To Drobo or not to Drobo?

I’ve been debating how to upgrade my Win 10 Plex machine, which also has backups of my photos, software, etc. it’s about 3 TB. I use an external HDD to backup for offsite storage, as well as using Backblaze for cloud backup ($5/mo)

It looks like a Drobo 5C will fit my needs, since it can also be backed up via Backblaze without having to resort to B2, since that would increase my monthly cloud backup costs 3x. That’s also the reason I’m not looking at a NAS/Unraid setup right now.

Question is, what is the consensus on Drobo? I’ve heard some people love them, but also heard about support horror stories. Not too worried about data loss since I already have multiple ways of backing up my data, but need some opinions before pulling the trigger.

Thanks!

I think you will get a lot of love and hate.

Do you really need a Drobo for 3TB? I would just get a couple of 6TB or 8TB externals and rotate.

You may want to take a closer look at the backblaze support for Drobo. Looking at the documentation, it doesn't appear to be a drobo specific client. It looks like you have to have the client on your local PC and it then will back up data stored on the Drobo. If you want an agent on your NAS that handles everything, the Drobo may not be what you are looking for.

Yeah, I realize that I’m still going to be using the PC as the backup client. I’m looking at the drobo as an expandable redundant storage option, that still allows for relatively cheap online backup, as well as fitting in my existing infrastructure. I don’t want to redo my whole setup, if I can avoid it. The 5c would basically just for storage, not much else.

drescherjm said:

I think you will get a lot of love and hate.

Do you really need a Drobo for 3TB? I would just get a couple of 6TB or 8TB externals and rotate.

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I’m looking for something redundant and expandable, since I’m going to run low on space within 6 months (have added 500GB of stuff in the last few months) so it seemed like a logical step. Yeah, I could get a 6-8TB internal and external drive and keep doing what I’m doing, but I like the idea of redundancy where I can just swap out a bad drive if I need to.

Bigfoot007 said:

I’m looking for something redundant and expandable, since I’m going to run low on space within 6 months (have added 500GB of stuff in the last few months) so it seemed like a logical step. Yeah, I could get a 6-8TB internal and external drive and keep doing what I’m doing, but I like the idea of redundancy where I can just swap out a bad drive if I need to.

Click to expand...

I upgraded from jbod to a drobo about 2 years ago, and this summer upgraded the drobo (5 bay/raid6) to a qnap nas (16 bay).
Personally I recommend spending the extra couple of hundred on a 8bay qnap or a synology, you'll get more bays for the cost overall and be just as easily expandable with alot more flexibility on options.
They even have the option to directly backup to the cloud : https://www.qnap.com/solution/hybrid-backup-sync/en-us/

The Drobo had some quirks about it especially the 5d and 5c models around volume formatting (it wasn't the actual size of the drive it was 64TB the max volume size for the unit.
This made it really annoying to judge the actual use/correct free space available, even though I had email warnings I like to see space increase trending.

Its was an overall ok unit, but I regret not spending the extra money to go with a better/larger bay unit.

While I cannot speak on their DAS options DROBO's NAS options are great for when you want something that, for lack of a better term, "just works". I know a few people with DROBOs and I personally have an FS (bought it in 2012) and so far no problems with any of them.

That said there are trade offs that must be considered. In my experience DROBO's are very much for your average home user (music, photo, and video storage) and not really for heavy use (working with large files/data from device). There are some additional caveats, but from your use case I doubt you will run into them (i.e. volume size limits).

All that said, my next storage solution update will not be another DROBO. As easy to use as it is, I would like more options and customization that are just not offered by any DROBO solution.

Side note: while I am p sure it could do it without issue I have not tried streaming 4k content from my DROBO.