Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6652 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Data Robotics
• Model: DRO4DD50
• Released on: 2008-07-21
• Dimensions: 17.64 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Drobo is the world's first storage robot. Data Robotics. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don't have to. No software required. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you.

Your library of data grows every moment now, your storage solution expands in seconds. Drobo holds up to four hard drives, can expand at any time, and supports up to 16TB on a single volume as disk sizes increase. Choose how big you want your Drobo today with any combination of drives capacities. With FireWire 800 alongside USB 2.0 and an upgraded core processor, Drobo is now the fastest product in its class. It is the perfect solution for both primary and backup storage of large media and productivity files such as video, photos, music, audio, and troves of documents and spreadsheets. In fact, even if you're now using USB 2.0, the new Drobo is up to three times as fast its predecessor in typical usage.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Drobo FW800 & USB2.0 - set BIOS on your PC to "legacy usb support" DISABLED
Drobo delivered in very good time but actually abandoned by Home Delivery Network on our rear doorstep in the rain, in full view of any passing stranger (we live on a corner with rear driveway facing the back door) - not the best delivery solution in the world for £400 worth of delicate electronics! I'm surprised it wasn't stolen!
After a couple of days drying out, drobo installed fine and worked nicely. Until, that is, I performed a restart on the PC, at which point the PC repeatedly hung during startup if the Drobo remained connected to it via its usb cable. After a couple of red-herrings involving firmware on the inserted drives (Segate 1.5TB with CC1H firmware are not a problem) eventually found a ref buried deep in the Drobo on-line knowledge-base, suggesting that the BIOS on the PC should have "legacy usb support" DISABLED. On changing my BIOS from its default AUTO setting, all my problems went away and I'm now extremely happy with this product. I do feel it would be beneficial for the manufacturer to make some reference to this potential issue in its quick setup guide though, as this could have been a far more stress-Drobo - 4 Bay FW800 & USB 2.0 Storage Arrayfree installation than it actually was.

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.

Unreliable with TB hard disks and very large files
I bought one of these when they first appeared on the promise that they are expandable without down time. Filled it with 2x500GB Samsung drives and it performed admirably, if a tad slow. I used it to back up machines and the backup files got fairly big and soon it filled up. I added 2 more 500GB drives and was pleasantly surprised when the extra capacity appeared within a few minutes without much fuss. The backup files got bigger ( >60GB each ) and then the problems started: It would start hanging from time to time and needed a power cycle each time to revive. One each power restart, the lights on all the drives would flash amber for several hours, with the warning message that the files are not protected. The problem grew slightly worse as the files got bigger and soon it had reach capacity. I started replacing the 500GB with 1 TB drives, and this was an ardously long process. The drives can only be replaced one at the time and each time, it flashed amber for several days before another drive can be replaced. Eventually all 4 drives were replaced and the backing up restarted in earnest and was met with a resounding failure. The backup files have now reach >100GB and not a single backup session was successful. Each time it would hang after several hours of copying, and after each power cycle, it would flash amber for a couple of days before turning green again. Tech support's only suggestions were always to either reformat the drive or update the firmware which were done every time to no avail. By now the drive was out of warranty, and stupidly, I bought a second one to see if the first one was unique. Sadly, the second one is exactly the same. Thus, the conclusion is to avoid it like the plague if you are intending to fill it with terabyte drives and copy very large files. I now have a proper NAS device with 4 TB drives for a little more money and it works like a dream. The only down side is that I can't upgrade the space without downtime like the Drobo promised.