Drobo FS Network Attached Storage (NAS) Review

@ Gordon<br />

Do you experience any degradation of sound quality with a NAS when using memory play of Amarra or Pure Music.<br />

If "yes" do you have any clue why?<br />

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Thanx,<br />

Roger

NAS in general worry me regards to reliability of back ups.<br />

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The best way, and gives me peace of mind is have 2 same sized hard drives in separate enclosures. one is your primary day to day drive that is plugged in all the time, the other as a back up. I back up about every 2 weeks and hide the back up drive away in a cupboard. <br />

i don't have to worry about power surges, theft, or data loss. <br />

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Hi blaine - A NAS is not a backup. If you think of it the same way you use two hard drives then you'd simply backup your NAS and the backup is the backup for lack of a better term :~)<br />

ah ok, thanks for clarification.

Thanks for the review. I've just started getting into computer-based audio after years of waiting for mass storage to get affordable, and I just picked up a NAS over the holidays.<br />

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I really wanted to like Drobo (the concept is awesome), but consistent complaints about I/O performance finally scared me off. I was almost ready to throw in the towel when I discovered Netgear's ReadyNAS family and XRAID2, which near as I can tell seems to offer a very similar expansion strategy to Drobo's BeyondRAID--just swap out smaller disks for larger ones and grow your volume over time. However, the Netgear seems to have better I/O performance.<br />

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I've got a technical background so ease of use and integration was not at the top of my requirements, but when I got my ReadyNAS and hooked it up I found it every bit as simple as I expected the Drobo to be. All I had to do was hook it up to the network and add drives and once the volumes were done building the default shares for "media" and "backup" were visible and usable from both my PC and my Mac.<br />

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I don't mean to turn this post into an advertisement for Netgear, but I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen more buzz about ReadyNAS here. Does anyone else here use this NAS? Am I in for problems I didn't discover in my research, or were there perhaps past issues with ReadyNAS that have been addressed? I noticed the older XRAID scheme seemed to have a limitation where it could only build volumes based on the smallest disk size in the array, but XRAID2 appears capable of utilizing the extra space on bigger drives as they're added, just like Drobo.<br />

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Anyway, I figured I'd share my ease-of-use experience since that was a big part of this review. I'm happy with my choice (ReadyNAS Pro 6) and hope your Drobo FS continues to work out. I really do like Drobo, and it looks more slick than my NAS, but since it lives in another room anyway the looks are less important.

but the QNAP's noise is limited by the noise of the hard drives, the more you have, the noisier it gets I suppose. <br />

As a guess they would be 25dbA @ 1m. The fan comes on now and again when it boots, but other than that, it's just the noise from the mechanics of the hard drives.<br />

If you want to store a NAS where you listen, then the only way to be bug free of noise is to use SSD, lots of them.

I purchased a Drobo 4 bay unit in 09 & put 4 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 drives in it. I've done everything you're not supposed to do to this unit as in removing drives without powering down, unplugging in full power mode etc, etc. This thing has never missed a beat. At one time it would go on a serial crash diet, the new software update fixed that. For me it's simply a back-up for my mac hard drive with time machine.

Hi there, I found this thread via a Google search for Drobo Failed Drives. Reading through the comments I might be able to shed soem light. I've been told that Drobos aren't that friendly to the WD green drive tech, the drives try to pin themselves down to save current etc, which the Drobo cant control. To get around that, set the Drobo to spin down drives after no activity for 15 mins, which is less than the Green drives settings. Seems to work for me and solved the same issue on a friends. On the failed drives front, does anyone know how the Drobo marks a drive as dead ? I had a failed 1.5 TB drive in my FS ( which I'm loving btw) and swapped it out. I ran a drive repair util on it, (Spinrite) then HDD Checker, which fixed the issues, and it works perfectly as an external, writing full and reading full without issues, yet the Drobo wont accept it back. I had thought that the unit remembered the drive fingerprint / serial, but I recently got a hold of a 4 bay USB Drobo, which also rejects this drive. So there must be a data entry somewhere on the drive header telling Drobos to reject. Just wondered if anyone else know of this and if so how to wipe it so I can use it once more ?

Because this is a NAS thread, some of you may be interested in the following post which describes my full Storage / Backup / Verification configuration for 5TB with local and offsite automated back up at very low cost. I happen to use the ReadyNas, but this is applicable to any NAS (or anyone who keeps important digital files with or without NAS)<br />

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http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/StorageBackup-Primer<br />

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I'd also welcome any comments, improvements you may offer.<br />

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Thanks

Has anybody any experience with Certon NAS units?<br />

http://www.certon.de/en/solutions/nas.html<br />

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They seem to be fairly high-end, don't know pricing though. <br />

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OTOH the last thing I would buy cheap is a NAS.<br />

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Daniel

I bought one that arrived a couple of weeks ago. So far I have loaded up 1.3Tb of audio files three times and backed up once. After each load it has corrupted the file permissions so that I cannot modify any filenames or delete files from within OSX. I found Data Robotics Answer Id 462 on the Support Site that said that some users were experiencing this and they would have a fix out soon. That was in May 2011 and there is no update to show that they did fix it.<br />

The Drobo is being returned for replacement but if that screws up too I'm going to try a different NAS. It has occupied to much of my time doing downloads and backups. I don't mind the slow download times (18 to 20 hours for 1.3TB) so long as it plays fine and doesn't corrupt the permissions. So far, a lousy experience.

money and get a different NAS.<br />

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There are so many good ones out there, I am still amazed that people are buying into the "ease" of Drobo stuff. <br />

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I really couldn't be happier with my two Synology NAS units, never had a drive or NAS fail and every single firmware upgrade proceeds without a hitch and has really useable new features. <br />

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I have used many others but have yet to find one that is as good as the Synology for home or small business use.

Greyfossil,<br />

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If you can, return the Drobo and buy a different NAS. I wish I had that option, instead I listed to Drobo support through my return policy duration and now I'm stuck with a horrible product.

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Chris these folks seem to be leaking into the threads more and more...would one of the programs web sites use to prove you are human be helpful when folks sign up? I'd hate to see this lovely site littered like so many others.

Hi bleedink - I actually use several different methods of spam prevention. I use catpcha / recaptcha to prove the user is human. I also participate in Stop Forum Spam. This is a collective database we all report usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses of spammers. This stops spammers from being able to sign up with an account.<br />

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However, the newest spam is coming from actual humans in India hired to spam sites one by one. The latest spam linked to an electronics site that linked to other sites selling electronics with referral kickbacks. I'm tracking down the referral ID and reporting it to the appropriate sites. Not a fun part of the job.<br />

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Forgive the delayed response. Me and my dog were attacked by a pitbull yesterday. We are both fine though the dog has some stitches. I appreciate your response though. I figured you were doing some things--these guys get sneakier and more sinister as time goes by. It's such a great site as I am sure you must know by the number of us who started out here as newbies and are still here! I would hate to ever see this site marred by some of the stuff that has led to the demise of utility and information on other sites. Whenever I think of great site design comparisons I contrast CA to AVSforums. Both have useful advice but the latter is so unfriendly as to be essentially useless to all but those who have time to scour through 112 pages of content. Keep up the great work. This site gets better all the time.

Chris, I see that Drobo have some older 4 bay models at near half the cost and was wondering if the functionality was any different to the newer 5 bay models. In terms of cost, do you think the older models are worth consideration? Thanks

despite some of the comments here, I purchased a FS from B&H, and have had absolutely no problems....<br />

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I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST, slipped three (various sized) previously used drives in, and purchased two new 2TB drives to go in the remaining two bays.......<br />

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fired her up.....upgraded the firmware (pretty automatic)....and started transferring data immediately....<br />

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no problems at all,....not a hiccup in the process.....<br />

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sterling performance by my DROBO FS.<br />

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I don't know what is going on with some of these situations that people are listing here, but if a computer neophyte like me can do it.....anyone should be able to.<br />

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edit: BTW, I can easily stream 192/24 audio tracks to two separate stereo systems, WHILE BACKING UP MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE, using only a TRENDNET tpl-401e network over powerline system......(10/100 only)....so if people are having trouble with bandwidth or the speed of this thing, they need to look to the integrity and speed of their network, NOT THE DROBO.....

Not certain that is true about users as there is nothing to configure. The FS is obviously a step up from the original Drobo or the 2nd Gen 4 bay. In my particular case, the network is absolutely not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is only an issue when using the Drobo. For example, a 32GB file might take an hour or more to get to the Drobo. That same file transfered computer to computer takes say 5 minutes. Over wifi. The former file is over ethernet! Lots of folks on here with plenty of computer experience have been vexed by this particular unit. I personally enjoy mine. I'm quite certain I've never got more than 30MB/s transfer speeds max. Most of the time it is much much less. That doesn't mean I can't stream multiple HD files of audio or video. The actual transfer of data is unfortunate because if you use something like Lightroom and access the files from the Drobo it is much too slow even to just browse. Which makes using it for home directories and the like useless.

all of my audio files are 192/24....and I don't have any that even come close to 32gigs.....<br />

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most of mine are in the 200 MB range.....<br />

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am I missing something here, or are my music files unusually small??????

I am not speaking of a particular file. I am speaking of the transfer of a file of that size. You can take any size file to use as an example. A GB file for example will take up to 3-5 minutes to travel to the drobo. A GB file between computers on the same network takes less than a minute. If I use wi fi to transfer btw the two computers on the network it will still be faster than an ethernet transfer to the drobo on the same network. I just reconfirmed this and it looks like 30MB/s is being generous.

ahhh I see.....<br />

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I thought you were saying your individual audio files were huge, and the drobo would not transfer them without skipping ....... or in some other way having trouble transmitting them......<br />

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I have four computers in the house here, and am (right now) streaming four ripped movies, and four 192/24 audio files concurrently . ...with no skipping, no pixelation and no seeming problems.....from the DROBO.....<br />

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at the same time, I am updating windows and backing up my hard drive to the DROBO, all while surfing to this site.....all using a kind of antiquated ethernet over powerline network....<br />

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I had reservations about whether or not the DROBO would do all of this (before I took delivery of it and set it up).....after reading the opinions of it on this site....<br />

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I am having no problems with mine......(thankfully).....it seems hard to understand how so many other people have had such disasters with it (scroll up).....

I got a replacement FS that seems to work but backing up to or from the FS is so slow it beggars belief. Not sure whether it is because of the number of files that I have but when I spoke to the 2nd level support at Drobo she recommended I used the Drobo S for iTunes which is quite telling. It does stream satisfactorily playing through iTunes but adding new files from CD is painful too.