Drobo Storage Systems... Are they headaches for anyone else?

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Far Side

Gawd
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Mar 9, 2000
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Has anyone else had as much trouble as we are currently having with these piles of crap? We've used a B800i and a Drobo Elite equipped with WD "Enterprise" 7.2K 2TB disks, per Drobo's recommendation. After about a year without any issues, read performance on these things become abismal. Support originally replaced our Drobo Elite unit, which still ended up having issues after they sent us a new chassis. After more troubleshooting, the Drobo support tech said the problem was the "intense" IO the SQL database residing on that device was causing. Not sure how a 100MB SQL Express database thats barely used or even running can cause "intense" IO but whatever. We moved everything to a QNAP and all is well..

We are having the same issue with our newer B800i unit. Horrible read performance out of nowhere. The only thing that resides on this device are Veeam backups.

These were both host to device iSCSI connections.

Has anyone else experienced these issues with Drobo? Are they just piles of crap?
 
General consensus here seems to be that the Drobo is rather shite. At least from what I've seen.
 
We played with one as a toy. It is a Well-assembled, Slow, Expensive piece of shit.
 
They are nice looking, uber expensive, slow pieces of shit that eat your data due to a proprietary file system when they die 4 days out of warranty.
 
I heard they are releasing a USB3 and Thunderbolt model, to cope with the slow speed. Maybe that will help increasing the speed?
 
brutalizer said:
I heard they are releasing a USB3 and Thunderbolt model, to cope with the slow speed. Maybe that will help increasing the speed?
Click to expand...

You are thinking of the Drobo mini. The B800i is an iSCSI SAN device connected by GigE. It has a USB port but it is only used for administration purposes, not a data transfer medium. It brings performance suckage to a new level, and charges through the nose adding injury to insult.
 
I have been using Drobos for some time now and love them. In fact, I have two that are still up running constantly for 3+ years so they are just fine from my experience. Others have had no issues with theirs either, easy to maintain, works as stated. Personally, I would highly recommend the Drobos to anyone wanting easy to manage network storage or RAID without the hassle.
 
We've had nothing but problems with our drobo pro. Out of the box it had intermittent iscsi connection issues so we exchanged it. That one also had the same issues on two different servers (one dell, one ibm). Their support is a complete joke and they replaced the unit twice. After the third one was unreliable, and they would not allow me to return it, we stuffed it in a closet for two years and forgot about it. A few months ago, as I was cleaning the closet and discovered it, I thought maybe there'd be new firmware and I'd try it again, since it literally had hours of use on it. I tossed a few 1tb drives in it and put it on a mac server (firewire this time) to use for time machine (the server, not clients). It ran ok for a few days so I put a couple more 1tb drives in it and thought it was fixed. Here we are about a month later and it's completely unresponsive to that specific mac. It works fine on other macs and remember we're talking firewire, not iscsi, so this is brainless. I hate this thing.
 
I had a 4 bay Drobo and the network share device a couple years ago. It caused nothing but problems. I am very happy with my Synology DS2411+, haven't had a single problem with it!
 
Like I said earlier in the thread... The Drobos are well assembled. They look nice. They are shiny. They are also slow, bug-ridden pieces of shit (the entire line, not just one model in particular.)
 
The original beta unit I used worked for what it was... a slow USB storage device. Their solution to the problem was adding a firewire port in the production units. Then they kept expanding, but the performance kept sucking. We purchased a Drobo Pro at work for one purpose only.. disk retention for backups. The performance was so bad that we had to scrap it used an out of warranty, retired CX700 SAN instead that we got from one of our facilities. The device was in storage for over a year not being used, so I brought it home and use is stricktly as a Veeam backup location. Works in my small home environment for what I need it for, but transfer speeds are slow and restores are painful...
 
Wow, Interesting.

I have never used the high end business iSCSI models, but I have had a 5 Bay Drobo S hooked up to my Linux server and serving as the main storage for my home NAS with 4 users now for almost 2 years and I have not had a single problem.

The performance isn't quite as high as I would have liked, but the ability to seamlessly mix and match drives of different vendors and sizes at any time without having to use a management interface (just pull a drive, and insert another, it automatically rebuilds) has been fantastic.

I tried to replicate this with a FlexRaid system a while back, but found that FlexRaid just wasn't ready for prime time. The live version is still in beta (and when I tested it crashed all the time), and the snapshot version just isn't going to cut it for a multi-user NAS.

That, and there is management involved. While the management interface isn't bad, nothing beats "just pull any drive out, and replace it with any other drive".

Since I've switched my server to ESXi though, I have noticed some significant slowdowns, but thus far I've blamed them on ESXi's USB implementation. My server doesn't have VT-d / IOMMU so no Directpath I/O, so I haven't been able to forward my eSATA card to my guest yet.

When I do my server upgrade, I'm hoping this will work, and I'll be back on eSATA with it.
 
Just so that everyone who reads this thread is aware. Synology's also allow mix and match drives with their raid system but the downside is having to click 3 times in the web interface after you swap a drive. I am unsure about the other big names (thecus, emc, etc...).
 
rsbennett00 said:
Just so that everyone who reads this thread is aware. Synology's also allow mix and match drives with their raid system but the downside is having to click 3 times in the web interface after you swap a drive. I am unsure about the other big names (thecus, emc, etc...).
Click to expand...

Interesting.

Maybe I'll check out one of their systems when I next feel the need to upgrade.

From what i recall when I first got my unit, Drobo was the only enclosure doing this back when I got it two years ago.
 
rsbennett00 said:
Just so that everyone who reads this thread is aware. Synology's also allow mix and match drives with their raid system but the downside is having to click 3 times in the web interface after you swap a drive. I am unsure about the other big names (thecus, emc, etc...).
Click to expand...

You seem to be pretty familiar with them...

Do they come in a "local storage" only model?

I was reading the webpage, and couldn't quite figure out their model numbering scheme.

I prefer to set up my own linux box to handle the network sharing part, and thus don't really want to pay for their NAS solution...
 
Even if they work well for the most part, i'm too afraid of the proprietary filesystem. If the Drobo itself dies how do I access my data?

If you want a similar product take a look at Synology. Their NASs can do everything Drobo does and typically have better performance and much better software that lets you install all sorts of third party programs and servers to run directly on the NAS.

If the Synology unit dies, they are just using standard Linux software MD RAID so you could take the drives out, put them in any PC, boot to Ubuntu and mount the Array.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039125008 said:
You seem to be pretty familiar with them...

Do they come in a "local storage" only model?

I was reading the webpage, and couldn't quite figure out their model numbering scheme.

I prefer to set up my own linux box to handle the network sharing part, and thus don't really want to pay for their NAS solution...
Click to expand...

The model numbering is weird, it kinda works like this:

DS is desktop style
RS is rackmount
first numbers try to indicate the number of bays
last two numbers is the year of release
the j series is the entry level consumer model
+ means performance

I have the DS1812+, so it's a desktop style, 18 I think means that it has 8 bays and you can slave two 5bays to it for 18 disks total (unclear), 12 means 2012, and + means performance.

Mine has esata ports so you can direct attach to something and use it as an external drive. It varies by device. I'm pretty sure you still have to manage it via the web interface though. It also does iscsi, I can't remember which is faster, iscsi or esata. I assume linux can do iscsi?
 
SirMaster said:
Even if they work well for the most part, i'm too afraid of the proprietary filesystem. If the Drobo itself dies how do I access my data?

If you want a similar product take a look at Synology. Their NASs can do everything Drobo does and typically have better performance and much better software that lets you install all sorts of third party programs and servers to run directly on the NAS.

If the Synology unit dies, they are just using standard Linux software MD RAID so you could take the drives out, put them in any PC, boot to Ubuntu and mount the Array.
Click to expand...

The drobo techs did offer to extract my data for me when my second drobo died if I shipped them the drives.
 
rsbennett00 said:
The model numbering is weird, it kinda works like this:

DS is desktop style
RS is rackmount
first numbers try to indicate the number of bays
last two numbers is the year of release
the j series is the entry level consumer model
+ means performance

I have the DS1812+, so it's a desktop style, 18 I think means that it has 8 bays and you can slave two 5bays to it for 18 disks total (unclear), 12 means 2012, and + means performance.

Mine has esata ports so you can direct attach to something and use it as an external drive. It varies by device. I'm pretty sure you still have to manage it via the web interface though. It also does iscsi, I can't remember which is faster, iscsi or esata. I assume linux can do iscsi?
Click to expand...

Ok, Seems like they would work for my purposes, still would prefer a standalone unit that does not connect to to the network, only directly to the local machine.

If my Drobo S ever gives up, or becomes obsolete, I take a serious look at the Synology products.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039125246 said:
Ok, Seems like they would work for my purposes, still would prefer a standalone unit that does not connect to to the network, only directly to the local machine.

If my Drobo S ever gives up, or becomes obsolete, I take a serious look at the Synology products.
Click to expand...

Well to be fair, you could connect the Synology directly to a computer via an ethernet cable.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a router or switch in between or even a speical crossover cable.

At least not since gigabit ports became standard.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039125246 said:
Ok, Seems like they would work for my purposes, still would prefer a standalone unit that does not connect to to the network, only directly to the local machine.

If my Drobo S ever gives up, or becomes obsolete, I take a serious look at the Synology products.
Click to expand...

I've always heard great things about Thecus too but the moment I saw them pushing mcafee on their website, I turned away. I don't want to seem like I'm pushing any specific manufacturer, just relaying my experiences from my tiny corner of the planet.
 
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