Drobo Drobo S 5 Bay eSATA, FireWire 800, USB 3.0 Storage Array Enclosure for Windows, Mac & Linux

2012-03-07T19:00:00

Bought this to use as a depository for movies, photos, and music. I do daily backups from my imac to the drobo and also from a 1TB external USB drive. I stream movies to my computer and TV from it, have never had an issue. I bought 5 1TB drives when they were cheap and have it 40% full. If you don't expect the drobo to break any speed records it is a great unit and couldn't be easier to set up and expand.

ROB B.

2012-03-07T19:00:00

I used to buy an external drive every time I filled one up, and it became a headache keeping my projects organized. Luckily I never had any of those drives fail. I finally invested in a big storage system to centralize everything, and wanted something that could also protect me if a hard drive crashed. I'm not a techie, so I went looking for the easiest one I could find, and Drobo has been really great. The video where a Drobo is set up a fast as toasting a bagel sold me on it, and seeing the Cali Lewis video. I started with three 2TB drives at the time because they were a great price, and it was enough to copy what was on my externals. I just put 2 more 3TB drives in to fill it up the slots and almost double the capacity. I loved how I popped the bigger drives in and it was all automatic. Gotta say that I wish I would have gotten all of my stuff organized earlier, won't ever go back to single external drives.

DJ S.

2012-03-07T19:00:00

I have no idea what Brian is talking about with slow performance. Could be the cheap drives he used - hard to say. I paid a few bucks extra to get 7.2K drives and have never had any issues with performance. The unit is very fast using either eSATA or USB 3.0 (60 to 100MB/s) and is very respectable on FireWire (50-60MB/s). Drobo's may not be the fastest, but they're fast enough and the BeyondRAID more than makes up for any perceived lack in performance. The ability to mix-and-match drives and simply add a new or larger drive to scale the system is amazing. I actually had a drive fail in my Drobo and the unit recognized the failed drive and automatically put the data back into a protected state without me having to do anything. My entire life is on my Drobo, so it is not an area I like to try and save money. Lots of people say there are cheaper solutions - I'm sure there are - but not any that are easier, safer, or more flexible than Drobo. You get what you pay for and I'm happy to pay a small premium to get the best stuff out there.

James S.

2012-03-06T19:00:00

I use the product for all my home media. The drobo is fast, expandable and extremely easy to manage. I feel so much better knowing my data is safe even in the event of a hard drive failure.

Shane

2011-11-02T21:00:00

I bought this as the answer to my storage concerns. I am a pro photog generating on average 5-20gb of data a week. The Drobo was seemingly well-built, and easy to set up. I used WD Caviar drives. 3x 2tb drives. When the Drobo was half full, it started to move exceedingly slow, but still worked. Then it got even slower. As an example, opening a single folder on the Drobo would take about 45 seconds. Transfer rates were impossibly slow. I had backed up everything to 2x 2tb external drives, so I wiped the whole Drobo and rebuilt everything, slowly adding back in the data. No improvement, the Drobo acted just as before. Then, one of the plastic bits broke off rendering it useless. Drobo had me ship it to them, and they agreed it was faulty, and said it was a firmware problem. Great, just what I want, my RAID-like storage device has a firmware problem rendering it unusable. I sent it to them and they sent a replacement, and I promptly sold it unopened to recover some wasted money. I then bought a Qnap NAS, and have been happy ever since. You get what you pay for.

BRIAN A.