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Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 | 
 enlarge | Brand: Data Robotics
Category: CE
Buy New: $331.00
New (13)
Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 836
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 11
Dimensions (in): 11 x 15.5 x 12.8
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: 900-00002-002
Model: 900-00002-002
UPC: 094922723819
EAN: 0094922723819
ASIN: B000PDLZ1A
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Automatically protects your data with no setup or configuration. If the status lights are green, your data is safe. | | • | Drobo The Worlds First Storage Robot | | • | Drobo uses Data Robotics' SAFE (Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable) StorageTechnology | | • | Makes storage manageable for anybody, regardless of computer knowledge or technical expertise. | | • | Non-Stop Data Protection |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, Data Robotics has created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
Does as advertised September 4, 2008
Bob F. (Hudson Valley, NY)
Using this for video backup only. 2.7 TB of usable space (4 Western Digital 1TB drives). Have not had a problem in 2 months of heavy use. Easy to use and upgrade (started with 2 TB and then added 2 more drives later). There is one weird thing it does though and that is whenever I turn on my Mac and the Drobo, I get the "unrecognized disc" message with the dialog box to "initialize or cancel" choices. Of course I always click cancel and it comes up normally, but damn that is a scary dialog to come up every time. What if someone else hits "initialize or I do it by accident? I hope it at least asks "do you want to erase all your data?", but I've been too scared to even go that far. Other than that, no complaints.
 BUYER BEWARE!!!! UNDERSTAND WHAT RISKS THERE ARE!!! September 3, 2008
ROBERT DECARLO (Freehold, NJ USA)
MAJOR CONCERNS YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF BEFORE YOU BUY!
***** Drive rebuilds can take 2 to 5 days ******
***** Drive expansions can take 2 to 5 days (same process) ****
DURING REBUILD OR EXPANSION IF ANOTHER DRIVE FAILS, ALL YOUR DATA IS LOST.
STORAGE CAPACITY IS INCORRECTLY REPORTED. THERE IS NO NEED TO INTRODUCE THIN PROVISIONING TO THE BASIC USERS.
What DROBO does tell you is that your data is protected. BUT they forget to add that if a drive fails, or if you need to expand it, can take a long long time to rebuild the data. LIKE 2-3 DAYS.......and longer as you go from 1.5TB Usable to 3TB Usable to 6TB useable once the new 2TB are available. Why do you care? It's very unlikely, however, if your two drives fail within 3-5 days during the rebuild process you will have complete data loss. DROBO recommends backing up your data, however, for most consumer users who just have USB2, it would take you about 1 1/2 days to do a full backup of 1.5TB of data. Even longer as you grow your data sets.
I will be testing the DROBO Firewire version to see if rebuilds are faster but I would be very uneasy waiting for 2-3 days for my data or my customer's data to be protected during the upgrading or rebuild process.
I think most consumer's who are purchasing a home RAID simplistic storage unit want to eliminate the need for daily backups.
So, in essence, this product is a good fit for people who have large storage requirements, aren't too technical, and want to protect their data from a common drive failure. (and are OK that during the 3-5 days rebuild window they can be in big trouble) REBUILD and EXPANSION times are way too long to risk that amount of data; especially if it's photos, videos, important data, etc....
Maybe the simplistic solution would be to run two DROBO units side by side and to get involved with differential backups using a simple backup to disk software.
I hope this helps
 Firewire vs Netshare August 31, 2008
P. Flood (Castro Valley, CA USA)
I picked up the Drobo when the firewire option was added. I was really excited to try this out and after installing two 1TB drives I was ready to go.
Filled up almost 1TB when I got the need more storage notice. Realized from reading the documentation that no matter the size of the drives, DROBO will use the largest drive as RAID overhead.
Picked up two more 1TB drives and the net-share add on. The Drobo assistant sees all 4 TBs but my Mac's disk utility only sees the original 2 TB partition. This doesn't have any really impact other then causing confusion for newbies.
When I added the net-share option, I thought I could have the Drobo connected locally to my primary Mac via firewire and connect the second Mac via the network. Unfortunately, it is a one or the other option. Either the drive is hooked up locally or networked. It isn't happy if you try to do both at the same time. (Lots of OS X freezes.)
Droboshare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo
So, half of my iTunes collection is mapped to the path created while loaded via firewire and half is connected via the path created by the net-share. Very frustrating when one has over 500 gigabytes of movies and TV shows.
All in all I can recommend this as an easy, safe storage solution but think about how you want to use it before you begin and load with the largest drives you can afford at the outset. The largest physical drive will always be allocated for the RAID redundancy.
Drobo support could be better August 26, 2008
App
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For a product that claims high-availability Drobo needs better technical support. I waited for about 40 minutes to be escalated to the next level when one drive bay did not work. I called back the following morning to see why nobody had called me yet and was told that it normally takes 3-5 business days!!
Until Drobo can provide better support than this you should stay away from Drobo for any critical business need.
Can you afford to be offline for a week or more waiting for Data Robotics to call you back and fix an obviously faulty Drobo like mine?
 An excellent gadget August 17, 2008
A great idea for keeping you precious data safe. A redundant type of real time backup system combined with real external HD for direct access.
Very satisfied with purchase
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