also, the Drobo doesn't go into Standby when plugged into Time Capsule or the Airport Extreme (when not in use for a period of time). It does this only when directly connected to the Mac or Droboshare. Every so often (happened about 5 times to me), the Drobo does appear to go into Standby mode (during active use – so it's not really supposed to do this) and the only way to rectify the situation is to unplug it from the Time Capsule. I attribute this to perhaps how the Time Capsule (or an Airport Extreme) manages the disk activity for external USB drives. Perhaps there is some precedence/pausing that the Drobo may confuse as Standby, but nothing to then subsequently restart that data stream.

    So in my opinion, Droboshare connected to Time Capsule or an Airport Extreme are not good long term solutions. Right now, I am looking two possible options. One – get a Droboshare, to share the data from Drobo to the laptops. Two – get a Mac Mini with the Drobo plugged directly into it and share the Drobo that way. Any thoughts on one option verses the other? Looking for some more input before I incur the additional expense. I was really hoping to have it just work for me via the Time Capsule, but that method is starting to cause some frustration.

    Comment by dino360 — December 19, 2008 @ 7:53 am

13. Awesome update thanks for filling me (us) in. It was fun to do this show and to have the hardware to give it a proper once over.

    Comment by typicalmacuser — December 19, 2008 @ 10:25 am

14. Thanks Victor. Do you (or anyone reading this) have a recommendation (one way or the other) as to what you would do? Would you go laptops accessing Drobo via [Drobo + Droboshare] or via [Drobo + Mac Mini]?

    Comment by dino360 — December 19, 2008 @ 10:45 am

15. Well my experience has been that the DROBO has been pretty rugged around sudden unplugs from the wall etc. I hardly ever use the dashboard other than to see how much data I use but I see your point. I think the Drobo +Mac mini combo would be excellent (if you can afford it) as you could also use that as a functional media center plugged into a TV for example.

    Comment by typicalmacuser — December 20, 2008 @ 7:47 am

16. I have a 2nd Gen Drobo firmware 1.2.4. It is 4TB with about 450 GB available. Mac 10.5.6 I use it for my photography business with Aperture (most current version). I was storing all my pictures and Aperture Library on the Drobo. I noticed that it was taking longer and longer (10-30 minutes) to open the Library and then eventually it would not open (it had become corrupted). I rebuilt the library and I talked to Data Robotics about why I was having difficulties. Apple Disk Utility said that all three partitions on the unit were ok, but Data Robotics suggested I run Disk Warrior which I did and I also move the Aperture Library to my internal drive. Things seemed to be working fine.

    A couple days ok, I noticed in Aperture 'unsupported image format' appearing on a couple of images after they have been viewable for a couple of days in Aperture. I store all my images as referenced so they are not stored in the library structure. I attempted to open the original RAW file with Photoshop, Preview and got the message that the file was corrupted on both them for both images. I have nearly 70K images on Western Digital drives and have never had a corrupted image that would not open with Photoshop. Thus it appeared that the two image files were lost. I rebuilt the drive with Disk Warrior again and it seems as if I have recovered a workable RAW file for both pictures.

    Have others had to rebuild the Drobo partitions with Disk Warrior? If yes, how often are you doing it?

    Also what has been your experience with upgrading to 1.3 firmware? Was it straightforward or were there problems?
    Thanks,

    Comment by Steven — December 27, 2008 @ 12:23 pm

17. I have rebuilt the FW Drobo with Diskwarrior and it worked fine. Remember that when DW does it's magic some files may become corrupt. That may have been the cause of your Aperture problem. I'm so glad that I was able to use DW on the DROBO, cause I think I had messed something up badly. I have not done the upgrade to 1.3 yet so I don't know.

    Comment by typicalmacuser — December 27, 2008 @ 12:58 pm

18. Typical.

    Well, I had an additional 20+ RAW files corrupted on my Drobo. Fortunately, I had retained a copy on my 2TB WD drive and was able to replace them, but this is now the third major file corruption I have suffered with Drobo. I have lost drives in the past, but the Drobo story is very scary because it is individual files that are becoming corrupted randomly….and there is no easy way to monitor for this sort of behavior.

    I am going to download 1.3 and try to install, but Data Robotics and I will have a serious conversation on Monday. My business requires faithful reproduction and maintenance of my image files and in 5 years I have never experienced such a serious problem. Hope they have some good solid answers.

    DW did not corrupt these files as they went on after I last ran Drobo…and if DW is the solution as recommended by Drobo and it is corrupting other files.. tis not much of a solution.

    Steven

    Comment by Steven — December 27, 2008 @ 8:42 pm

19. Yes please keep us informed of the outcome. As you know I like to report on the good, bad and ugly. This sounds ugly.

    Comment by typicalmacuser — December 27, 2008 @ 9:57 pm

20. I have upgraded to firmware 1.3 on both of my 2nd Gen Drobo. Nothing new to report. Starting January 1, I move all my new work to the second Drobo.

    Comment by Steven — December 28, 2008 @ 2:20 pm

21. I have upgraded to firmware 1.3 on both of my 2nd Gen Drobo. Nothing new to report. Starting January 1, I move all my new work to the second Drobo.

    Comment by Steven — December 28, 2008 @ 9:20 pm

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