Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

Recently purchased this drobo for home use with a network database for movies. Currently have it hooked up to airport extreme and running apple TV with it. I also use it to backup all documents and large files. Best part is when space gets low i just order another hard drive - slide it in, and its good to go! The enclosure being finsihed looking lets me leave it out in the open, and it actually looks nice. My one 'complaint' about the unit would be that when the fan kick into high speed to cool off, it can be a little loud with nothing else in the room on. Solution was to put it in a room that no one stays in.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I use it strictly for backup and it's okay. It is very slow to transfer large amounts of data.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I use the Drobo v2 for mass storage, the UI is very well designed and easy to use (OsX). Adding drives couldn't be easier and I've encountered no problems using the device. I would not suggest using this as a scratch drive at any cost.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I purchased the bare 4-bay unit as a backup raid-style system for my photography business after my Sans Digital maxed out. I put in my own drives (easy) and the unit has a ton of future growth capacity. Compared to my old Sans Digital the Drobo is significantly more quiet in its operation and I like its energy saving features. Installation was fast and straight forward.The unit comes with a software dashboard that produced an error message everytime the computer booted up. Drobo customer service was able to narrow it down to a conflict with Windows Vista but could not take it any further for a solution. As the dashboard is not required to actually operate the unit I simply uninstalled it and will try again after I upgrade to Windows 7. I liked the construction and almost silent fan which was a nice bonus to the great price.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

My Drobo now houses all file backups for my home computers, as well as family photos and a growing collection of movies that I'm ripping from my DVD collection.

I have mine attached via USB to an Apple AirPort Extreme, which makes the Drobo drive available over the network to all my computers. (I have both Macs and PCs.)

Expanding the available storage is amazingly easy-- just shove a new drive into the running Drobo. Ten seconds later, you have more space. Awesome.

Consolidating all my backups and storage into the Drobo let me retire an old desktop computer that was sharing internal drives, as well as two disk drives in enclosures, and all the associated cables and power lines. This means a RADICAL improvement in the tidiness of my home office.

The Drobo uses some of the hard drive space to protect against hard drive failure, so you won't be able to use ALL the available physical storage to store data. The Drobo website has a "Capacity Calculator" you can use to see how much available space you'll actually get. (I have two 1TB drives and one 500GB drive, and have about 1.3TB of total available file storage.)

The ONLY downside here is the price. The Drobo itself isn't cheap, and the data redundancy feature makes adding usable storage space more expensive, but honestly I think the Drobo is worth every penny. You get consolidated storage, automatic protection against drive failure, and it's so easy to add more space that there's no reason to spend lots of cash on big disk drives immediately. Get two cheap drives to start (so that you get data redundancy), and upgrade as needed, or when you see big hard drives on sale.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I am a photographer who needs as LOT of space. With this enclosure you can shop for cheap drives and create an inexpensive monster of storage.

NOTE**** You can ONLY add blank drives.... I cannot stress this highly enough.... and you can only swap out a larger drive than the one you remove. Once you have filled all the drives, you can ONLY ever use them as a single complete unit.

The instruction manual covers a whole range of Drobo products and it is complicated figuring out exactly what the unit you have purchased is capable of.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

So what is the saddest sound you can hear (besides "I have a headache")? It's the sound of the clicking from a dead hard drive, or worse - the sound of silence (with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel). After losing my last drive, I started desperately seeking (not Susan) a fail-safe method of saving important files (like scans or images). I have saved files to DVDs, even loaded RAW files to some of my CF cards, but after discussing this with more experienced photogs, I decided to get a backup solution - DROBO meets my requirements.

What I like is that the system allows me to load up 4 3TB drives, allowing a total of 12 TB of storage. This system provides backup and an early warning system, so that if you start having hardware problems in one of the hard drives, you can replace the drive before it dies.

I have now put all the important files on the Drobo, including my photos. Comforting thought.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

Running a small production company, data storage has quickly become a serious concern of mine. After transitioning to solid state recording in 2011, long-term storage of footage suddenly mattered much more than it had in the past. The drobo has allowed me to take much of the burden off my internal drives and keep them clear for editing. I feel confident that my footage is safe on the drobo and no longer have to worry about multiple backups. The interface is elegant and very easy to use. My mac pro had no problem seeing the Drobo as any other harddrive and after 2 weeks of transferring footage (almost 2tb so far), I have not found any problems.

I'd highly recommend this for anyone looking for an affordable, reliable redundant storage system.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

Having explored several options for protecting my data, I came upon Drobo at the suggestion of one of my friends. I did my research and was pleased to find that their website provided a fairly detailed Knowledge Base that answered many of my questions. I settled on this 4-Bay unit.

For me, the primary function of my 4-Bay Drobo unit is as an off-site storage for my photography. (It also stores my music, video, and Apple Time Machine.) I backup my notebook probably twice a week, or more if I've added new photography. Using the USB 2.0, it can do a 3gb backup in around two minutes.

I started using this Drobo in January (2012). As of this review it has a 1TB and a 1.5TB harddrive inside, which allows it to store approx 930GB. In a few months, I plan to purchase another 1.5TB soon, which will boost its storage to about 2.25TB.

I have enjoyed the unit because of the ease of upgrading it. I don't have to worry about sticking with harddrive manufactures, sizes or speed. I can purchase new drives without the hassel of changing its RAID formats. I can even access my information while it's rebuiding. Essentially, it handles all the dirty aspects of setup on its own.

It comes with some software, but it's capable of running without the software running on your PC/Mac. (The software is really just to apply firmware upgrades, see more detailed information on your Drobo's performance and to create/change volumes.)

There's a peace of mind knowing that if a drive should fail, my information is still accessible. That said, I also maintain a full backup on a seperate external harddrive. Common sense dictates that one should not leave all their eggs in one basket.

It's relatively quiet, with an internal fan that is temperature regulated. In an office setting it's just barely loud enough for me, who sits next to it, to hear it. No one else has commented on it.

The Drobo is not without is detractions. One major issue is should there be a catestrophic failure in the internal Drobo software (not a harddrive), retrieving your data through a third-party data recovery personal may be impossible, or at the very least, expensive. Drobo uses a proprietary RAID architecture unlike other multi-harddrive storate units. The benefit to Drobo's RAID architecture is that there's much more ease in upgrading it and its more forgiving of random harddrive types. The bad, however, is that outside of the Drobo box, retrieving your data is extremely difficult.

That concern weighed heavily on mind, but in the end, for what I plan to do with it, I decided it was worth a shot.

I have not attempted using it as a video production scratch disk. Nor have I routinely opened and/or worked with files stored in the Drobo. I use it strictly as a backup. I can not speak to its performance in those usuages. As the Drobo isn't a RAID 0 (Striped) I don't believe it would be adequate for use in video editing.

I like the peace of mind in knowing that this unit can expand with my backup needs, while maintaining a watchful eye on the health of the harddrives stored within. So far, having used it for three months, I find it running just as robustly as the day I first set it up.

If there is one recomendation I could make, it would be for a way to lock the front panel in order to protect he harddrives. It comes with a Kensington Lock to secure the Drobo unit, but there's nothing to stop the front panel from being removed.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

It is a very good external drive. I have only had it installed for a week but so far so good

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

The Drobo is very attractive, it seems to store files without a problem, and I love the ability to swap drives. However, it is impossibly slow to read and write. It's half the speed of a USB RAID drive I have connected. I just got off the phone with support, and they informed me that 24Mb/s (or 3MB/s) is within their range of normal operation. To put that in perspective, that's half of what one might expect from USB 1.0. Please do not get this expecting it to run even half as fast as your USB drives. You will be sorely disappointed.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I have two of these. They are great for storing files- I am a documenty filmmaker and have tons of photos and footage in its original AVCHD codec. I feel that my material is safe on Drobo. I DO NOT recommend using Drobo as a scratch disk for editing HD video in FCP. Even if you are connecting with FW800 and all 7200rpm drives, the Drobo is too slow to handle the workflow. I've spent the last month going back and forth with a Drobo technician and he says there is no way to increase the speed of the drives. I thought it was important to give you all a heads up that even though these are marketed as great for video work,they are not. As storage they've worked great so far but they're very noisy. (you wouldn't want this in your bedroom or studio apartment.)

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

the redundancy and ability to increase drive size is fantastic. easy set up. must-have.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

Even though I didn't buy my Drobo from B&H, I felt I had to add my 2 cents. This is such a great product! I have never had ANY problems with it since I bought it early 2009. It just works-like a Mac! To address the one and 2 star reviewers, the Drobo is NOT designed for primary storage! It is made for back up only; works great with Time machine, just set it and forget it. If your looking for primary storage, this isn't it. Just get a big internal hard drive for that. Also, for the negative reviewers, It's not Drobo's fault if your hard drive fails, it's your hard drive, not Drobo! Drobo doesn't cause hard drive failures! I've only contacted Data Robotics once, only to ask when they were going to come out with a Thunderbolt model. They didn't say when, but I hope it's in the works. And no, I don't work for Data Robotics.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

If you take this in your carry on luggage, prepare to be searched, swabbed and patted down.
Other than that, my only complaint was that when I first hooked it up with four 3GB drives, it did not recognize any of them. It took two full firmware upgrades to get it current. I don't know why it took more than one update, that was pretty irregular.
After setting it up properly, i had it working briefly as NTFS. Then I reformatted it to make it a TimeMachine for my multiple Macs. I was able to use Disk Utility to transfer my old TimeMachine drives to it with ease.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I purchased the Drobo with a Deskstar 3TB hard drive to install. Turns out the Drobo arrives with the older firmware installed which claims the 3TB drive is bad. This is not true and updating the firmware will resolve but the Drobo Dashboard automatic update feature fails, claiming the firmware is updated when it really is not. After much wild goose chasing I finally figured out that downloading the firmware file and doing a manual update worked fine. After that the 3TB drive was recognized as good and all was well. Ignore the Drobo instructions saying to use the software on the installer CD. Software on there is stale. Instead download the Drobo Dashboard from their website along with the latest firmware for your device. Unit is a bit pokey with 30MB/s sustained throughput. Took many hours to copy 450GB from my old drive to this one.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I bought this product mainly to use as a backup and storage solution for a growing photo library. I have nothing but praise for it so far though i have only been using it for 2 months. User interface is good, easy to use and simple to set up. I was up and running in under 20min. I have not had issue with speed others have mentioned but don't do video editing however some of my larger pano shots are over 1gb. Its so much better than the many ext drives i had clogging up my desktop i only wish i had have bought one much earlier.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

Great solution, impressed with setup and easy configuration tools.

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I now own this device for 3 weeks. Before my purchase I read a good amount of reviews on this site and other sites that offer this product. Some really bad others superior.
After I made up my mind I thought that should give it a try, since I recently moved from a PC-Windows machine to an iMac. With tons of video and photos I needed a solution that would make sense (since it is always growing).
I put in my 4 x 1 TB Hard Drives from my W7 PC, formatted it, moved over all my digital media, and voila...I love it.
I also use it to capture digital video from my camera via FW800, into FCP X...no problem there

Comments about Drobo 4-Bay Hard Drive Array Enclosure:

I purchased the Drobo 4-bay in Aug, 2010 and will begin phasing it out this year. I currently have it loaded with 3-1TB 7200rpm drives and 1-2TB 7200rpm drive. While this system is great for archiving, redundancy and even photo and still graphics work, it is too slow for multi-media or video work. Via FW800 using the AJA System Test App, I only was able to get write speeds averaging 19.4MB/s and read speeds of 24.2MB/s on a 4GB 1920x1080 10-bit video file. For comparison, the other two FW800 drives I have clock at roughly 67MB/s write and 80MB/s read - over 3x faster! So do not purchase this drive for video or high-datarate work.

That being said, for other applications, I think it is a great array. The Drobo dashboard is clean looking, intuitive, and easy to navigate and use. Another big plus is customer service. I had a drive in the array crash and upon calling customer service, the phone was answered in under a minute by someone in the USA. Further, she was friendly, knowledgeable and was able to help me troubleshoot the system without escalating the call. And after replacing the faulty drive, the Drobo flawlessly rebuilt and no data was lost.

So in summary, for video and high-datarate uses, don't buy this Drobo. But for everything else where fast read/write isn't an issue, it's a great option at a reasonable price.