Nice work here TM. I've recently purchased a 5c as a second Drobo, the earlier Gen 2 was their 4 bay entry model which I've had running for over 8 years. Problems? Yeah, once there was a total system failure - but Drobo, even with the thing out of warranty spent hours with me recovering ALL of my data, graphics, video, and images and the enclosure's worked perfectly since (I am a fine art photographer/videographer). More recently I've had two drives fail in the Gen 2 machine... a WD 2TB Green and a 3T Seagate Barracuda (green). Now, as I seek to both replace the Gen 2 drives AND to purchase drives for the new 5c, I've got questions. a. When I first set up the Gen 2 I got modestly priced drives from Best Buy, clicked them into place and everything worked except for the Drobo system crash and repair in year 4, and the recent deaths of those two drives just this year. b. All is working fine in the Gen 2 machine where I am running 3/3T drives with an empty bay... which I want to refill. Remember my major work is done in Adobe Creative Cloud and the files I create are quite large (I have many images that have been printed at 8 to 11 feet on their longest edge.} c. I store all of my images on the Drobo and use it interactively with my various Macs... a current generation iMac Retina fully tricked out, is my principal machine. d. I want to purchase drives which best fit those needs, and I'm thinking of one 6T drive in each machine with the rest of the drives (for now) at 3T. So? Which type from each of the major brand of disc makers is best matched with my uses? e. Should I purchase 7,500 RPM drives or are 5,600 or 5,900 RPMs sufficient for my uses? Is there any value to SSHD drives either individually mixed in or bought exclusively? f. We (I have assistants who do illustrator additions, Photoshop some portraits, and edit some video/audio) generally do about 8 - 10 hours of work on the machine (s) six days a week. I generally shut down my machines at the end of the day, but they are frequently left in sleep mode overnight. I've read that some drives suffer from being shut down while other thrive on it. g. I expect that the old Drobo will be reassigned to pair with one of my late generation MacBook Pros, with the other dedicated to the iMac. h. I am interested though in Drobo's claim to have software which will allow me to build a personal cloud and may dedicate one of the Drobos to off-site storage at home with the primary 5c kept here at the studio. Main question... What brand, rpm, and type of drives should I purchase to maximize I/O? Yes, price is an object, but with a Drobo I can work my way up to filling up every bay with the biggest and fastest. So I'd rather start right and build as the budget allows. Anyone have thoughts?
Ted Byrne a, b, c, f, g and h aren't questions... use whatever brand and size drives you want for your personal needs. SSD's are generally more stable and have much quicker read speeds. if going with standard HDD's, yes, go with 7,200 or even 10,000 rpm versions. speeds are varyingly better.
All data backed up on a multi drive device and you have all your stuff in a nice storage area but wait what is that? I'd that a water line? Copper water pipe connecting to plastic tubing water line? Right next to the multi hard drive device? I am in the USA it looks like a water line not sure that it is since you in the U.K. And there is a difference in approved pipeline. If it is a water line I hope you can see why I am getting a good chuckle at your expense. Love your videos and love all your devices you manage to find. Thanks for being a good sport
I had a 160Gb HDD on ATA, very old one, and worked for 10 years, every day, for ~10 hours a day, and still works 100% (and it wasn't high end, just a normal cheap HDD)!! :D
Well said about the backups TM and I was really interested in this review. You raised a good point about the potential failure of the Drobo. Does it simply copy one drive to another or does it create a RAID array. Could that array be read by a non-Drobo device? If not that puts me off a bit.
Looks like a nice bit of kit. May I suggest you just use your vacuum cleaner and suck your old units fans a bit to get most of the dust out. Other than that, love your channel and reviews!
Great advice, I'm always harping on about that very topic, non-tech people still really don't get it, I guess it doesn't interest them enough to take it in fully. Once it happens they then do take it seriously, but all the equines have already moved off at great haste :)
I have had that same drobo few years and have had some problems with it. I'm going to get new NAS thingy soon and it's probably not going to be a drobo. I'm probably going to buy something what uses normal standard raid.
That's amazing having two backups of your data. I like the fact they supply the cables as well. Not most manufacturers do that. What is the casing made out of? Is it plastic or metal?
Can only agree about the backing-up things. The worst thing just happened to me. I got a new external hard drive and wanted to mirror my old one onto it the next day. Well, I dropped the old external hard drive the night before and my data is now gone...it were only series and movies but that still sucks.
I use the "Naked" hard drive system. TimeMachine on my Macs does a great job, then once ever 6 months or so I do a manual backup to bare drives (1TB or 2TB), and can use both sizes of drive.
Its a good idea to number all the drives (as in) 1 to 5.I've had problems with my Drobo and hade to remove the drive and then stick them back. If I did not number the drives and just placed then at random I would have lost all the data. You can move all the drives between different Drobo's providing the drives are inserted in the same order.
@Techmoan What about your present Storage? Is it still this Drobo? For me it looks like you stripe all 4 Harddrives to one volume (3+1,5+1,5+1,5=7,5 TB). So, this is a BIG problem when only one drive fails -> all data is gone then.
Did Drobo have the migration software available? You probably could have just migrated disk packs. But you are right. I have several back up options. I put ALL of those "spare" hard drives to good use.
I don't have any Apple computers, only an iPod touch 4g so I don't get much profit out of this. I use a Synology DS213. Maybe something to backup files to from my NAS. Nice video by the way Techmoan
I think the idea is having reliable data which Wifi can be a problem. Throughput is a bastard with anything prior to 802.11ac. 802.11ad however, could change all this.
Do you know if there is enough room in there to use the older IDE drives with the Sata adaptors to slide in completely, I have a lot of IDE drives and only two Satas, one is a dead OCZ SSD drive that only lasted almost 2 years and is only recognized in DOS but Windows will not let me wake it up again.
with a mac you can simply create a TimeMachine backup, and these work far quicker with a lightning connector than Wifi - especially when dealing with huge amounts of data at once.
Drobo is not safe! Worst system EVER! Ive bouth Drobo and Drobo5D all wast all fail. Nice concept worst product EVER! Even a usb portable drive is more reliable then Drobo! To all the people please check: scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
I could totally turn one of my computers into a NAS, but I'll have to configure how I'll have the network set up, image some older HDDs, and disassemble some external ones. It can be turned into a music and entertainment server, torrent machine, and I can also have it back up to an online server (I'm thinking about CrashPlan) if something really terrible happens. I'd probably be less worried about my data then.
Yes get your equipment at least on a stand 2ft above the water line. However I liked the video and I use Asustore I have two of these units and one now is getting very old. The new one is a backup to my old one. Both are working well my old one has 8 4TB WD Red drives designed for NAS or servers and my new one has 4 6TB WD Red drives. I have setup the old unit to backup to the new unit and all backups work well. However as I moved to Thailand from Switzerland I purchased two spare disks for the old one and one for the new one due to the raid configurations. I recommend swapping the replacement drives with the working ones every six months. Why? I have been told leaving a drive idle for more that a year can cause problems to that drive. However the first time I learned this it was three years after buying the spare drives and even tough all worked well... Maybe I was lucky or maybe this is false. However swapping a drive while your raid is working is a good precaution as then you know if the drive(s) are good or not.
Great video. I'm a little confused about how Drobo's redundancy works. Is it a Raid 1 setup? Or something else? What if you had 12TB total and 7 were used up and one hard drive failed? You're using more than half the available space...which makes me think it's not a Raid 1 set up. Just trying to wrap my head around how it works! Thanks.
Man dont buy it! Worst system EVER! Buy Drobo and Drobo5D all wast all fail. Nice concept worst product EVER! Even a usb portable drive is more reliable then Drobo! To all the people please check: scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
Great video, what I like about this is that you now have even more space to put new content on :) I asked this on your website too, are you planning on reviewing the waterproof case for the mobius, since it's being sold to people now?
i dont expect you to review one anytime soon, but may i personally advise a synology for your next upgrade ? same functionality but much much more with their dsm (check out their website) it's defonately worth the extra cost and allows you to pretty much automate everything (downloading & cataloging your media, ebooks, etc, allowing you to view it from across the world thru dedicated web interfaces, apps or even smart tv apps on samsung tv's). i'm currently running a DS413 and a old ds110j both running the most recent dsm :)
When you installed the old Drobo drives into the new unit you say that it was "formatting away, consolidating the drives" -- did you LOSE the original files from the old Drobo? I am about to do this myself from my old Drobo. I do not want to lose my files.
+mc4bbs I kept the data I needed I'm my old Drobo and put unused drives in the new one - I haven't dared to try moving data I was using from one Drobo to another. However I understand your situation, I too was concerned what I would do if the whole Drobo hardware enclosure died - but I don't have an answer.
Techmoan Thanks for responding. I lost a drive on my Drobo Version 2 and will be adding a LARGER replacement soon. I was thinking up upgrading to a Drobo N (or larger).
Well, alternatively, you could share the volume the Drobo is attached to (System Preferences -> Sharing, enable File Sharing and add the Drobo to the list of Shared Folders. Set permission accordingly). Once that's done, you just backup to the Drobo as usual on the computer the Drobo is attached to, and do network backups on the other two computers with the Drobo share as the target. But I suggest using the network version instead, so the one computer isn't burdened when the other two do their backups.
Backing up your data is critical. Saved my ass back at school when the laptop HDD failed. Any solution that backs up your data automatically is worth the money and everyone should do.
I've lost so much data over the years that I have backups of my backups. It's curious how the Drobo seems OK with you mixing drives of differing sizes. What happens if all the storage is used, and then the big 3TB drive fails? Surely you're going to lose all of its data?
James Grimwood It will survive the failure of any one of the drives as the data is duplicated on the other drives. If the 3TB drive fails..its data is also somewhere spread across the 3x1.5TB drives. Eventually I'll put a load of 3TB drives in there.
Techmoan I'm interested what your Drobo is doing with your drives and storage. I take it your computer just sees one massive "drive" and doesn't know anything about the physical drives in the Drobo. What's your total usable space? And if you fill it to 100% capacity and a drive fails, what's it do?
James Grimwood Yes, that's what I like about this. All my Videos, Music, Photos etc are all in folders on one massive drive. When it gets full, I'll just add a drive or swap out a smaller one for a bigger one as the prices of large HDDs come down.
You can back-up to as many harddrives as you want. But if you keep them all in the same house you are not safe at all: What if the house burns down or is flooded? I have two ordinary USB harddrives. I keep one near my PC and the other in my workshop which is in another house. So if one of them should burn or drown I always have the other. I copy to the one in the workshop once a month so I will only loose what I have saved for the past 29 days.
Came here to see what a drobo was all about. Thank you for the brillinat video, go in to more detail on the software next time please :) Also are you Alan partridge? you sound just like him :) hehe. Note to a few comments below, I would recommend a NAS Box over this. People have more than 1 device these days and everyone wants to access the data. Plugging in to your router via a ethernet cable would be so much better. Do Drobo offer this? Thanks Netcon
I have a Drobo 5C attached to my iMac with a separate volume for a Time Machine backup. I also have a Mac Book Air that I would like to backup on my Drobo as well. Can this be done, and if so, how?
I run a network bck up ith 4x3TB drives - I like the extra 5th drive of the Drobo. I'm being lazy now but will it run on a net work or have a version that does run on a network?
Yes the Drobo 5N is their equivalent Network version. Like a couple of people have mentioned it's an either/or choice...network or thunderbolt/USB 3.0. The 5N is quite a bit cheaper, Thunderbolt capable devices are always expensive.
I like the simplicity of these network devices for people not acing RAID class or no time for setting up a PC todo the same at a lower price and infinite flexibility, but £500(roughly) is too much even for that. I current have no use for more than 3 TB and I just use an internal PC drive for that and backup to 2x 2 TB USB3 3.5 drives at £80 each, with some overlap for the most important bits(legal papers, homemade/unique stuff and stuff that isn't video basically). If I would ever go bigger, I would use a cheap PC, but with 1+ good controller card(s) like an IBM 1015, a good PSU and then software raid via FreeNas, use ZFS and with Raid Z2, cause then a failed hw Raid controller won't ruin everything. Z2 is like Raid6 but better. Made some calcs on it last year, when a friend and me wanted to make a joint big NAS of 60 TB (both of us has 40/40 lines so np with inet throughput) and came in at €2900 with 14.34% spent on non-disks in such a setup. For just a 12 TB we came to the conclusion that a Drobo-like station called Buffalo was just slightly cheaper than a PC based solution, however that solution was unproven and again had the hw raid possibility to fail, with a 24% price of non-disks involved. Regarding flooding, put said backup computer in the attic then.
+Supercat Mao Unfortunately you are right, Seagate had to paid me more than £300 in compensation as I lost all my childhood photos. Guess we live and learn
I wanted a Drobo but the price put me off, then I found out about Unraid which does almost the same thing being able to survive a single drive failure and should you be unlucky & lose 2 drives you only lose the data on those drives. Watched a few UA-cam videos and managed to set one up for the less than the price of a Drobo with Hard drives included.
I switched over to Mac because it has TimeMachine Backups built in (at least it was one of the reasons). Manually backing up is just annoying when you're using windows, and the backup programs for Win are just so slow and expensive.
You must have been using a pretty prehistoric version of Windows my friend. Because I use Win7, and it has auto backup and restore built in to the System Maintenance panel. You just tell Windows where your local or network backup target is, and off it goes. You can auto backup files, folders, or image the entire hard drive. No third party software required.
+Sheepy007 Neither had I. Looks like a NAS aimed at consumers. If you're not in I.T. (or familiar with the tech used by a modern business) you wouldn't know they exist. I guess we've reached a point where we consume so much media Drobo thought we'd buy them.
I'm struggling to understand what the point of this is to be honest. It isn't a NAS device so can't be used for centralised backups, making it hideously expensive for a glorified USB hard drive. Certainly the SSD seems useless, why would you need this on a backup device? No home user has files that are multi terabytes each so why not just have several 2TB drives attached to different machines with multiple copies of data and save yourself some money? I'm currently planning a new home server that uses an older desktop PC. It'll have a gigabit LAN connection, 9TB of storage with RAID protection, more power and all in it'll cost less than the base Drobo. Still, great review of the product as always.
I think the Drobo is for people that just want plug and play. It's a frightfully simple device that has a lot of intelligent backup that goes along with the Drobo. I think it's a good device for those that have a ton of data and no time to mess around.
Its a bit quicker then usb but i see the point, I would have thought a proper nas with the option to mirror the data from one nas to the other would have been a better option.
It's certainly a nice looking device, but I can't help but feel it is $300 overpriced at $499 if it doesn't include drives - maybe $299, but that's pushing it. You can use an open-source OS (FreeNAS, etc) and a cheap PC (RaspPi, etc.) coupled with a drive array case to get identical functionality as this thing for about $100.
FieryWingedAngel maybe for someone who has an ISO rated clean room. your normal, run-of-the-mill computer user would never be able to complete a platter transfer with any kind of acceptable success rate.
Don't leave it on the floor of your wardrobe. Place it on a shelf or shoe rack. Anything to raise it off the ground in case of flooding be it a roof leak or by tap...Cardboard boxes are no good too.
What about an Offsite backup? I use a cloud solution for all those things that if my house went up in flames I could not live without or cant replace. like all those pics that you take over a lifetime. I have a 2 disk Raid in a 4 disk case (expandability) 3TB drives.
you want to one transfer 3tb of data over the internet 2 pay for 3tb of cloud storage. i think his idea is to back it up to this then stash it at a friends.
You are really only paying for convenience when you buy a Drobo, and i respect your choice. However, this could be done cheaply with like a hundred drives on RAID 1+0 and a dedicated server managing those drives.
First off, this isn't firewire... it's Thunderbolt 2.0. And theoretical speed of USB 3.0 is near 4.8 Gb/sec. Not quite as fast as SATA 6 but close. If you go TB2.0, you reach nearly 10Gb/sec which is faster than SATA 6 mechanical drives can read and write. Therefore TB2.0 is really suited to SSD and probably more in line with PCIe/SSD. Of course this all comes with a super high price.
$580 BUCKS?! Plus hard drives. Holy cow. You can do the same exact thing by buying any old computer on ebay, slap Ubuntu and some extra hard drives in there, connect it to you network and you're done. Network RAID storage for less than $100 if you already have the disks.
Even brand new you can do much cheaper. 12 bay case plus PSU is $300 AUS, Highpoint raid card is $200, then you can slap any amount of drives in. With 12 bays I have 20 TB of storage.
Jason Dial I notice all these comments about using free cloud based services as back up solutions but do these people not understand that they lose all their data privacy?!? seems like that would be one of the most important components when selecting a back up solution, no?
Beware, hard drives over 1TB have a higher failure rate. My friend had two 3TB external drives and one of them died on him. Movies, pictures, music, files, all gone. My 1TB external drive is 4 years old and still going strong, so I'd say anywhere around 1TB is a good balance of capacity and low failure rate
With the greatest respect I would suggest looking at an external backup provider. After some research I settled on CrashPlan (Google and you'll find it) who provide an unlimited capacity backup for about £4/month or 8 years worth for the price of your Drobo. If my house burns down or floods I'll still have my data, I suspect you won't. (No, I'm not associated with CrashPlan, I'm just a satisfied user).
***** You're wrong. Yes the initial backup takes a long time but once done it only backs up incremental changes. I've got several TB backed up and I know I can get them back regardless. Learn about cloud backup before venting a useless opinion.
I didn't mention online backup - because this video is about a Drobo 5D. I back up my data in various ways...but the Drobo serves all my media 24/7 with backup for a drive failure. This is a large hard drive in my house that I use all the time. Online/Offsite backup is not used for serving up data immediately...it's a back-up.
The White Piano Key Productions No, it backs up at the time you schedule it to back up and yes, unlimited, go and check for yourself. I gain no benefit from telling anyone about this system, I'm just using it.
Wow, that was really cool watching this video. I worked as a level 2 tech support for Drobo a few years back. Thanks for sharing.
Nice work here TM. I've recently purchased a 5c as a second Drobo, the earlier Gen 2 was their 4 bay entry model which I've had running for over 8 years. Problems? Yeah, once there was a total system failure - but Drobo, even with the thing out of warranty spent hours with me recovering ALL of my data, graphics, video, and images and the enclosure's worked perfectly since (I am a fine art photographer/videographer). More recently I've had two drives fail in the Gen 2 machine... a WD 2TB Green and a 3T Seagate Barracuda (green).
Now, as I seek to both replace the Gen 2 drives AND to purchase drives for the new 5c, I've got questions.
a. When I first set up the Gen 2 I got modestly priced drives from Best Buy, clicked them into place and everything worked except for the Drobo system crash and repair in year 4, and the recent deaths of those two drives just this year.
b. All is working fine in the Gen 2 machine where I am running 3/3T drives with an empty bay... which I want to refill. Remember my major work is done in Adobe Creative Cloud and the files I create are quite large (I have many images that have been printed at 8 to 11 feet on their longest edge.}
c. I store all of my images on the Drobo and use it interactively with my various Macs... a current generation iMac Retina fully tricked out, is my principal machine.
d. I want to purchase drives which best fit those needs, and I'm thinking of one 6T drive in each machine with the rest of the drives (for now) at 3T. So? Which type from each of the major brand of disc makers is best matched with my uses?
e. Should I purchase 7,500 RPM drives or are 5,600 or 5,900 RPMs sufficient for my uses? Is there any value to SSHD drives either individually mixed in or bought exclusively?
f. We (I have assistants who do illustrator additions, Photoshop some portraits, and edit some video/audio) generally do about 8 - 10 hours of work on the machine (s) six days a week. I generally shut down my machines at the end of the day, but they are frequently left in sleep mode overnight. I've read that some drives suffer from being shut down while other thrive on it.
g. I expect that the old Drobo will be reassigned to pair with one of my late generation MacBook Pros, with the other dedicated to the iMac.
h. I am interested though in Drobo's claim to have software which will allow me to build a personal cloud and may dedicate one of the Drobos to off-site storage at home with the primary 5c kept here at the studio.
Main question... What brand, rpm, and type of drives should I purchase to maximize I/O? Yes, price is an object, but with a Drobo I can work my way up to filling up every bay with the biggest and fastest. So I'd rather start right and build as the budget allows.
Anyone have thoughts?
Ted Byrne a, b, c, f, g and h aren't questions...
use whatever brand and size drives you want for your personal needs. SSD's are generally more stable and have much quicker read speeds. if going with standard HDD's, yes, go with 7,200 or even 10,000 rpm versions. speeds are varyingly better.
Thanks for the super simple and yet comprehensive look at the Drobo! Hope you're liking it!
All data backed up on a multi drive device and you have all your stuff in a nice storage area but wait what is that? I'd that a water line? Copper water pipe connecting to plastic tubing water line? Right next to the multi hard drive device? I am in the USA it looks like a water line not sure that it is since you in the U.K. And there is a difference in approved pipeline. If it is a water line I hope you can see why I am getting a good chuckle at your expense. Love your videos and love all your devices you manage to find. Thanks for being a good sport
I just like hearing the word "Drobo" over and over ^^
I had a 160Gb HDD on ATA, very old one, and worked for 10 years, every day, for ~10 hours a day, and still works 100% (and it wasn't high end, just a normal cheap HDD)!! :D
I'm more of a Synology man myself. But as always, you've created a really good review!
I would recommend the networked NAS system. Access it from anywhere on the network and even set it up as your own cloud storage.
thats brilliant that, i never knew they existed. Thanks Techmoan, im surprised how much i learn from your channel.
Well said about the backups TM and I was really interested in this review. You raised a good point about the potential failure of the Drobo. Does it simply copy one drive to another or does it create a RAID array. Could that array be read by a non-Drobo device? If not that puts me off a bit.
Looks like a nice bit of kit. May I suggest you just use your vacuum cleaner and suck your old units fans a bit to get most of the dust out. Other than that, love your channel and reviews!
Great advice, I'm always harping on about that very topic, non-tech people still really don't get it, I guess it doesn't interest them enough to take it in fully. Once it happens they then do take it seriously, but all the equines have already moved off at great haste :)
Back up your back up's back up back up...
I have had that same drobo few years and have had some problems with it. I'm going to get new NAS thingy soon and it's probably not going to be a drobo. I'm probably going to buy something what uses normal standard raid.
The modern technology, a backup for my backup.
That's amazing having two backups of your data. I like the fact they supply the cables as well. Not most manufacturers do that. What is the casing made out of? Is it plastic or metal?
The box is metal, and the door etc is plastic. It's pretty heavy, especially with five drives in it.
Techmoan Oh good. Because with a price like that you want something that is solidly made.
Can only agree about the backing-up things. The worst thing just happened to me. I got a new external hard drive and wanted to mirror my old one onto it the next day. Well, I dropped the old external hard drive the night before and my data is now gone...it were only series and movies but that still sucks.
I use backblaze, and would highly recommend for cloud storage. Unlimited data including external drives.
old skool stuff, network storage is the future
I use the "Naked" hard drive system. TimeMachine on my Macs does a great job, then once ever 6 months or so I do a manual backup to bare drives (1TB or 2TB), and can use both sizes of drive.
I print my photos and keep them in a photo album. Hasn't failed on me yet.
Good advice about backing up your photo's etc.
Its a good idea to number all the drives (as in) 1 to 5.I've had problems with my Drobo and hade to remove the drive and then stick them back. If I did not number the drives and just placed then at random I would have lost all the data. You can move all the drives between different Drobo's providing the drives are inserted in the same order.
@Techmoan What about your present Storage? Is it still this Drobo? For me it looks like you stripe all 4 Harddrives to one volume (3+1,5+1,5+1,5=7,5 TB). So, this is a BIG problem when only one drive fails -> all data is gone then.
Awesome as usual...
But I wonder if its safer than a normal HD drive
Or its just better to have an external hard drive
Did Drobo have the migration software available? You probably could have just migrated disk packs. But you are right. I have several back up options. I put ALL of those "spare" hard drives to good use.
I might get one actually, thanks for the video.
Can you review a system that is not so expensive and a little more particle? Great vid and thanks!
I don't have any Apple computers, only an iPod touch 4g so I don't get much profit out of this. I use a Synology DS213. Maybe something to backup files to from my NAS. Nice video by the way Techmoan
Do these things have wifi? Seems so expensive. I would have thought it would come with the drives too.
I think the idea is having reliable data which Wifi can be a problem. Throughput is a bastard with anything prior to 802.11ac. 802.11ad however, could change all this.
my photos are all in some kind of cloud or are physical negatives that I can rescan whenever.
Always test my hard drive every 6 months or so when I do a proper cleanup.
@Techmoan you should use your zozirushi rice cooker! is it broken ?
Do you know if there is enough room in there to use the older IDE drives with the Sata adaptors to slide in completely, I have a lot of IDE drives and only two Satas, one is a dead OCZ SSD drive that only lasted almost 2 years and is only recognized in DOS but Windows will not let me wake it up again.
a USB storage? why not use a network storage?
TheHirade *speed
Gigabit speeds are fine.
with a mac you can simply create a TimeMachine backup, and these work far quicker with a lightning connector than Wifi - especially when dealing with huge amounts of data at once.
TimeMachine does automatic incremental backups over WiFi/Network every hour...?
"lightning"
GET YOUR ELECTRONICS AWAY FROM YOUR WATER LINES!!! Especially a backup Drive. This is a great way to lose everything.
Stacy DeVille true
its a natural gas line
Diamond Dave ur a natural gas line
*immature giggle XD
Build a box with 5 drobo 5D in it.. just to b on the safe side
Drobo is not safe! Worst system EVER! Ive bouth Drobo and Drobo5D all wast all fail. Nice concept worst product EVER! Even a usb portable drive is more reliable then Drobo!
To all the people please check:
scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
tommyjones1978 Say it a few more times...
does the drobo unit also include backup software utility? can this unit, the 5D, work with a Windows Essentials server?
I could totally turn one of my computers into a NAS, but I'll have to configure how I'll have the network set up, image some older HDDs, and disassemble some external ones. It can be turned into a music and entertainment server, torrent machine, and I can also have it back up to an online server (I'm thinking about CrashPlan) if something really terrible happens. I'd probably be less worried about my data then.
Im using a NAS, and I need to get one that support more drives these days.
Yes get your equipment at least on a stand 2ft above the water line. However I liked the video and I use Asustore I have two of these units and one now is getting very old. The new one is a backup to my old one. Both are working well my old one has 8 4TB WD Red drives designed for NAS or servers and my new one has 4 6TB WD Red drives. I have setup the old unit to backup to the new unit and all backups work well. However as I moved to Thailand from Switzerland I purchased two spare disks for the old one and one for the new one due to the raid configurations. I recommend swapping the replacement drives with the working ones every six months. Why? I have been told leaving a drive idle for more that a year can cause problems to that drive. However the first time I learned this it was three years after buying the spare drives and even tough all worked well... Maybe I was lucky or maybe this is false. However swapping a drive while your raid is working is a good precaution as then you know if the drive(s) are good or not.
Great video. I'm a little confused about how Drobo's redundancy works. Is it a Raid 1 setup? Or something else? What if you had 12TB total and 7 were used up and one hard drive failed? You're using more than half the available space...which makes me think it's not a Raid 1 set up. Just trying to wrap my head around how it works! Thanks.
Man dont buy it! Worst system EVER! Buy Drobo and Drobo5D all wast all fail. Nice concept worst product EVER! Even a usb portable drive is more reliable then Drobo! To all the people please check:
scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
Great video, what I like about this is that you now have even more space to put new content on :)
I asked this on your website too, are you planning on reviewing the waterproof case for the mobius, since it's being sold to people now?
I'll see if I can pick one up.
Will buy one if it's any good :)
grim fandango best pc game ever made
i dont expect you to review one anytime soon, but may i personally advise a synology for your next upgrade ? same functionality but much much more with their dsm (check out their website) it's defonately worth the extra cost and allows you to pretty much automate everything (downloading & cataloging your media, ebooks, etc, allowing you to view it from across the world thru dedicated web interfaces, apps or even smart tv apps on samsung tv's). i'm currently running a DS413 and a old ds110j both running the most recent dsm :)
When you installed the old Drobo drives into the new unit you say that it was "formatting away, consolidating the drives" -- did you LOSE the original files from the old Drobo? I am about to do this myself from my old Drobo. I do not want to lose my files.
+mc4bbs I kept the data I needed I'm my old Drobo and put unused drives in the new one - I haven't dared to try moving data I was using from one Drobo to another. However I understand your situation, I too was concerned what I would do if the whole Drobo hardware enclosure died - but I don't have an answer.
Techmoan Thanks for responding. I lost a drive on my Drobo Version 2 and will be adding a LARGER replacement soon. I was thinking up upgrading to a Drobo N (or larger).
Thanks for the video but i have three computers how do i back up my info to one drobo???
+Yaemy Moreno I think you'd use the networked version of the Drobo. I haven't used that one myself.
Well, alternatively, you could share the volume the Drobo is attached to (System Preferences -> Sharing, enable File Sharing and add the Drobo to the list of Shared Folders. Set permission accordingly). Once that's done, you just backup to the Drobo as usual on the computer the Drobo is attached to, and do network backups on the other two computers with the Drobo share as the target. But I suggest using the network version instead, so the one computer isn't burdened when the other two do their backups.
That was an awesome video. Subscribed!
Backing up your data is critical. Saved my ass back at school when the laptop HDD failed. Any solution that backs up your data automatically is worth the money and everyone should do.
I've lost so much data over the years that I have backups of my backups.
It's curious how the Drobo seems OK with you mixing drives of differing sizes. What happens if all the storage is used, and then the big 3TB drive fails? Surely you're going to lose all of its data?
James Grimwood It will survive the failure of any one of the drives as the data is duplicated on the other drives. If the 3TB drive fails..its data is also somewhere spread across the 3x1.5TB drives. Eventually I'll put a load of 3TB drives in there.
Techmoan I'm interested what your Drobo is doing with your drives and storage. I take it your computer just sees one massive "drive" and doesn't know anything about the physical drives in the Drobo.
What's your total usable space? And if you fill it to 100% capacity and a drive fails, what's it do?
James Grimwood Yes, that's what I like about this. All my Videos, Music, Photos etc are all in folders on one massive drive. When it gets full, I'll just add a drive or swap out a smaller one for a bigger one as the prices of large HDDs come down.
Techmoan
Money saver!
Yay! :-)
You can back-up to as many harddrives as you want. But if you keep them all in the same house you are not safe at all: What if the house burns down or is flooded? I have two ordinary USB harddrives. I keep one near my PC and the other in my workshop which is in another house. So if one of them should burn or drown I always have the other. I copy to the one in the workshop once a month so I will only loose what I have saved for the past 29 days.
So it's basically a RAID box...
Yes.
Kinda. It does some fancy magic beyond what normal RAID types let you do with different sized drives. But other than that, pretty much.
Hi, what about encryption? They say this drive cant be encrypted at less is done setting it up as a Time Machine volume.
Came here to see what a drobo was all about. Thank you for the brillinat video, go in to more detail on the software next time please :)
Also are you Alan partridge? you sound just like him :) hehe.
Note to a few comments below, I would recommend a NAS Box over this. People have more than 1 device these days and everyone wants to access the data. Plugging in to your router via a ethernet cable would be so much better.
Do Drobo offer this?
Thanks
Netcon
I have a Drobo 5C attached to my iMac with a separate volume for a Time Machine backup. I also have a Mac Book Air that I would like to backup on my Drobo as well. Can this be done, and if so, how?
I run a network bck up ith 4x3TB drives - I like the extra 5th drive of the Drobo. I'm being lazy now but will it run on a net work or have a version that does run on a network?
Yes the Drobo 5N is their equivalent Network version. Like a couple of people have mentioned it's an either/or choice...network or thunderbolt/USB 3.0. The 5N is quite a bit cheaper, Thunderbolt capable devices are always expensive.
Techmoan Nice review. Thinking about picking this up with 4 4TB & 2TB drive.
So a drobo is not like a raid 1? Mirroring for backup protection?
Gerat video. Very informative. Thanks!
Do the large seagate drives fail alot? Was looking at grabbing done 2tb drives for my nas but saw they suffer from clicking and high failure
I wouldn't trust Seagate drives at all. Especially if they're powered on a lot.
I have a Drobo 5D. I didn't see any difference when I added the MSata drive.
I like the simplicity of these network devices for people not acing RAID class or no time for setting up a PC todo the same at a lower price and infinite flexibility, but £500(roughly) is too much even for that.
I current have no use for more than 3 TB and I just use an internal PC drive for that and backup to 2x 2 TB USB3 3.5 drives at £80 each, with some overlap for the most important bits(legal papers, homemade/unique stuff and stuff that isn't video basically).
If I would ever go bigger, I would use a cheap PC, but with 1+ good controller card(s) like an IBM 1015, a good PSU and then software raid via FreeNas, use ZFS and with Raid Z2, cause then a failed hw Raid controller won't ruin everything. Z2 is like Raid6 but better.
Made some calcs on it last year, when a friend and me wanted to make a joint big NAS of 60 TB (both of us has 40/40 lines so np with inet throughput) and came in at €2900 with 14.34% spent on non-disks in such a setup. For just a 12 TB we came to the conclusion that a Drobo-like station called Buffalo was just slightly cheaper than a PC based solution, however that solution was unproven and again had the hw raid possibility to fail, with a 24% price of non-disks involved.
Regarding flooding, put said backup computer in the attic then.
4:18 why are you using refurbished Seagate drives?
Because my original failed so I sent it back within warranty and they replaced it.
Tech, Hi, just purchased a (buyse) car camera/recorder, HD and tiny for less than £20, review maybe? works very well. Tom
Also consider the fireproof,waterproof iosafe server or hd ...
Buy a Seagate Network Drive and you will find you more than half the price, or put the drives in your PC and use RAID!
+Supercat Mao Unfortunately you are right, Seagate had to paid me more than £300 in compensation as I lost all my childhood photos. Guess we live and learn
How about an update.. still spinning without issue?
I’ve never set up a RAID array but you don’t have to set the drives up as master or slave?
I wanted a Drobo but the price put me off, then I found out about Unraid which does almost the same thing being able to survive a single drive failure and should you be unlucky & lose 2 drives you only lose the data on those drives.
Watched a few UA-cam videos and managed to set one up for the less than the price of a Drobo with Hard drives included.
Is this a NAS of some kind
What is the speed of 5D? My Drobo FS is so slow.
For the price of that Drobo you should consider a cloud-solution.
Can u do a review on u led spinning starter thing
Why would you get this over a HP Microserver which can be had for a fifth of the Drobo price?
8:05 An SSD, failing?! You don't say :P.
I switched over to Mac because it has TimeMachine Backups built in (at least it was one of the reasons). Manually backing up is just annoying when you're using windows, and the backup programs for Win are just so slow and expensive.
doesn't windows also have a automatic backup built in?
You must have been using a pretty prehistoric version of Windows my friend. Because I use Win7, and it has auto backup and restore built in to the System Maintenance panel. You just tell Windows where your local or network backup target is, and off it goes. You can auto backup files, folders, or image the entire hard drive. No third party software required.
Never heard of Drobo. What's the difference to regular NAS solutions?
+Sheepy007 Neither had I. Looks like a NAS aimed at consumers. If you're not in I.T. (or familiar with the tech used by a modern business) you wouldn't know they exist. I guess we've reached a point where we consume so much media Drobo thought we'd buy them.
thanks for this bud..
Gradual shutdown is actually Parking the Hard Drive heads before turning off.
Why does it cost so much if it is just USB? At that price I would at least expect a gigabit ethernet connection on it.
Do you still use it?
I'm struggling to understand what the point of this is to be honest. It isn't a NAS device so can't be used for centralised backups, making it hideously expensive for a glorified USB hard drive. Certainly the SSD seems useless, why would you need this on a backup device? No home user has files that are multi terabytes each so why not just have several 2TB drives attached to different machines with multiple copies of data and save yourself some money? I'm currently planning a new home server that uses an older desktop PC. It'll have a gigabit LAN connection, 9TB of storage with RAID protection, more power and all in it'll cost less than the base Drobo. Still, great review of the product as always.
I think the Drobo is for people that just want plug and play. It's a frightfully simple device that has a lot of intelligent backup that goes along with the Drobo. I think it's a good device for those that have a ton of data and no time to mess around.
Its a bit quicker then usb but i see the point,
I would have thought a proper nas with the option to mirror the data from one nas to the other would have been a better option.
It's certainly a nice looking device, but I can't help but feel it is $300 overpriced at $499 if it doesn't include drives - maybe $299, but that's pushing it.
You can use an open-source OS (FreeNAS, etc) and a cheap PC (RaspPi, etc.) coupled with a drive array case to get identical functionality as this thing for about $100.
Transplanting the platters is also an option.
FieryWingedAngel maybe for someone who has an ISO rated clean room. your normal, run-of-the-mill computer user would never be able to complete a platter transfer with any kind of acceptable success rate.
Nice
Not
Don't leave it on the floor of your wardrobe. Place it on a shelf or shoe rack. Anything to raise it off the ground in case of flooding be it a roof leak or by tap...Cardboard boxes are no good too.
So you store your data on the *floor* next to what appears to be a *water* line???
You might want to rethink that.
This is the easy option, but it's so much cheaper to build a home file server PC with 4 drives in raid 5.
What about an Offsite backup?
I use a cloud solution for all those things that if my house went up in flames I could not live without or cant replace.
like all those pics that you take over a lifetime.
I have a 2 disk Raid in a 4 disk case (expandability) 3TB drives.
you want to one transfer 3tb of data over the internet 2 pay for 3tb of cloud storage. i think his idea is to back it up to this then stash it at a friends.
i do like the msata edition.
im still likeing the wd live stuff
You are really only paying for convenience when you buy a Drobo, and i respect your choice. However, this could be done cheaply with like a hundred drives on RAID 1+0 and a dedicated server managing those drives.
what is the difference between usb 3 and firewire in term of speed?
First off, this isn't firewire... it's Thunderbolt 2.0. And theoretical speed of USB 3.0 is near 4.8 Gb/sec. Not quite as fast as SATA 6 but close. If you go TB2.0, you reach nearly 10Gb/sec which is faster than SATA 6 mechanical drives can read and write. Therefore TB2.0 is really suited to SSD and probably more in line with PCIe/SSD. Of course this all comes with a super high price.
$580 BUCKS?! Plus hard drives. Holy cow. You can do the same exact thing by buying any old computer on ebay, slap Ubuntu and some extra hard drives in there, connect it to you network and you're done. Network RAID storage for less than $100 if you already have the disks.
An old tape station would probably cost the same with the benefit of higher reliability!
i just get the western digital case at fry's and couple drives still cheaper.
Drobo is more than just RAID. That said, there must be a FLOSS "smart RAID" controller.
So Ubuntu can show up as a nas for a windows machine?
Even brand new you can do much cheaper. 12 bay case plus PSU is $300 AUS, Highpoint raid card is $200, then you can slap any amount of drives in. With 12 bays I have 20 TB of storage.
Try taking the mSATA out, it may actually IMPROVE performance. The caching mechanisms aren't very effective.
Have you tried backblaze?
Jason Dial I notice all these comments about using free cloud based services as back up solutions but do these people not understand that they lose all their data privacy?!? seems like that would be one of the most important components when selecting a back up solution, no?
$599.00 USD on Amazon with free shipping to the U.S.A.
so this one can't be seen over internet
It's pretty inexpensive for a raid configuration. A proper raid card can get into the thousands.
why not get a nas drive that way u can use it as a backup and play dlna from it to your tv and it would cost a lot less
important comment 'this video is cool !!!'
whats going to happen if we got single hdds larger than 16tb?
PCGeekProductions it implodes into a black hole.
69/420 would do it
+PCGeekProductions You would have to have 4 separate volumes.
finally not a car cam, got a bit tired of those ...
My last dash-cam video was over ten videos ago, although I will look at some more in the future....but I don't have any planned at the moment.
Beware, hard drives over 1TB have a higher failure rate. My friend had two 3TB external drives and one of them died on him. Movies, pictures, music, files, all gone. My 1TB external drive is 4 years old and still going strong, so I'd say anywhere around 1TB is a good balance of capacity and low failure rate
I had three WD RED drives (3TB) die within two years.
With the greatest respect I would suggest looking at an external backup provider. After some research I settled on CrashPlan (Google and you'll find it) who provide an unlimited capacity backup for about £4/month or 8 years worth for the price of your Drobo. If my house burns down or floods I'll still have my data, I suspect you won't. (No, I'm not associated with CrashPlan, I'm just a satisfied user).
***** I use both. External hard drive to backup my data, and Crashplan to backup my backup ...
***** You're wrong. Yes the initial backup takes a long time but once done it only backs up incremental changes. I've got several TB backed up and I know I can get them back regardless. Learn about cloud backup before venting a useless opinion.
I didn't mention online backup - because this video is about a Drobo 5D. I back up my data in various ways...but the Drobo serves all my media 24/7 with backup for a drive failure. This is a large hard drive in my house that I use all the time. Online/Offsite backup is not used for serving up data immediately...it's a back-up.
Techmoan Indeed you didn't, good call if you are. :-)
The White Piano Key Productions No, it backs up at the time you schedule it to back up and yes, unlimited, go and check for yourself. I gain no benefit from telling anyone about this system, I'm just using it.