New, improved Drobo

I have an important warning for everyone for the Drobo device. I just purchased the new one with the firewire 800 for my mac. I also bought a TON of 1 TB Western Digital drives. I have a bunch of digital video and photography RAWs to back up. So I get it, install 4 drives and I get..... 2.7 TB. I call the company and ask them 'where are my 4 TB', and they is so many words, and I am paraphrasing here, that this is a RAID device in all but name. RAID that cannot be turned off under ANY circumstances! You lose approximately 50% of the drive space you install!!! I really wish they had just said that in black and white before I dropped thousands of dollars on this thing. I mean my PowerMac comes with RAID capability, but I can CHOOSE to use it if I want. But with DROBO you have no choice. All the comments about fantasies of having 16TB online - yeah, I was having them too. But the most you are gonna get is possibly 10TB. Of course we have to wait until 4TB single drives are available in a few years from now.

Sorry to disappoint, but as I was searching the web here for ways to disable the firmware or to maybe burn a new firmware with a modified ROM, I came across this forum with a lot of people who were as badly misinformed as I was.

PLEASE pass this along so that other people don't make the same mistake as I did. Its a very painful lesson.

The company also told me that to use it for backups as was the intended purpose in my case, I would have to remove the ENTIRE 4TB drive set, all 4 drives, in order to retain what were essentially 2 copies of my data. A first copy taking up 2.7 TB and a second copy, presumably compressed or something taking up a little less.

I think this is a great item for companies who need online RAID or any user who actually WANTS RAID. I do not see any value whatsoever in having it be hot swappable like they have made it?!?! It only makes it easier to ADD drives as you use more space. But most tech junkies I know go for the max right off the bat, um, like I did.

Again, to recap: The Drobo device is an ENFORCED, NON-OPTIONAL RAID DEVICE that will make half of your bought storage disappear for the second data set.

Go to their website and use the Drobo Calculator, or the Drobulator I think they call it, somewhat cryptically. After I bought it, I went over all the spec data I had read to see where I made my mistake about thinking I would get 4TB if I put in (4) 1TB drives, and while in retrospect there are hints at it, there is nothing that the company says which is clearly stated that you get half the capacity that you install. NOWHERE DOES IT SAY THIS CLEARLY!! And judging from all the posts here, quite a LOT of people are as misinformed as I am.

Perhaps an email campaign to the company to get them to make the RAID optional. I mean come on, its just freakin firmware - we all know that. They can make it a choice. All I wanted was a nice hot swappable external storage device. They are losing 90% of their potential market I am sure, once everyone hears about this.

Thanks for hearing me out.....

Frank

There's no reason to charge $20 at all. Take it back Apple.
Unless it's a new release like going from 1.1 to 2.0, then it should be FREE

I purchased the USB-based Drobo 12 days ago (from yesterday). Had the Firewire version been available I would have purchased that. I went to the Drobostore.com site and could not find a written policy for exchanges or returns. So they don’t have a return policy? So I called customer service. The woman on the phone confirmed that they do not have any policies in place, took my information and said someone would contact me. I followed up with an e-mail via their support form. I found out this morning that they will not exchange it.

Most retailers have either a 14-day or 30-day return policy. I find this to be poor customer service. Especially since they don’t have a written policy online. What if Best Buy, Dell, Apple and others didn't have a return policy? Not acceptable.

You can buy FW400 to FW800 cables and it'll work (but you'll only operate at FW400 speeds, 'natch)

Thanks again Reg, ill be following this devixce that's for sure.

@Reg , thanks for the comment, i am surprised about the virtualization part, that feels to me like there is an other layer of software ( that might get corrupted ) added to the set up.
I would have expected something like hardware raid for savety.

This sounds like the new file system , that is coming to Snowleopard aswell, atleast on the server side, ZFS i think it's called. RaidZ/RaidZ2

The real question is whether or not it supports a 64bit file system structure allowing for Drobo to have volumes larger than 2TB. Currently, the Drobo is limited to 2TB volumes. If you add more than 2TB to the current Drobo, what you actually get is two volumes that show up. So, even though you can have more than 2TB in the unit, you have to manually spread out your data to multiple file system volumes once you hit the 2TB volume limit.

Why no gigabit ethernet? :-/

Having a separate product (Droboshare, $200) is pretty lame. $700 for just a networked empty box? There are multi-drive, gigabit boxes out there for $80 and less.

Seems like a useless purchase because if you want to use this networked- the bottleneck is USB 2 speeds until they update the network adapter. Other products with the same or lower price point include networking/other ports