Drobo and DroboShare — a review

Executive summary: don't buy it.

Convinced by people on podcasts (mostly TWiP and This Week in Tech) raving about how great the Drobo (from Data Robotics) storage device is, I decided to budget two into a project I'm working on. Expectations were high — Drobo marketing pushes the devices as easy to use, reliable and flexible. Being a Mac user, I expected an "Apple experience": plug it in and forget it's even there.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

To begin with, the Drobo is Loud. Not just "loud", but REALLY LOUD. And it isn't the drives, it's the fan that cools the whole thing. To give you an idea of what I mean by Loud, one single Drobo with ultra-quiet WD Green drives spun down is louder than my 8-core Mac Pro with 4 drives and an army of fans in it. It's that loud. To make matters worse, the fan in the Drobo turns on very frequently, even when the drives have been spun down for hours. I don't know why, as the drives are very cool to the touch.

You won't want to have a Drobo under your desk, or anywhere in your vicinity, trust me. And that means the fancy fast FireWire-800 interface that you just paid for is pretty much useless. I used a DroboShare to setup my Drobo in a remote location where I can't hear it.

The DroboShare comes with Gigabit Ethernet, as the marketing will point out. What they won't point out is that it connects to your Drobo with a USB cable, which (together with SMB) pretty much limits your transfer speeds to about 5-8MB/s. That's about 6 times slower than when connected via FireWire-800.

What you should also know is that using the DroboShare will provide its own annoyances. As an example, I found it impossible to create a sparsebundle disk image for use with SuperDuper on the Drobo. Go figure. SMB introduces other annoying problems, too — I couldn't copy my music collection onto the Drobo, because some filenames had non-ascii characters in them.

But all of the above are merely inconveniences. The real issue is with reliability. I bought the Drobo so that I can trust it with my data and forget about failing drives and losing data. Which is why I was slightly miffed when Drobo Dashboard kept crashing on me and reporting unreliable data, annoyed when it hung in the middle of the night when doing my first real backup, slightly angry when support told me my Drobo is defective and needs to be replaced, and really pissed off when the second unit I got corrupted my volume and lost data (when connected to a DroboShare). And then Data Robotics support asked me... whether I have a backup. Or a copy of DiskWarrior.

I have so far been through TWO Drobo replacements. Despite my asking, Data Robotics was unwilling to provide an upgraded (better) unit.

What's worse is that now I don't trust the Drobo at all. I looked closer: the DroboShare seems to use the plain Linux support for HFS+ that is known to be shaky. There is NO FSCK (Filesystem Check) program for HFS+ at all! Data Robotics will tell you that you can switch your Drobo between a Mac and DroboShare and you will be ok — but that seems to be exactly what resulted in my data corruption problems.

Then there is Data Robotics support. When you make "reliable data storage devices", you really need to have support that cares about customers, reads their emails and responds instantly. Responding after one business day is not enough. Given that support people will forget what was written before, or begin by asking what your address is and when you bought your Drobo, it will easily take a week before you get to the real issue.

What you should also realize is that when your Drobo unit fails, there is no way for you to read data off the drives. You need a working Drobo unit to do that, and it has to recognize the filesystem and mount it.

I bought a Drobo so that I can have reliable data storage without worrying about reliable data storage. The net effect was that I got an unreliable solution that I have to manage, worry about and spend time and money on. That's a failure in my book. I will never buy another Drobo unit again.

[... the above was been drafted, and then 3 months passed ...]

So, today my volume (drobo mounted via a droboshare) unexpectedly disappeared on my Mac. Investigation of the DroboShare logs shows:

MOUNT HFS+ : s_id = [sda1] scsi: unknown opcode 0xea SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105544 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638188 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105552 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638189 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105560 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638190 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105568 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638191 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105576 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638192 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105584 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638193 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105592 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638194 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105600 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638195 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105608 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638196 usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 2 SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105616 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 566638197 [...] Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 270838 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 270838 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 276472 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 276472 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806275 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806276 Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806277 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device

Drobo Dashboard doesn't launch, console shows me crash logs for the ddserviced daemon, which crashes every 10 seconds or so. Reinstalling drobo dashboard doesn't help.

I am so tired. I bought the Drobo so that I can save time, not so that I can run around and service it all the time, jumping through hoops set up by "support" from Data Robotics. I can already see how I'll have to spend several hours debugging the problems, dealing with support, reinstalling things.

I am posting this so that people are warned. Hopefully people will google for "Drobo" before buying it and I will save someone the hassle and frustration.

Will I lose data again this time?

Don't buy a Drobo.