Drobo 5C Self-Managing USB-C Storage Solution Review

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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Today Servethehome is taking a look at the updated Drobo 5C, and it seems like they quite like the device. Drobo have certainly made a name for themselves as RAID devices for people who don't like to mess around with RAID.

If I weren't the type to want to build my own, and I wanted to buy a Drobo, this would certainly be the one to get. This 5 disk model supports dual disk redundancy, a must in my opinion, as well as relatively high transfer speeds of almost 240MB/s via its single C type USB3 connector. It really stands out by having an internal battery backup allowing it to save in-process writes to disk in the case of a power outage, a feature that is usually reserved for higher end enterprise gear.

We will go through the eight pages here for reference, but it really boils down to inserting your drives, plugging it in, connecting your USB cable and installing the Drobo DashBoard software. It is very simple and straightforward.
 
Why are these things so expensive? 350$ for a non nas external bay that holds 5 drives?
 
Hypergreatthing said:
Why are these things so expensive? 350$ for a non nas external bay that holds 5 drives?
Click to expand...

Well, it's not just an external 5 disk bay.

All of the RAID calculations are done on the unit. It just presents itself as a mass storage device to the computer, so it is compatible with just about everything.

It's a functional backplane, has a CPU and RAM in order to calculate the parity for RAID, and it's actually a nice sleek package.

They have also really gone out of their way to develop an easy to use RAID system that you just pop drives into and it handles itself.

Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap, but I wouldn't expect it to be either.

Now, personally I would build my own ZFS NAS server for the money instead, but not everyone wants to do this.
 
Here's the thing about that site. I love STH. I really do. The community is awesome. BUT!

Every fucking review is a 9.x/10. Every single goddamn one is a blinding seal of approval that this device is awesome and you should use it ALWAYS! I've seen maybe 1 or 2 8's over the years but beyond that everything is the bestest thing fucking ever.

This to me ruins any and all 'reviews' that STH does as there HAS to be something that is god awful shitty that comes through their door that they just don't discuss.

I'd rather have lots of 5-7's than all 9s.
 
Bigdady92 said:
Here's the thing about that site. I love STH. I really do. The community is awesome. BUT!

Every fucking review is a 9.x/10. Every single goddamn one is a blinding seal of approval that this device is awesome and you should use it ALWAYS! I've seen maybe 1 or 2 8's over the years but beyond that everything is the bestest thing fucking ever.

This to me ruins any and all 'reviews' that STH does as there HAS to be something that is god awful shitty that comes through their door that they just don't discuss.

I'd rather have lots of 5-7's than all 9s.
Click to expand...


I see what you mean, but honestly when I read a review I don't pay too much attention to the numbers they rate it at. I don't really believe I boiling a product down to a number out of 10.

I read the details. 240MB/s, build quality, easyle of use. I feel STH does a good job at this, even if their number rating scales are a little over optimistic.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I see what you mean, but honestly when I read a review I don't pay too much attention to the numbers they rate it at. I don't really believe I boiling a product down to a number out of 10.

I read the details. 240MB/s, build quality, easyle of use. I feel STH does a good job at this, even if their number rating scales are a little over optimistic.
Click to expand...

I do enjoy the details, they do a good job testing some quality stuff that I end up getting. when i see the numbers I roll my eyes and think "Oh lord this thing shits clock cycles for breakfast"
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I see what you mean, but honestly when I read a review I don't pay too much attention to the numbers they rate it at. I don't really believe I boiling a product down to a number out of 10.

I read the details. 240MB/s, build quality, easyle of use. I feel STH does a good job at this, even if their number rating scales are a little over optimistic.
Click to expand...
I own one and have 5x4tb WD reds in it atm and it it pretty consistent 200+MB/s read and Write's.

Hypergreatthing said:
Why are these things so expensive? 350$ for a non nas external bay that holds 5 drives?
Click to expand...
As guy said above yea it does all that internally and its built to be pretty much anyone can setup and use with almost 0 computer skills. If you build a RAID setup you would have to know a lot about setting up a raid also using same size drive's where as this you can drop about any drives you have laying around and it will use them even if they are different sizes and if one goes bad it tells you, you replace it and it handles all the work needed automatically. For people that are PCper fans, its pretty much Shrout Proof raid.
 
We use Drobo NAS at work for the bottom tier DR stuff. Like when performance doesn't matter... at all. Dev/Testing/DR backups etc. Shit that isn't SAN worthy. For plug it in and forget it, the stuff works, and it's dirt cheap compared to enterprise grade NAS and SAN gear.
 
I have my 5C sitting on my desk right now stocked with 20TB worth of NAS drives and I'm pretty happy. All my disks are in one place, and redundant. It was super easy to setup and I just don't have the time/energy to mess with my own ZFS style server. I didn't need server room level hardware, just something to give me a little insurance in case one of my 4-6TB drives decided to take a dump, I have backups, but backing up THAT much stuff externally wasn't cost effective.

Everything but my main games (GTA5/BF1) are on the Drobo array and it's plenty quick for anything I want to do. Haven't had a single problem yet. Very satisfied and it's worth 350 to me to have peace of mind against a failure that would cost me days/weeks of re-downloading stuff.
 
Never again Drobo, I learned my lesson years ago. Sitll have the piece of junk collecting dust in the garage because I didn't want to have passing it off to someone else on my conscience.

If I had to go turnkey NAS with peashooter RISC CPU again, I'd probably go Synology or QNAP before I'd touch a drobo again.
 
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I own an older DroboFS. I used it for about 2-3 years as my NAS. I lost a drive, it took a while but rebuilt its RAID array. A few months later, I lost 2 drives right about the same time. It was supposed to be able to recover, but it didn't so I lost some of my data. My bad for not having a backup strategy (really, my fault with no backup).
What was not cool - I contacted Drobo support. I believe they had an updated OS available for download. My system was out of warranty so they wouldn't help me with anything. However, they did offer to sell me a new Drobo at a 10% discount and also told me I should be a support plan! No thanks guys.
Besides it failing, I will also say it was damn slow. Mine had a single gigabit network port. It was SLOW. I used it to store photos and videos. Transferring large videos (2-5 GB) took a ridiculous amount of time.
Now, I use a used server I bought from ebay that is cheaper and absolutely smokes it in performance. However, my server is much louder and uses a lot more power...I'm ok with it. It also keeps my basement a little warmer.
 
This review is garbage. The actual file transfer speed in article was 116 mb/s .. Same speed with a good gigabit nas

Also they are testing with 5400 rpm drives? So pointless..
 
blandead said:
This review is garbage. The actual file transfer speed in article was 116 mb/s .. Same speed with a good gigabit nas

Also they are testing with 5400 rpm drives? So pointless..
Click to expand...


Looks like they measured 239MB/s sequential read, and 113MB/s sequential write on their "Drodo" to me :p

Drobo-5C-2x-WD-4TB-Red.jpg
 
Something to keep in mind is that the Drobo is *not* RAID. If your unit dies after the warranty, you're going to be buying another one if you want to keep your data because it uses their proprietary standard.

I hope for anyone who gets this it isn't as much a piece of shit as their old units. Had one of the DroboElite units years ago as the absolute cheapest certified solution for vSphere storage. It was so damn slow that if you booted more than a couple of VMs at a time it would take half an hour or more to boot them up. When called on it, the Drobo engineers told me it was because we were using 5400 rpm drives...the drives they sold with the unit that is. Upgraded to WD Blacks (from before they had dedicated NAS drives, not that it would have mattered) and got 0 improvement.
 
Paladin21 said:
Something to keep in mind is that the Drobo is *not* RAID. If your unit dies after the warranty, you're going to be buying another one if you want to keep your data because it uses their proprietary standard.

I hope for anyone who gets this it isn't as much a piece of shit as their old units. Had one of the DroboElite units years ago as the absolute cheapest certified solution for vSphere storage. It was so damn slow that if you booted more than a couple of VMs at a time it would take half an hour or more to boot them up. When called on it, the Drobo engineers told me it was because we were using 5400 rpm drives...the drives they sold with the unit that is. Upgraded to WD Blacks (from before they had dedicated NAS drives, not that it would have mattered) and got 0 improvement.
Click to expand...

Yep. Their pay-forever support scheme ala Cisco - where you can't even download firmware updates without being paid up on an annual maintenance fee - is pretty obnoxious.

The abstraction layer created by their proprietary fake-RAID implementation is less than ideal -- you're not going to be able to pop the drive into a different unit or attach to your PC and read data if the drobo dies.

The UI is slick, but it ends there. I remember my original drobo got like 13MB/s throughput with 4 x 10KRPM WD Raptor drives. It was comedy.
 
why when linux or even the intel chip raid is so easy and cheap.

Code: 
md127 : active raid5 sda4[0] sdb4[1] sdc4[4] sdd4[3](S)
      3852238848 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 1024k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      bitmap: 0/15 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
 
steakman1971 said:
I own an older DroboFS. I used it for about 2-3 years as my NAS. I lost a drive, it took a while but rebuilt its RAID array. A few months later, I lost 2 drives right about the same time. It was supposed to be able to recover, but it didn't so I lost some of my data. My bad for not having a backup strategy (really, my fault with no backup).
What was not cool - I contacted Drobo support. I believe they had an updated OS available for download. My system was out of warranty so they wouldn't help me with anything. However, they did offer to sell me a new Drobo at a 10% discount and also told me I should be a support plan! No thanks guys.
Besides it failing, I will also say it was damn slow. Mine had a single gigabit network port. It was SLOW. I used it to store photos and videos. Transferring large videos (2-5 GB) took a ridiculous amount of time.
Now, I use a used server I bought from ebay that is cheaper and absolutely smokes it in performance. However, my server is much louder and uses a lot more power...I'm ok with it. It also keeps my basement a little warmer.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the one small business I know who ran these had a very similar problem where it was supposed to tolerate 2 disk failures and recover, but did not. Except they WERE under warranty. They got the EXACT same treatment you did with the minor difference that they were willing to give the owner the updated OS, but absolutely refused to help him when it would not actually install on the drobo. Their answer to that was hmm weird, we can sell you a new one at 10% off.
 
Shaten said:
why when linux or even the intel chip raid is so easy and cheap.

Code: 
md127 : active raid5 sda4[0] sdb4[1] sdc4[4] sdd4[3](S)
      3852238848 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 1024k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      bitmap: 0/15 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
Click to expand...


Easy to you maybe, but these are targeted at average computer users. The "Ease of use" of the Drobo raid management software is a HUGE part of the appeal to most for these.

That, and as far as the on board Intel RAID goes, it is driver based, and runs in software. With one of these it is run in hardware without any additional load on your machine.

Can you imagine your typical computer user trying to rebuild an Intel RAID volume after a disk failure?

Drobo's are not perfect by any means, but they have absolutely nailed the user interface and ease of management aspect of things.

Personally, I do ZFS on a dedicated server, but that's the kind of geek I am.
 
Paladin21 said:
Something to keep in mind is that the Drobo is *not* RAID. If your unit dies after the warranty, you're going to be buying another one if you want to keep your data because it uses their proprietary standard.

I hope for anyone who gets this it isn't as much a piece of shit as their old units. Had one of the DroboElite units years ago as the absolute cheapest certified solution for vSphere storage. It was so damn slow that if you booted more than a couple of VMs at a time it would take half an hour or more to boot them up. When called on it, the Drobo engineers told me it was because we were using 5400 rpm drives...the drives they sold with the unit that is. Upgraded to WD Blacks (from before they had dedicated NAS drives, not that it would have mattered) and got 0 improvement.
Click to expand...

100% agree with you, i have 2 drobo 8 bay nas and 2 12 bay das. biggest mistake i ever made while both das units are ok time to time they drop speed "alot" and its very random. and thier 8 bay nas even the current gen suffer from the dreaded reboot loop. both got stuck in warranty but hey guess what drobo told me to buy a new drobo if i wanted instant accses to my data.

needless to say building my own unraid boxs shifting all my data over ebaying the my drobo junk

seriously stay away from drobo crap.
 
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everyone that has been stung by drobo knows, nope, not now, not ever. don't care if they guarantee recovery. nope nope nope.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
Easy to you maybe, but these are targeted at average computer users. The "Ease of use" of the Drobo raid management software is a HUGE part of the appeal to most for these.

That, and as far as the on board Intel RAID goes, it is driver based, and runs in software. With one of these it is run in hardware without any additional load on your machine.

Can you imagine your typical computer user trying to rebuild an Intel RAID volume after a disk failure?

Drobo's are not perfect by any means, but they have absolutely nailed the user interface and ease of management aspect of things.

Personally, I do ZFS on a dedicated server, but that's the kind of geek I am.
Click to expand...
You nailed it - Drobos are easy to use. Mine even let my use different sized disks. Just stick it in, wait a while, done. It was a decent system when it worked (though still very slow compared to my current storage server).
 
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