We set up a Drobo in a basic configuration of a MacMini OSX Server (2x500Gb internal drives in RAID1) and the FireWire800 attached Drobo. It has 4×1.5Tb Western Digital drives and all lights are green.

This thing is SLOW.. it averages 20 megabytes per second writing however reading is a bit faster.

The worrying thing though is that it is silently and irrevocably corrupting the stored data. We only find out when Photoshop or InDesign suddenly don’t open a file citing corruption or missing plug-in issues. Yes I know about the Adobe best practice methods of copying to the desktop before working and this is done but it seems the damage is occurring in the “down time” between edits.

Time Machine is faithfully backing up the data in its corrupted state so that becomes useless as well.

I see this this thing as a nightmare for businesses as I have no faith in the device to store data accurately over time.

The diagnostics, and indeed any useful information on this device, are encrypted by default forcing each simple question into a lengthy email conversation where we have to email over encrypted data files and hope for a response.

We literally cannot tell what is the problem or if one even exists.

The last round of corruption got bad enough that DiskWarrior 4.2 (the latest) could not even complete reading the drive. This time around DiskWarrior simply crashes the server cold with a Kernel Panic.

Please be careful with your choice on these units as they will go quietly and take your data with them.

T

Overall I really liked the drobo when it came out, but I’m finding more and more over time that there are limitations to it, and it’s always been a concern that it’s their own proprietary system.

The speed issue continues to be an issue on pretty much all of their units. It’s painful if you have the original one as I do.

Anyway, thanks for the post and all of the ZFS details. It’s too bad it’s not more widely adopted by all platforms. It’s hard to see a downside to it.

I haven’t had any problems with my file server, so I’ve had no reason to reinvestigate the world of Drobo. I think they have a good product for certain use cases. Unfortunately, it didn’t meet my needs.

Home storage solutions haven’t changed much recently, so if I did it all again today, I’d probably end up with something very similar.

Also, I just noticed that you’re a RackSpace Cloud Files guy – I <3 your work. Do what you can to get me cname support for my CDN files eh? :)

Don’t use a sparsebundle for Time Machine. The Drobo can be partitioned using Disk Utility to limit the size of the TM volume in a natural file structure. I created one firm partition for TM, and the remaining partition is available (and expandable) to the Drobo.

1.) Disable hard drive sleep function in power options. Especially in a firewire chain; if 1 drive goes to sleep, the chain will break and the system will freeze while trying to resolve I/O errors. This will require a hard reboot.

2.) See 1. If you have a sparseimage/bundle open during an I/O conflict, your image WILL be corrupted. In my case, the corruption was not repairable by DiskWarrior.

most solutions on the market have serious drawbacks.

zfs & opensolaris is the way to go. its free, runs on cheap hardware and it is pretty simple to use if you are willing to spend a little time. and last not least it offers features that are not available anywhere else.

I built an atom-based homeserver with 3 1tb drives under raid-z2 for under 500 bucks and its great. only thing I didn’t get to run yet is the twonky mediaserver in a linux container within opensolaris – need that for linn sneaky ds music player.

other than that this is a totally headache free way to have reliable backups. set and forget.

I have nearly finished setting up my file server. I’ll post more about that process in the days to come.

From my working experience with it I have to say that is has been really good. I didn’t run into the slow transfer speed you noticed, but mine is connected by Firewire 400 to 800 able (I didn’t see if you mentioned how you connected). I did share mine across my network and I was able to run a Super Nintendo emulator off the Drobo across the network and watch 300.

I had an additional problem where my Drobo kept rebooting itself (apparently it prefers to be plugged directly into the wall). Oh and I also got the Green light, Red light, Green light issue, though I did use SpinRite on the “failed” drive before reinserting it. I have a help ticket into Data Robotics. Hopefully this missing data thing is just a growing pain, but Data Robotics should offer some reimbursement if investing in Disk Warrior or a Windows equivalent is required. Any suggestions for a Windows equivalent? Since my Drobo was setup with Windows I don’t dare plug it into my Macbook to use Disk Warrior.