2011-04-24T21:00:00
Rated 1 out of 5
Do Not Buy Drobo
I highly recommend staying away from drobo products.
I regrettably purchased a bare DroboPro FS and 4 3TB Western Digital Green Drives to go in it.
First I had to contact support just to get get the unit to be recognized by the Drobo dashboard software, at the time the current software listed on their download page would not work with the unit.
The real problem was after the unit was all setup, before loading any data onto the Drobo I was getting write speeds of 32-33 MB/s and read speeds of 57-58 MB/s, acceptable speeds...
After loading about 10-12 GBs of data onto the Drobo the read and write speeds would rapidly start to deteriorate, speeds were cut in about half, once the drives became about half full the read and write speeds were down to 4 MB/s... yes 4 MB/s!
The Drobo was tested directly connected to a computer to rule out any network issues and still 4MB/s on read and write.
After battling with Drobo support for several days they suggested replacing the Western Digital Green drives with higher performance drives and filling all 8 bays with hard drives.
Now to point out some flaws with their supports response...
Drobo sells some of their units bundled with the 2TB Western Digital Green drives, the very same drives I purchased only in smaller form, yet they suggest I not use them?
Their support wants me to spend another $1000 filling all drive bays with drives yet one of the Drobo's key features is easy expansion of space by adding hard drives as needed, I don't think I'll be spending my hard earn money on more drives only to find out that at best it could delay the issue from happening so soon.
I am now stuck trying to sell my DroboPro FS at a loss.
I won't be buying anymore Drobo products and I strongly advise you to consider this review before you purchase a Drobo product as well.
As an alternative you may want to look into a QNAP product, a good replacement for the DroboPro FS would be the QNAP TS-859 Pro+ Turbo NAS, I don't own one yet but it will be my next purchase.
The QNAP TS-859 Pro+ Turbo NAS offers a slew of features and about twice the rated speed of the DroboPro FS and all for about $300 less.
Furious R.
