Drobo's

[Jay A. Kelley]

I'm looking into using Drobo's as my copying back up system for downloading on set. Has anyone any experience with these units? I'm planning on using my Macbook pro and conecting the drobo via firewire 800. I'd be interested to know if of your experiences with this system good or bad?

[Martin Weiss]

I have a first gen Drobo. They are allright, but only feel 99% secure. I'd still make a backup on tape.

http://www.google.no/search?hl=no&client=firefox-a&hs=Jgx&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=site%3Areduser.net+drobo&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

[Scott Brown]

Hi Martin

We have a Drobo Pro with 8 x 2TB WD Green drives attached to our edit suite and I have to say it has been one of the best purchases we've made. We use this to backup our current edit projects and also to act as a holding area for material that has to be archived.

You can set the Drobo up to backup overnight and it'll e-mail you once complete. You sleep and the Drobo works :o) We also have the Drobo set up as a Time Machine unit for our primary drive.

We archive onto hard drives and we're just starting to also backup onto LTO tape - this way should we lose a drive then we have the LTO to fall back on. All LTO tapes are stored off site for added security.

Hope this helps in making your decision.

Best wishes

Scott

[Scott Brown]

Hi again Martin

One negative with the Drobo units is their speed...they are NOT fast, so perhaps for on set use they may not be the best option for you.

Drobo have some faster units shipping now with e-sata so these may be up to the task!

Scott

[joe hedge]

I'm looking into using Drobo's as my copying back up system for downloading on set. Has anyone any experience with these units? I'm planning on using my Macbook pro and conecting the drobo via firewire 800. I'd be interested to know if of your experiences with this system good or bad?

One problem with that is both the Drobo and the Red drive/card reader will be on the same system bus. Ideally for on-set backups with a MBP you're connecting the backup drives to an eSata card using the express34 slot. Also you (or someone) will need to transcode, and the speed of the Drobo might slow you down there as well.

Also Red bit rates are going nowhere but up with the release of Epic and 5K resolution...FW800 will probably not be real great for that...

[Tom.Wong]

there IS a esata model for drobo, and red station should solve a lot of cf reading issues, plus there are express card cf readers as well. for the drobo users, how are the read and write speeds? I know the earlier models were very slow, produced a lot of heat and noise. Also are the rebuild times any faster? I've heard of rebuild times up to 3 days...

[Joshua O. Miller]

I use a Drobo S (esata) for editing and it works great. no issues. We still do hard drive and off site tape backups though.

[Joseph Q. Simpkins]

I use a Drobo S (esata) for editing and it works great. no issues. We still do hard drive and off site tape backups though.
Joshua, so you use this as your raid array for your editing? Just asking because I'm trying to decide on an internal array off raid card/express slot or external esata such as Drobo.

[James Liu]

you can check out Areca 5040 too. Its a main drobo competitor product but with USB3.0 too

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151070&cm_re=5040-_-16-151-070-_-Product

[Mark L. Pederson]

I'm looking into using Drobo's as my copying back up system for downloading on set. Has anyone any experience with these units? I'm planning on using my Macbook pro and conecting the drobo via firewire 800. I'd be interested to know if of your experiences with this system good or bad?

Tested. Two thumbs down. Good luck with that.

[christopher witzke]

I had a drobo.... Did not work as well as hoped. I now hav an OWC 4 bay at raid5 and love it.

[Mark L. Pederson]

I had a drobo.... Did not work as well as hoped. I now hav an OWC 4 bay at raid5 and love it.

I have a ton of eSata Wiebetech 4 bays - Raid model and JBOD model - love 'em.

[David Battistella]

DROBO was named incorrectly. It should have been called SLOWBO. :)

I never lost any data, but as many report the product performs below expectations.

David

[Martin Weiss]

I'm currently upgrading my Drobo from 4x1TB drives to 4x2TB drives.

Whenever I take out one of the old drives and replace it with a new 2tb drive, it takes over 3 days (days!) to rebuilt. The scary part is that during those 3 days (or about 2 weeks for the whole procedure), the unit will not be protected against a drive failure. (Also, before being able to use the 2tb drives, I had to update the firmware, which in turn means running a full backup of the Drobo, which in turn takes ages at the slow bus speed of the 1st gen unit.)

I am really flabbergasted as to why it takes so long. It should be able to copy 2tb at full speed internally.

I like the idea behind the Drobo, but as said earlier it is a) slow and b) never feels totally secure.

I pray that the IT industry comes with a much better safe, long term, reliable, transportable and affordable backup-solution in the next year. It is amazing that they've come this far without it.