Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14006 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Data Robotics
• Model: DROBO600
• Released on: 2009-04-16

Manufacturer's Description
The world’s best storage experience. Meet your new primary storage, the second generation of the safe, expandable Drobo storage robot. It’s so simple anyone can use it, yet powerful enough for business. Drobo plugs into Mac, PC and Linux systems for redundant data protection without the complexities of RAID. Dynamically expand storage any time

Drobo holds up to 16TB in four drive bays using any combination of 3.5” SATA drives. It comes with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, so you get the data protection you need with the speed and interface you want.Redundant protection, no headaches Drobo provides the redundant protection of much more expensive storage, in a format you don’t have to configure or manage. We call this BeyondRAID™ technology. You’ll call it peace of mind.

Incomparable exandability. With Drobo, buy just the storage you need now and change it as your data grows. Mix n’ match drive brands, capacities and speeds. Replace your smallest drive with a larger one and immediately use the new capacity in a matter of seconds, not hours! Hot swap up to 16TB on a single volume as drive sizes grow larger. Drobo creates one large storage pool. Dive in and eliminate the need for multiple external storage drives and devices.

Plug in peace of mind. Just plug in Drobo and your data protection is all set up. Add disks at any time for additional protected capacity. Drobo can even solve problems by itself. Lights on the front tell you what’s happening – if you can read a traffic light, you’re already a Drobo expert.

Speed demon. Need speed? With both FireWire 800 and enhanced USB 2.0, safety and quick access go hand in hand with Drobo.

Windows, Mac, Linux Drobo connects to Windows, Mac, and Linux* systems and supports NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3, and FAT32 file formats. Everyone can take advantage of simple, powerful, complete Drobo data protection. *Linux support currently in Beta.

Drobo Share - A Companion to Drobo.

The most reliable and expandable networked storage system for sharing your data. DroboShare is the ideal companion to the award-winning Drobo for users who want to share data over a local area network. The combined solution automates network management, safeguards your data and lets you easily add capacity as needed. With DroboShare, users can now access the information stored on the award winning Drobo from almost any client on the network, including Windows, Apple and Linux* computers. DroboShare can host up to two Drobos, allowing capacities of up to 8TB of storage today, scaling to 32TB as larger disk drives become available. *Linux support now in beta.

Box Contains

Customer Reviews

Droboshare Sucks!
Don't be tempted to buy this for the free Droboshare, it's awful! The Drobo itself is great, not quite as fast as a regular USB/Firewire hard drive, but I guess that's just the price you pay for the security of knowing your data is safe.

The Droboshare however is abysmal, firstly it's slow (almost halving the transfer speed to the drive) so don't be fooled by mentions of Gigabit ethernet; it transfers at just barely above 100mb ethernet on my gigabit network. The worst thing about it though? It turns the Drobo into a device you can't trust with your data! On many occasions I have copied large quantities of files, only to have them not appear on the Drobo, on one occasion I made the mistake of moving files and a number of them vanished and were lost for good! Also if you hammer the drive reading and writing files from multiple machines on your network simultaneosly, it will often simply give up and spontaneously reboot itself. No wonder Drobo have the support message boards locked to be viewable by Drobo owners only when they have this stinker of a product (believe me, i've been there and read posts, it does not make pretty reading).

Oh yes, and one other thing, if you're a Mac owner the Droboshare doesn't support AFP, Windows file sharing only here I'm afraid, which will work with a Mac, but not as nicely.

Personally I'm going to ditch the Droboshare and just buy an Airport Extreme, which will do the same thing but reliably!

Its good ... but
Ok.. sooo I do the research and after some time I take the plunge and buy a Drobo. I have to say there has been a lot of thought put into the design on the packaging. Very well thought out and it looks amazing. It a real shame that more thought didnt go into the actual workings on the product.

The ease of use is fantastic simply insert your disks of any size into the bays and away you go. It does the rest for you. The problem is when you actually start pushing it. It doesn't perform well under load and seems to power cycle at every given opportunity. If one of your drive does fail it can take a long time to get back to a secure state (10 hours for about 600gb of data).

My drobo is connected to the Drobo Share at the moment however, the rebooting problem did seem to go away when it was directly connected to my computer.

The apps are a cool feature but remember that they are not supported by Data robotics and you might have to tweek them to get them working.

In summary - Its a good NAS box but for the price tag I would have expected more reliable performance.

Poor build quality and not as robst as expected
I bought the Drobo a few weeks ago after a friend had seen it online.

It looked excellent, robust, hugely configurable and there is the ability to start with only 2 disks and expand as need dictates.

On trying to set it up, the disk would not go into the first slot, and the 2nd slot would not open properly. When I looked I found that a piece of broken plastic in the top bay was preventing the disk from being inserted, and removed it. I also found a small spring was jamming the 2nd "bay door" and when it came free the door came loose from the box.

The top bay would still not accept a disk, and when I looked closer the SATA connecter on the backplane was bent.

AMAZON do not have a replacement service (only a return, refund and re-order service), but I bought this in the UK and had taken it back to Germany, so I called Data Robotics Internationl support. Initially I was told they'd send a replacement and collect the defective one, but when I called back to arrange that (the serial number was required) I was told that was incorrect. I had to pay 20 Euros to return the Drobo to them so they could assess whether it was a warranty claim or "accidental damage".
(I work in I.T. I used to make a living building PCs, I have stripped down and re-built laptops, PCs and Servers. In other words, I know how to handle delicate electronic equipment and it wasn't accidental damage.)

Data Robotic's representatives in Germany, returned a "new" Drobo to me. However, it had the same serial number, and my opinion is that the Drobo I sent them was repaired and returned.

Since then I have had it running .. it is easy to use ... you can start with just 2 disks and others later as you need them ... with the DroboShare you just plug your Drobo into a spare port on your network hub/router and all the PC's on the network will find it "automagically" once you install the Drobo software on the PC.

There is no power button to put the Drobo into standby mode. As such, when using the DroboShare, if I forget to put the Drobo into Standby mode, using the supplied software, before I close down the last PC on the network, I either have to restart a PC to shut the Drobo down, or I have to pull the plug. When it is connected by USB to a single PC, the Drobo detects the PC shutdown,and goes into standby, but it does not work when it is on a network.

I have a Gigabit network, and I have found that if 2 PCs are both accessing the Drobo simultaneoausly over the network it can be quite unstable, there was a point where the Drobo was resetting every 10 mins or so. Further checking online suggests that the Drobo can become unstable while it is rebuilding the disks after you have added extra capacity using an empty slot, or replaced a smaller disk with a bigger one.

Finally, the Drobo has now been running without a problem for about 1 week ... I am hoping it will stay stable ... but I am less confident than I should have been, given the cost.


In my opinion - Poor build quality lets the Drobo down, the fact that AMAZON would not replace the faulty machine let's them down : Bottom Line - Have a look for other reviews before going ahead with this machiine - and maybe consider another, local, supplier for it if you choose to go ahead.