I promised I’d keep you up to date on this… Jim did get me hooked back up with Support, and we’ve been pursuing this. I thought we had it nailed down to unknown Seagate drive problems, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have solved things. We’ve swapped out the chassis, power supply and most recently the drives but I still see frequent crash-reboots.

The problem only happens when connected to an Apple Time Capsule, so now that we’ve ruled out the drives it’s clearly an issue with one device or the other… but neither logs any errors, and neither vendor has yet provided any sort of debugging firmware.

This is easily the most frustrating technology support experience I’ve had, made worse by being told that nobody else has ever seen these problems. I guess my house is in the center of some sort of technology negation field…

I’m not happy with the Time Capsule for other reasons (can’t change even port mappings without a reboot? Really?), but it was $300 and the only supported platform for network Time Machine, so I’m stuck with that for a while. And the Drobo is a fortune compared to (much less capable) USB RAIDs. So I’m going to keep pursuing this… I’ll let you know where it ends.

–Jered

Hardware raid sucks, and does not offer good protection. See here for hardware raid short comings. In fact, many sysadmins advice against, for instance raid-5:
http://www.baarf.com/

The Drobo has been a fantastic piece of kit for us – I work as a consultant with them (work when required) so the ease of use is a major factor, specifically the use of any drives for expansion which any runner can do if needed. We have been looking at getting a SAN setup within the next year or so and the new DroboPro Elite would seem to fit the bill perfectly, for about half the cost of any alternatives.

The comment about Drobos’ being good for businesses with <=1 sized IT department is certainly on the money for us.

I have the original Drobo connected to my MacPro 2006 – while the performance isn’t stellar, it is certainly fast enough to playback highdef video. I would assume you’re absolutely correct about editing HD being a nonstarter – but playing 1280px wide mp4 in mkv & mov with data rates of 3000-5000kbps works great!

Cheers.

-pmod

1) Firmware absolutely CAN be updated via iSCSI. Curious if you remember the version of firmware used.
2) There should be no reason to reboot the DroboPro once configured. Can you elaborate on your requirement? FYI – I have forwarded the request to restart via Dashboard to product management.
3) Regarding disconnects and data corruption, some very early versions of firmware had some connection issues that were resolved but there are no documented data corruption issues as a result. We always recommend running the latest firmware.
4) Hard drive failure should NEVER take the unit offline. We fail drives all the time in our demos as this helps demonstrate the value proposition. Would be great to understand more about your specific scenario, but there are no known issues with this on any of our products. Regarding hard drive warranty returns, we have a direct relationship with WD and are working to streamline the return process.
5) The DroboPro performance issue being discussed in the forums affects less than 0.5% of the install base as it only occurs under a specific set of circumstances. The fix is in QA and should be released in less than two weeks. A notice on the fix was posted in the forums last week.

If your initial testing was shortly after launch, I highly recommend upgrading to the latest firmware and Dashboard and giving it another go. We have made many improvements in the last seven months.

Jered – Sorry to hear about your experience as well and have to say that it is very atypical. Have you been in contact with support and if so, what was their response? Sounds like a replacement unit is in order. Feel free to send me an email if you like. Otherwise I know how to get a hold of you as I am familiar with the enterprise archive space and know where you work.

Dale – Equallogic makes great products, but there is a need for cost-effective iSCSI storage in the SMB space – especially for tasks such as file sharing, backup, and archive. $10K for a few TBs of raw storage may be cheap to some businesses, but that can be a significant amount to a small business that maybe doesn’t need all the advanced functionality that Equallogic offers. Our DroboPro is available with 16TB for less than $3K. That’s a big difference.

Jim

(Disclosure, we are an EqualLogic reseller)

Although the Dell EqualLogic PS4000E doesn’t come in under $10K unless you get a single controller model, you cannot argue with the performance and quality. A fully redundant dual controller unit will set you back around $12K. Watch the fan noise, you probably don’t want to put it in your home office.

Another interesting product is ioSafe (we are NOT a reseller) which combines high-capacity hard disk storage inside a fireproof/waterproof shell. Great idea. http://www.klsecurity.com

Dale

The 2nd generation boxes definitely had the performance for the target market, users like me who want to protect data at home. I don’t like the mini-RAID boxes because of the challenges with expansion, and was willing to pay a price premium for a path forward to larger drives and an integrated solution. (I used to build Linux boxes for every purpose at home, and eventually found my time to be more valuable.)

I wish them luck: Drobo is doing new and right things with data storage. Some of the expansion features are very similar to what we do at my company. I’m not posting this message under my work email though for one reason:

I love my Drobo, but it has SERIOUS reliability problems. When I first got it, it would crash-reboot every 15 minutes… this was fixed quickly by a firmware update regarding the USB target driver. After this it would crash-reboot daily, and I got into the middle of fingerpointing between Apple, Drobo and Seagate (well, mostly the latter two), nobody willing to do anything to help solve my problem. I finally swapped out the drives to a different model just to try to make them help me.

Now I find my Drobo crash-reboots every 3-4 days. The logs even say “possible OS crash?”. (If you download the diagnostics, they’re “encrypted”. The encryption is to XOR every byte with 0xC3. Why hide your logs from your customer?) Drobo Support is polite, but refuses to do anything like, oh…. gather crash log data!

So now I have a box that I mostly love, but that loses data every few days. *sigh* This gives me great pause in ever considering their business products.

–Jered

Our experience:
-Firmware can’t be updated via iSCSI. Process is to dismount volume, power unit down, disconnect ethernet, reconnect via USB, manually power on, update firmware, shutdown, manually restart, confirm upgrade took correctly, shutdown, change from USB to ethernet, manually power on. Seriously.
-Unit can’t be restarted via mgmt app but oddly it can be shut down via mgmt app. We can remotely reboot the entire office except this device and the copier.
-We had several disconnects which resulted in 2 data corruption incidents, was told by support that new firmware would prevent it in the future (can’t confirm or deny that). While t-shooting the problem with tech support we were told to change the IP address to the one they suggest, had to explain subnetting to tech support.
-HD failed (which happens). First problem is the array went offline and hung until it was manually power cycled. We were told by support this was expected in some drive failure situations…which kind of defeats the purpose of an array. Second problem: we were told to return drive directly to drive manufacturer for replacement even though we bought the unit populated. They aren’t tracking failure rates on drives or warrantying the entire product.
-There are many posts in the Drobo forums about performance severely degrading when the data gets above a percentage of total capacity. Forums aren’t (weren’t?) open unless you had already bought a unit.
YMMV.
It was a great price, we had high hopes and thought we understood the limitations. The sales people were very friendly to deal with when we explained it wasn’t the right product for this environment, which we appreciated.

http://www.infortrend.com/doc/datasheet/ES_S16E_RG1130_PRN_PDS_v1.2.pdf

Seems to be about $6k online w/no drives, takes up to 16 SAS or SATA drives, optional redundant controllers, can scale to 80TB via SAS links.

Myself of course I wouldn’t want to use cheap desktop grade disks. Western Digital RE4, Raptor, or Seagate ES.2 disks, I’m sure Hitachi has something similar as well but I still hold a grudge from the IBM 75GXP issue several years ago, was briefly involved in the lawsuit till the judge wanted to consolidate to only clients based out of California.

I was about to get a Thecus which is in the same market as Drobo I think, but decided against it once I figured out it was using software RAID(N770 at least).

I wouldn’t use an Infortrend in place of my 3PAR, but if I needed real cheap storage they have worked well for me in the past, and have many flexible configurations.

Skeesicks – I think you have nailed the issue with most SOHO NAS. By the time you have added in the software overhead to support the laundry list of features that you may or may not use, you are left with a poor performing device. Exactly why Data Robotics is happy to focus on simple, safe, expandable DAS and iSCSI SAN products that deliver a better overall end user experience.

Veit – Not sure if you saw my comment on your Technorati article, but I did respond to your pricing argument. Happy to continue the discussion if you’d like.

Joe – Always a pleasure to hear from another satisfied customer. Feel free to drop me a line anytime should you have comments on how to make our products even better.

Regards,

Jim Sherhart
Sr. Director of Marketing
Data Robotics, Inc.
http://www.drobo.com