Cheap Digital Cameras For Sale: Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21 Review

Average Reviews:
2.9 out of 5 stars

(More customer reviews)I am an IT professional with over 20 years of experience working with storage systems ranging from mini frame computers to the latest iSCSI based systems. This device is NOT the fastest ever storage device.Far from it. What it is, however, is a very elegant storage system designed for the average home or SOHO user who needs a large RAID based storage system that can be expanded on the fly using any drives they happen to have laying around. There is no other storage device (in this price range) that has that ability.

If you are comfortable moving all of your data off of your storage device, breaking the RAID set, installing new drives, repartitioning the RAID set, reformatting the RAID set, and then moving all of your data back because you need more space then by all means choose one of the many available RAID based enclosures on the market that are less expensive. If you are not comfortable with this scenario then the Drobo is exactly the device you need.

The simple reason that this device underperforms compared to those devices is purely based on the calculations required by the BeyondRAID technology built into this device.Drobo have tried to address this performance gap with the Drobo S by incorporating a faster processor. This does help greatly and the Drobo S is faster than the standard Drobo over all of it's interfaces. In order to justify the price gap over the standard Drobo they have added an extra drive bay (5 in the S), the eSATA port, and the ability to survive from 2 drives failing simultaneously.

Having said all of that the performance over FireWire 800 is not bad. I am using 5 Western Digital Green 1TB drives in it (which run very cool) and am seeing 70 MB/s on reads and 50MB/s writes. These drives average out at about 75 MB/s for both reads and writes in most independent tests I have seen.That means my read speeds are almost at the drives maximum.Obviously the writes are quit a bit slower, but RAID write performance is almost always slower due to the calculations required.

Bottom-line is that this device does exactly what it is expected to do.Provide the end user with a painless external storage device that can survive one or two drive failures and expand on the fly to accommodate your ever increasing storage needs. The trade off for that simplicity is a "slight" performance penalty over some plain vanilla RAID enclosure.

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Product Description:
Drobo S is perfect for creative professionals and small businesses with "set it and forget it" storage needs. It's safe, reliable and expandable features make it the best data storage experience ever.

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