Warm/Hot Drobo 5N Network Attached Storage Array DRDS4A21 $469.99

If you have had good experiences with Drobo in the past, then please by all means feel free to jump on this deal.

I bought this thing a couple of years ago, and I have to say that I was let down in nearly every aspect of it. Besides the cheap build quality, you'll also find that the software controlling the hardware on the NAS itself to be buggy at best. Random times it would "lose" a drive, and begin rebuilding the volume (which can take days). The hard drives aren't locked into place, they just click in with a cheap plastic notch which most of the time you won't be able to "click" all the way.

You'll also notice how they don't advertise the data transfer rate. Yes it has a 1GB network connection, however it will never even come close to saturating that. The average data transfer speed I saw was somewhere around 24MB per second. Compare that with a Qnap, or a Thecus, which can deliver sustained speeds of nearly 100MB per second.

And for the best part, the REQUIRED software that you have to run on your computer just to see the network drive. No, you can't log into the Drobo over the network and configure it the way you want to (like any cheap router), you have to install their crap-ware, and keep it installed just to see the drive. And let me tell you if there was an argument between Drobo's software and iTunes for who's software was worse, I'm not sure which one would win. I was running Windows 7 FWIW.....

There is one area that I do have to say worked quite well. The blue lights at the bottom that tell you how much storage capacity you have used seem to work pretty well. Because hey, that's whats important in a NAS :rolleyes:

My advice, save your money for a little while longer, get a Qnap, or build your own. Hell, if I can do it, so can anyone else, and Hardware Raid cards aren't as expensive as this thing.
 
I have limited experience with Drobo. I have two units.

First unit is a B1200i w/ 12 4TB drives & dual disk redundancy. Connected via dual iSCSI to a direct attached server. Writes seem to max out around 800-1200MB of data per second on sequential read/writes from the server which has 4 10k SAS2 disks in a RAID 10. Copying data between LUNs is very slow though to the point where I would call the performance poor. It is primarily being used for the iSCSI connections so this doesn't have a negative effect on my end, but I wasn't pleased with the local disk performance. Again, limited time with it and really haven't fully tested it yet. The 1200 series has redundant components which is nice, but the price is in the $10k neighborhood for an empty shelf.

The other Drobo is a B800i filled with 3TB in a dual disk redundant format. This one has lesser quality components and performance seems to max out at around 200 MB per second via a single iSCSI connection to a similar RAID 10 configuration as above.

For comparison I have a 12TB Buffalo TerraStation and it's OK if you're looking for cheap storage with some enterprise features built-in.

And I have a Synology NAS which is pretty neat. It has a lot of useful plugins for corporate and personal use. It also has the best GUI which is essentially a Linux distro which means via SSH you can double the NAS as a server.

If you're looking for a platform to use as a home unit that would compete with the Drobo in this I'd recommend looking at Synology purely from a platform standpoint. NAS speeds are acceptable and the software brings the product together. A comparable unit to this Drobo would be a DS413 or 513.
 
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Does this thing not come with any harddrives? Why wouldn't you just get a cheap combo from Newegg or Amazon and use an OS like FreeNAS?
 
Never liked these. You don't need many harddrives anymore. Two 4TB drives in any of the less expensive simple RAID NAS you see on Amazon all the time for $100 is plenty of storage capacity IMO.
 
drobo = Overpriced, well-marketed crap that ultimately fails because transfer rates are too damn slow, regardless of model.
 
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