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So what happened to the Drobo? #1
Steve Jackson's picture
by Steve Jackson
February 13, 2012 - 7:36pm

It's now another day, so I have to ask.

Joseph, in your post “http://www.apertureexpert.com/tips/2012/1/25/using-3rd-party-apps-with-a… (which IMO is an absolutely super piece of advice - thank you) you said:

“…I work with a referenced library, meaning all my masters sit on a Promise RAID … [and] … For those of you who are wondering what happened to the Drobo, I dropped it a while ago due to a legacy of problems and moved to the Promise. Never been happier with external storage. But that’s another story for another day.) …”

So what were the Drobo problems?

Cheers

Steve

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
February 14, 2012 - 5:55am

Steve,

In short, I’ve had the entire Drobo replaced once, I’ve had every single drive in it fail at least once, many twice, and even when I started migrating away from Western Digital drives due to advice by people much smarter than me, I still had constant problems. The problem were spontaneous dismounts, insanely slow write times, FW800 refusals to mount at all so having to revert to USB which wasn’t even reliable, and more.

You can read a lot of the lead-up to it here: “Spontaneous FireWire Drive Dismounts? You Too? Read On…” from my photography blog. I finally gave up and went to the Promise and guess what… not a single problem. I’ve heard more and more people giving up on the Drobo. Nice idea, but in the end I’m not sure it’s worth it. I even demoted it to a Time Machine disk and even that was too much for it. It’s currently in the closet. Want it? Cheap!

@PhotoJoseph
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Graham Parker's picture
by Graham Parker
February 14, 2012 - 9:15am

Hey Joseph

Sorry to hear your problems with Drobo. So far with mine ……………….not wanting to tempt fate so I won’t say it.
But if you want to relocate your Drobo to a good home I’ll look after it!!!!!!!!!!

Marcus 's picture
by Marcus
February 15, 2012 - 5:12am

I have had mine since the Firewire 800 version was released - I had to make a trip to Australia to buy it and bring it home as no one in New Zealand sold it.

Touch wood it has performed very well. It is now NAS via our wifi link so that the laptop etc can access it, so I am not getting FW800 speed. When I need to update vaults I disconnect it from the network and use the FW cable direct to my Mac Pro.

I also have 4 HDD’s in my Mac Pro which are obviously the fastest place to access as they are on the internal bus.

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