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| Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 | 
 enlarge | Brand: Data Robotics
Category: CE
List Price: $459.95
Buy New: $349.99
You Save: $109.96 (24%)
New (4)
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 316
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 11.5
Dimensions (in): 11 x 15.5 x 12.8
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: 900-00002-002
Model: 900-00002-002
UPC: 094922723819
EAN: 0094922723819
ASIN: B000PDLZ1A
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. Drobo is the first fully automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.Avoid the hassles associated with managing multiple external hard drives or managing the complexities of RAID. Attach Drobo to your Mac or PC and let it manage your storage so you don't have to.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Runs too hot. Not the machine it should be. Drobo bad. October 1, 2008
This machine is only worth it if you run new MacOS or, I believe, Vista. Will NOT
act as a single large partition otherwise. It'll make two small ones.
Also, do not buy it from NewEgg. Their RMA policies blow.
Unreliable product sold by not trustworthy people - think twice before you buy! September 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've reviewed it a while back, but now I have to revise my original rating and review. I strongly advice you to think twice, before you make your purchase, as I am now sitting in the mess of trying to recover my data! The company making Drobo refused to offer any support.
[Latest update 09/27/2008] DROBO CRASHED AND I LOST MY DATA!
They lied about Linux support on their web site. Someone got Linux working with this device, and they started putting up Linux "Support" on their product web site. The truth is: THEY DO NOT SUPPORT LINUX AND REFUSE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT FOR PROBLEMS.
The worse thing is that they don't provide support for Linux. I am extremely disappointed because they advertise Linux support on their web site, but when problems appear, they shied away and told me they don't "officially" support Linux. They sent me to their "community" web site filled with advertisement, where I finally learned the Linux support is "experimental" at the moment. Now I am on my own.
I felt I was cheated. They are not trustworthy. Now they don't even want to take that thing back! So my advice - think twice before you buy this product, I would not trust what they put up on their web site.
[Original review]
This is an interesting product, which is really easy to use. I have not got a chance to try out the recovery feature, but from what I've read so far, I would expect it to work as advertised. I've considered building a RAID 5 array myself, but with the amount of work involved, I have always hesitated. This product solved this problem, although the downside is the price tag and being dependent on their proprietary data format. I guess if my Drobo fails, I'd have to buy another one immediately.
I got the USB version, so far I am getting around 10-20MB/sec throughput. It's quite low, but good enough for my purpose as mass storage primarily.
Another issue I have had was with the fan, when it on it's quite noisy. This happens after I've accessed the drobo for a while. I've not observed a lot of heat even when the disk has been active for a while. Another nice thing is that the disk goes to standby after being idle for a while, so this is good for the disks' lifespan.
The spin up time I've seen is around 10-20sec, I guess it's also dependent on the disks I am using.
Overall, this is a useful product that suites my needs. For me, the downsides are the price tag and the fan noise. 4-star is the best I could think of for now.
 It does what it says on the product description, but ... September 11, 2008
I've had my Drobo for about a month now, and the product does work as described. It is as easy to use as shown on the videos on the product website and here at Amazon. It does work with any size drives you may have, and you can grow how much capacity it holds by just replacing your smallest drive with another of a bigger capacity. It simply works.
But they left out that it can be slower than other external drives you may have had in the past. It is slower than most other external drives when you're just copying files to and from it.
When you replace a broken drive for another, or when you add capacity to the unit, the Drobo will let you access your data while it prepares your new drive in the background, but this slows down the unit even more.
I don't recommend the Drobo to the impatient nor to people working in AV production. It is great as a backup drive, because you can grow its capacity easily and relatively inexpensively. In fact, as disk drives grow in size and drop in price month after month, the relative cost of growing its capacity will just get better.
Because of its ease of use and because it actually does work as expected, I give it my recommendation and 4 stars. I just wish it had a bit more pep to it.
Does as advertised September 4, 2008
Using this for video backup only. 2.7 TB of usable space (4 Western Digital 1TB drives). Have not had a problem in 2 months of heavy use. Easy to use and upgrade (started with 2 TB and then added 2 more drives later). There is one weird thing it does though and that is whenever I turn on my Mac and the Drobo, I get the "unrecognized disc" message with the dialog box to "initialize or cancel" choices. Of course I always click cancel and it comes up normally, but damn that is a scary dialog to come up every time. What if someone else hits "initialize or I do it by accident? I hope it at least asks "do you want to erase all your data?", but I've been too scared to even go that far. Other than that, no complaints.
 BUYER BEWARE!!!! UNDERSTAND WHAT RISKS THERE ARE!!! September 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
MAJOR CONCERNS YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF BEFORE YOU BUY!
***** Drive rebuilds can take 2 to 5 days ******
***** Drive expansions can take 2 to 5 days (same process) ****
DURING REBUILD OR EXPANSION IF ANOTHER DRIVE FAILS, ALL YOUR DATA IS LOST.
STORAGE CAPACITY IS INCORRECTLY REPORTED. THERE IS NO NEED TO INTRODUCE THIN PROVISIONING TO THE BASIC USERS.
What DROBO does tell you is that your data is protected. BUT they forget to add that if a drive fails, or if you need to expand it, can take a long long time to rebuild the data. LIKE 2-3 DAYS.......and longer as you go from 1.5TB Usable to 3TB Usable to 6TB useable once the new 2TB are available. Why do you care? It's very unlikely, however, if your two drives fail within 3-5 days during the rebuild process you will have complete data loss. DROBO recommends backing up your data, however, for most consumer users who just have USB2, it would take you about 1 1/2 days to do a full backup of 1.5TB of data. Even longer as you grow your data sets.
I will be testing the DROBO Firewire version to see if rebuilds are faster but I would be very uneasy waiting for 2-3 days for my data or my customer's data to be protected during the upgrading or rebuild process.
I think most consumer's who are purchasing a home RAID simplistic storage unit want to eliminate the need for daily backups.
So, in essence, this product is a good fit for people who have large storage requirements, aren't too technical, and want to protect their data from a common drive failure. (and are OK that during the 3-5 days rebuild window they can be in big trouble) REBUILD and EXPANSION times are way too long to risk that amount of data; especially if it's photos, videos, important data, etc....
Maybe the simplistic solution would be to run two DROBO units side by side and to get involved with differential backups using a simple backup to disk software.
I hope this helps
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