Drobo wants Mac users to "Upgrade your RAID"

I have the Drobo FW 800 version and it's sooo slow. If this is faster than the original USB version, then that version must be almost as agonizing as a dial up modem. This FW Drobo is slower with 4 drives than a single SATA drive over USB 2. For the cost of this Drobo unit, I should have just gone with a real RAID. Maybe the newer ones are faster but I still wouldn't want one after the experience with the FW 800 Drobo.

The one time I did have a drive fail, the Drobo lost all the data and couldn't rebuild the array. Good thing I didn't have any important data one it when that happened. Definitely don't rely on it as your sole backup(you shouldn't do this with anything) because it's not as good as they tout when a disk fails.

I got a Sans Digital 2 bay RAID MobileSTOR MS2UT at Fry's for $160 and added two 1T drives fairly cheaply and it screams as a boot drive plugged in a MacBook Pro with the right eSata card to be bootable (not all are.)

http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2utplus.html

They make lots of bigger models too, this one has a hardware RAID engine, supporting RAID 0, RAID 1, Spanning, JBOD, SAFE33, and SAFE50

The drives mount on trays and can be swapped easily, and the LCD gives various drive info. This one also has USB 2.0 and a similar drive has Firewire 800 instead of eSata.

I have a DroboPro and a Mac and currently I hate the machine!

The reason is that it provokes the famous finder -10810 error and that it refuses to wake up when the Mac comes out of sleep mode.

Currently there is no solution but their engineers are working on it ... waiting for a long time now...

As a professional photographer, I was tempted to join the Drobo hysteria. Then I read the user comments on Amazon- some interesting stories regarding the proprietary method of distributing your data. For far less money, ($400), I chose the 2T + 2T Guardian Maximus from Other World Computing. Running at 7200 rpm and with 64MB cache, I connect with Firewire 800 and enjoy greater speed than the Drobo could provide. All of my Aperture libraries are stored externally on the GM and I download directly to it, manage files, and utilize Photoshop. Backups are made on a secondary drive daisy-chained to the GM.
True, the Drobo is more expandable, but the empty Drobo costs more than the GM that has 2 included 2T drives.
Finally, check out Amazon's current price on Drobo 4-bay. 25% off the listed price. So much for the Mac deal...

I've seen too many reliability issues with Drobo to want one. There are better alternatives out there. Like the Promise DS4600 that Apple recommends.

I'm struggling to see how trading in a device for 10% off a Drobo is a good deal, when the resale value of that device is almost certainly much greater than the 10% I'd be trading it in for.

10% isn't much of a deal. You can get two ReadyNAS for the price of one Drobo.

I have a drobo 2nd gen and love it. It was a since to setup and gives me the protection and redundancy I need to protect my 2tb and growing media library. I have 3 1tb drives and a 2tb drive. I had a failure on one disk and it warned me, indicated the malfunctioning drive, which was replaced, and the array rebuilt itself with no loss of content. It was by far the best purchase i've made regarding my media. If I lost my library of over 1000 movies, 30 tv shows and thousands of audio files, not to mention all my books and podcasts, I'd be devastated. Their customer service is also fantastic. Nothing but positive reviews from me.

Guys, stop bashing tuaw for reporting on Drobo's program; its getting old. Almost everything posted on this site is considered free advertisement, whether it's an application, hardware, or another ridiculous app for iWhatever. I wouldn't have known about this if it wasn't shared on tuaw.

With that out of the way, I do think this program is pointless. What Drobo won't tell you is that their speeds posted on their websites are a fallacy. The point of RAID is high productivity, either in speed, data protection or both. To some people it has that data protection, although they'll never tell you how exactly it works. But the speed is terrible; their complicated RAID system takes way too much processing power of the Drobo itself to output data at any reasonable speed. It will drop frames when playing back any reasonable HD footage (not h.264, I mean real editing codecs). Often stand-alone drives are faster than it.

I did extensive testing on my drobo with tech support with me the whole way to get the speeds up, including replacing it twice. Don't expect great tech support either, they are clueless. Honestly, a standard RAID 5 array is more productive; more space for the same drives, significantly better speeds, and drive failure protection. Drobo is for consumers who don't know any better. RAIDs are for people who know what RAIDs really are meant for.

Wow you guys must receive a lot of money from the drobo people to
write these articles. If that's what pays the bills so be it, I
guess. Your articles are taken with a 50 pound bag of salt.

I don't recall ever reading any articles about any other hard drive manufacturer on this site.