I’ve been using a Drobo for several months now and overall am very pleased with it. Most of the things I’d heard about it before I decided to buy are spot on, and its many benefits are both useful and have removed one of many sources of anxiety in my life, worry about sudden disk failure and data loss. I’ve found a way to work around my one complaint with the Drobo, which I’ll discuss in a moment, and for the device’s benefits, that workaround is worth the inconvenience.
If you aren’t familiar with the Drobo, in a few words it’s this: a computerized enclosure for up to 4 SATA drives with special software that manages spreading your data out over all installed drives so that you have the benefits of parity, expansion, and the ability to replace a failed drive with no loss of data. Sounds great, right? It is great, but if you also want a working, day-to-day drive with all those features, the current Drobo is not quite there yet.
I got a Drobo to replace the 4 external hard drives on my desk. I removed the drives from their cases and installed them into the Drobo, which was just as easy as shown on the company’s website videos. The only difficult part, in fact, was getting the drives out of their enclosures so I could install them into the Drobo. Once free, they slid right into the Drobo and that was that. Setting up the Drobo once the drives were installed was easy, too, and the volume was up and available on my iMac’s desktop in a fairly short time, once the software inside the Drobo had done its thing to incorporate the drives I’d installed. I currently have two 1TB drives and two 500GB drives in the Drobo, giving me a total of 1.78TB of space to use. (In order to work its magic of allowing one drive to fail without losing any data, some portion of each drive is not available for the user to write to; the system uses that to keep track of its own kind of back up of each of the installed volumes.) At some point I’ll replace both of the 500GB drives with larger ones. The Drobo will grind away for a while, moving its information around to incorporate the new larger drives, and when its done I’ll have expanded my current 1.78TB limit.
I also like how the Drobo monitors the health of each drive moment to moment. As long as I have four green lights, I know the drives are fine. If I see a yellow light someday, I’ll know that drive will need to be replaced. MUCH better than learning a drive is bad when it’s too late!
I bought my Drobo when the older USB only version was still available, and paid extra for the latest Firewire 800 version because I’d heard from some Drobo fanatics that the new model was fast enough to use as a primary drive. And this brings us to the one thing I wish were better about the Drobo. For just about everything I do, the Drobo works fine as a place to store data. But I use Adobe LightRoom every day, and often for hours at a time. I also like to use several different sizes if image previews, depending on what I’m doing in LightRoom. When I’m scrolling through images and LightRoom is reading many image previews, the Drobo has trouble keeping up. Sometimes a lot of trouble. I find myself waiting, waiting, waiting for the previews I need to load as the Drobo grinds away. That can be frustrating when I have someone waiting for a photograph and I want to get my task done and move on.
So my workaround of late has been to keep my last few shoots on the internal HDD, which manages this task of working with lots of images better than the Drobo. Once most of my work is done on a project, I copy the entire folder (LightRoom catalog and previews, original RAW and PSD files) over to the Drobo for long-term storage. As these folders are often 5, 10 15 gigabytes or more, being able to move them off the internal drive to a secure, protected space like the Drobo is very handy. When I go back to one of these large catalogs, I just grin and bare the slower access of the Drobo, and usually I’m only in to get one or two images and doing a small takes like that takes less time than it would to copy the entire project back to my internal drive, re-link the photos, etc.
So overall I’m very pleased with the Drobo for its fantastic features. The security and expandability without having to copy data elsewhere, format, and copy it back is wonderful. I suppose having all of these great features but wanting lighting speed as well is asking a bit too much. But I have a feeling the next version of the Drobo will improve in that area. I certainly wouldn’t mind have two Drobos!
