Today, I continue my look into different options for Home Network Data Storage. Yesterday, I examined RAID-5, which isn’t really a system, per se, but it’s important to understand it since most of the other options I’m going to explore are based on the concepts seen in RAID-5.
This time, I’m going to take a look at Drobo.
What is Drobo?
Drobo is a stand-alone external hard drive enclosure that holds up to 4 Sata hard drives in the most basic model, with more advanced models that hold 5 and 8 Sata drives. Drobo’s claim-to-fame is that it is the simplest, most easy to use external hard drive solution available today, while also being one of the safest places to store your data. It offers easy expansion by inserting up to four of literally any size (capacity) Sata hard drive you have laying around.
Simple
Drobo is very simple to use. It’s so simple to use, in fact, that if my in-laws asked me what to buy for good safe data storage, I would immediately recommend the Drobo. These are the same in-laws who recently called me to come fix their printer, and when I arrived, I found that it was out of paper. It took me an hour just to explain how Tabs work in Firefox. Plus, just to get them to use Firefox, I literally had remove every internet Explorer icon from their computer.
Drobo features a series of lights that indicate how full the storage space is. When it gets too close to being full, it starts showing red lights to indicate it needs more space. Next to each drive is a green light that indicates the health of the drives. As long as all the lights are green, everything is good.
To increase the amount of storage in a Drobo, you literally just take out the smallest disk and replace it with a larger disk. Drobo’s lights will even suggest which drive is the smallest to remove. As long as you don’t take any more drives out until all the lights are green again, you don’t have worry about anything else.
That’s right… You don’t have to shut it down, or rearrange the drives, or open a control panel and tinker with configuration settings, or telnet into a root shell and enter special command line commands into a parity processor while crossing your fingers next to a tiki-god talisman. You can literally treat it like an old fashioned VCR. Need more space? Take out the 2 hour tape and put in a 4 hour tape.
The awesome thing here is that the Drobo will automatically handle partitioning the drives, formatting them, adding it to the RAID array, and even moving your data around to the safest possible configuration. You literally don’t have to do anything but give it the time it needs to do it. And yes, you can use ALL of your data while it’s doing all that.
Expandable
Again, this is part of Drobo’s claim to fame. They call this “BeyondRAID” technology. It’s similar to RAID, but unlike standard RAID, Drobo lets you expand by inserting any size Sata hard drive that you have. Drobo looks at the size of the drive, and automatically figures out the best way to integrate that extra storage into the storage pool that it makes available to the user. If the Drobo is full of drives, and you still need to expand, you just take out the smallest disk and slide in a new bigger disk in it’s place, and the Drobo works automatically to incorporate the new disk into the storage pool. This makes Drobo the ULTIMATE storage solution when it comes to expandability…
…right up until you have one more hard drive than will fit into it. When you run out of space, and you have to take a drive out, now you have an extra drive. Odds are that drive isn’t dead yet, either. So, now what do you do? You’ve got this extra drive laying around, and the Drobo is full! Do you buy another Drobo?
Reliable
Drobo is, from what I hear, very reliable. It takes very good care of your data, so you’re completely immune from loosing anything with one complete hard drive failure. I’ve also heard that the hardware of the Drobo box itself is very high quality, and that much thought has been put into things like keeping the hard drives and other circuitry cool.
If I were to choose a Drobo for my data storage needs, I would feel pretty confident that my data is safe.
I should mention that I have read a few report of people loosing all of their data when using Drobo. I’m not sure what’s going on with that. Perhaps it’s some kind of glitch, or massive user mistake, but while it does sound pretty extreme, most users of Drobo seem to be very happy with the devices.
Secure
Ok, this sounds too easy. There has to be a catch, doesn’t there? And there is.
Drobo is NOT a network storage solution. It’s basically a super an external hard drive. That means that you can’t just connect it to your network. Drobo needs to be connected directly to a computer on your network. From there, you can share the storage space with other computers on your network.
But, then how do you control access to the data? Well, that depends on the computer it’s connected to. A basic Windows computer offers workgroup file sharing that is actually pretty easy to configure, though it takes a but of understanding how it works, and a bit of planning as to how you want to set it up. If you want more control, it is possible to turn off “simple file sharing” and do something more advanced, but I suggest grabbing a book on it, because it can get quite complex.
DroboShare
Ok, I lied. You don’t really NEED to connect it directly to a computer, there is an extra device you can add called DroboShare. DroboShare is basically a network interface controller for the Drobo that takes care of the important things like managing the Drobo’s file system and controlling user access to the data.
The biggest problem that I have with DroboShare is that, while DroboShare uses a gigabit Ethernet connection for maximum speed, it connects to the Drobo itself using USB. It’s a lot like driving a Yugo on the autobahn, or trying to fill a swimming pool through a drinking straw. Which brings me to my next point…
Fast
Drobo is not fast. It is basically an external hard drive that connects to a PC using USB. The latest version can connect to a PC using FireWire 800, but I’ve read that only really works for a Mac – Windows machines only really get to use it as FireWire 400. The more expensive 5 bay Drobo S also features an eSata connection for the fastest throughput, but the problem with that is that still requires a desktop computer to run it, as the DroboShare only has the USB connections.
Now, admittedly, USB 2.0 isn’t horrible. It’s fast enough to stream a movie to a media player. The problem is this – is it fast enough to stream 3 movies to 3 different media players at the same time? I have my doubts.
Low Power
Ok, I’ll be honest – I’m not really sure how a Drobo stacks up when talking about power efficiency. I do know that it must keep all of the drives spinning to be able to access the data, but I have read that it can be put into standby mode as needed. I don’t know if this is a sleep mode from which it can awaken automatically when data is needed.
What I do know is that if you decide to connect a Drobo to a full desktop computer, then you have to take the electrical usage of that computer into account when thinking of keeping your data available 24x7.
Quiet
Again, to be honest, I don’t know how quiet Drobo is. I’ve heard it’s fairly quiet. However, because it is primarily designed as an external drive solution that connects directly to a computer, it will tend to be more “in your face” with whatever noise it does produce.
I suppose if you connect it with a DroboShare and stick it in a closet, it would probably be completely unnoticeable.
Cheap
Here’s the problem with Drobo. It isn’t cheap. A Drobo box, without any hard drives, costs as much as a small laptop computer at $350. The more advanced models (that can hold 5 or more hard drives) easily costs as much as a very powerful gaming rig – around $700. The DroboShare device is another $200.
That’s only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that Drobo’s are not exactly known to be EFFICIENT. If you insert just one drive into a Drobo, you don’t even get to use all of the space on that one drive. The Drobo uses half of that drive for “protection”. I’m not quite certain how that’s supposed to work, since if you loose that one drive, you still loose it all, but that’s what the Drobo Calculator at Drobo.Com shows.
If you insert a second drive of the same size, then the Drobo automatically uses the entire second drive to protect the first drive. This essentially is exactly the same as RAID-1, “Mirroring”, which is well known to NOT be particularly Efficient. It’s very safe, but not efficient. Still, your usable space is now equal to the entire first drive instead of just half of it, so it’s still an increase.
If the second drive is NOT the same size as the first drive, then it gets worse, because the Drobo will basically treat both drives as if they are the size of the smaller drive, and then do it’s Mirroring thing. Any space on the larger drive above the smaller drive gets wasted as “Reserved for expansion”. Oddly, if the smaller drive is less than half the size of the first drive, the Drobo’s storage pool actually gets SMALLER than with the larger drive alone. Granted, it’s now protected from drive failure, but it is smaller.
Once you add a third drive, the Drobo starts to use Parity instead of Mirroring to become a little more efficient, but it still seems to suffer from the “Reserved for expansion” problem if the largest drive is significantly larger than the second largest drive. Using the DroboCalculator, I tried to see what would happen with 2 500g drives and 1 1500g drive, and it shows the same amount of space as if I had used 3 500g drives.
Adding a fourth drive finally makes the Drobo start to be rather efficient. But, then again, at this point, the box is full. You simply can’t add a 5th drive unless you own the much more expensive “Drobo S” model.
Data Robotics, the makers of Drobo say that you should expect to loose an amount of storage equal to whatever the largest size drive is. Honestly, that is to be expected. What surprised me the most is that you should also strive to make sure the the SECOND largest drive is as close to the size of the largest drive as possible to avoid wasting space to “reserved for expansion”.
Other Thoughts
One aspect of the Drobo that worries me is that noone outside of Data Robotics Inc. really knows how Drobo works. The details of “BeyondRAID” technology seems to be a very closely guarded secret. I’ve read several articles on how people think it works, but I’ve also seen rebuttals from Data Robotics that are along the lines of “well, that’s close”. What makes me worry about this is that – If the Drobo itself breaks down, you must replace it with another Drobo unit to get your data back. This is similar to the problem with RAID-5, except that when my RAID motherboard died a few years ago, I was able to use just an add-in card with the same chipset to access my data. With a Drobo, I’d be forced to acquire another Drobo box to be able to get my data back. And again, they aren’t cheap.
One aspect of Drobo that really impresses the hell out of me is that unlike RAID-5, when you remove a drive from a Drobo, it immediately starts to rebuild the missing data in the remaining free space of the remaining drives. If you have enough free space on those remaining drives, your data will eventually be fully protected again, even before you add the replacement drive back in. Then, once you do that, it will move the data around again for maximum safety. other systems I’ve read about will wait until you replace the failed drive, but Drobo doesn’t seem to want to wait around.
When I first heard of Drobo, I wanted one badly. The idea of being able to use different size hard drives together in a RAID-5 like configuration, AND to be able to add those drives over time as needed seemed like a dream come true. But, I must admit the slow speed, inefficient space usage, and high cost have really put me off.
If they sent me a review unit, I would be very happy to re-evaluate. I’d like to know if the DroboShare could sustain streaming 3 video files simultaneously, one to my MediaCenter, one to my laptop, and one to my father-in-law’s O!Play Air. I’d like to see how long it takes to rebuild data. I’d also like to see how long it takes to rebuild data while streaming video files. Also, I’d like to test it’s power usage and see how loud it is.
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