Comments on: Drobo Mini, 5D, and 5N Preliminary Review

By: Oliver Kadak

Oliver Kadak — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:13:00 +0000

FS is not an USB drive.. It has just one ethernet port..

By: Thewirehead

Thewirehead — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 01:51:00 +0000

Those Thunderbolt to Firewire adapters only work to use Firewire devices with a Thunderbolt port, not the other way.

By: Anthony Miller

Anthony Miller — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:38:00 +0000

Completely agree about the support. I put an FS in service, replacing my internal DAS disks, for the sole purpose of protecting my data. A week after setting it up and xfering all my data, the file system became corrupted. That was back in August.

Fast forward…they are now just sending my drives back to me after I declined them sending them out to a 3rd party for a data recovery attempt. They are offering a free upgrade to the 5N or 5D, but I would trade that for never buying one and having this issue in the first place. VERY poor response from support. I drove the effort 100% and it seemed like they were almost hiding information along the way.

By: Nick Kessler

Nick Kessler — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Tom. If I understand you what you mean is that if you have a 4 drive raid o or 5 or 1 going on you can take the 4 drives out and put them in another raid box and just go right away? I am not sure if this is possible or not but what I do know is that my experiences with raid’s before drobo were if a drive went down I was in bad shape until a new exact drive was installed and rebuilt (best case scenario) with a drobo you can keep working through that entire process. You can also go find any working drive that is large enough in capacity. doesn’t have to be the same size speed model make or anything. I think that in this case, proprietary is somewhat of a plus! A lot like an apple device!

By: DafOwen

DafOwen — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:09:00 +0000

Different beasts.

The Drobo 5D is an Direct Attached RAID enclosure (so can connect on USB etc)
While Synology make NAS boxes.- which will need Gigabit connectivity for decent speeds.

By: DafOwen

DafOwen — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Funny – PopPhoto did their review just a day before this one ;oP

Would be nice to see a review/comparison of a few NAS and direct attached RAID boxes.
Was looking to get a NetGear 4-bay NAS as it’s WAY cheaper than some of the others (~£150 for the enclosure) but then realised I don’t have a Gigabit router…..

By: DafOwen

DafOwen — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Price + speed according to the people I’ve spoken to.

By: Thewirehead

Thewirehead — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:49:00 +0000

Read below. Yes Scott Kelby wrote a lot of bad things, he has a big mouth anymore… Read any of his posts about Android or Apple anything…

Anyways, I took a look at their Twitter help account, there was an endless stream of people complaining of problems of all kinds. Some so much so that the CEO wanted to speak directly with them.

Seems the general trend is that they have issues. And worst of all is the proprietary filesystem.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:09:00 +0000

I have a 2nd Gen Drobo and it’s embarrassingly slow. So much so that it’s been relegated to being a monthly backup server. After reading your review I was happy to note that they had made an attempt to fix this but then this morning I see that the CNET has voted one of these are the Top5 worst products of the year due to performance. http://cnettv.cnet.com/8301-13489_53-57559330-10389930/worst-products-of-the-year/?tag=nl.e404&s_cid=e404
I’m done. I’ll never invest in a Drobo again. I’m a Synology guy from now on.

By: PaulJay

PaulJay — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:05:00 +0000

Not if the housing is broken. You will need to get a new drobo to read your data.

But Beyond RAID or not beyond. You always need a 2nd (offsite) backup of your RAID.
No RAID type will save your data with power failures, water, fire, theft.
Trust me: All RAIDs can and will die.