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The Drobo Storage Robot
February 23, 2008

Background
For those of you that read of about my latest computer upgrade, you may recall that I wrote about still trying to decide on what to do for additional backup of files due to my 1 TB Buffalo TeraStation Pro NAS at or near capacity.

The TeraStation, while having 1 TB of base storage from the four 250 GB hard drives in it, only offers up about 700 GB of usable storage after the RAID 5 configuration gobbles up its share for parity.

700 GB is actually just enough to store most of my current photographic files, but then there’s all the music files and eventually, video files that I’ll need backups for too, plus ongoing new photo files created. To tide me over in the short term, I had to resurrect a bunch of external hard drives and even buy some more, which left me with a mish-mash of storage and a dim memory of what was stored on them.

With the new computer having 2 TB of storage available, I was able to copy all the contents of the external drives to the new computer and take a measure of what it is I actually have and needed to backup and which drives could be set aside for other purposes.

With the TeraStation not being enough, I looked at a few different options, with the mindset of wanting to do away with as many external drives as possible to clean up the clutter on my desk.

1. Buy another higher capacity TeraStation – the Buffalo NAS is slow over a network connection, but it’s a known quantity for reliability
2. Buy an NAS from another vendor and build my own – the specific product in mind is the Promise SmartStor NAS box that you add your own drives in and can configure like the Buffalo into different drive and RAID configurations.
3. Buy a pseudo RAID in the Drobo Robot – like the Promise SmartStor, you get a basic box that you add in your own hard drives

Buying a 2 TB TeraStation would have cost around $1300, which I felt was too princely for sluggish performance. Even if the Promise SmartStor is no faster, I’d save some meaningful coin with this option and buying my own drives over the TeraStation.

Of the three choices, I kept coming back to the Drobo, because it appeals to the cheapskate in me. As I already have a slew of external hard drives, I could easily reuse them in the Drobo and incrementally increase my storage capacity as I needed it and could afford it.

The original idea was to combine two existing 500 GB drives with two existing 300 GB drives into the Drobo and then eventually swap up the 300 GB drives for two new 500 GB drives. As it turned out, I bit the bullet and decided to immediately buy two more 500 GB drives and keep all the drives matched for capacity in the Drobo.

I actually ended up spending a bit more money than if I had bought the Promise SmartStor with two additional 500 GB drives, but we’re only talking about $50, so not a big deal. The Drobo lists for $600 pre-tax at most Canadian retailers that carry it (Tiger Direct & Vistek), but I bought it for a total of $572 including taxes, by ordering through a local discount computer store.

For the two old 300 GB drives, I bought a two-drive Vantec NexStar case to house them. I know I just wrote that I wanted to get rid of my external drives, but here I am writing about buying another external case.

This specific Vantec case appealed to me, because it houses and powers two drives via one power cord and I can choose to configure the drives as two independents or one large 600 GB JBOD (just a bunch of discs). It also has a fan unit at the back to keep the drives cool, which most single-drive, external cases don’t have.

I set mine for JBOD and used it to store all my AIFF music files with the intention that it would feed iTunes on the Acer 9920 computer. Unfortunately, the NexStar’s fan unit generates noise that contaminates the audio signal and is thus unusable as a music server, unless you really like hearing static continuosly through your speakers.

There is also some risk associated with using a JBOD configuration. JBOD is nice for turning two smaller drives into one large drive, but if one drive goes bad, all of the data is gone. About two-years ago, I came across a few reports of Lacie’s 500 GB Bigger Disks dying prematurely in the field, likely the result of a bad batch of hard drives used by Lacie in its product. Those curious enough to open up the box found two 250 GB hard drives configured as a JBOD to create a single 500 GB drive.

While JBOD sounds like RAID 0, which similarly provides no redundancy and security of data, JBOD does not offer the performance benefit of a RAID 0 to stripe the data in half to two hard drives.

Thus, if you do buy a NexStar-like box to build your own, or buy a ready-made JBOD like the larger 2 TB Western Digital MyBooks, you should budget for two such boxes for redundancy and security of your data (assuming you don’t already have redundancy and security).

When I bought the NexStar, I had originally intended for my older 500 GB Western Digital MyBook external drive to be its backup. However, after hearing the fan noise, I reversed the roles and the fan-less MyBook will be the primary music server while the NexStar will be its backup. I also have a triplicate set of music files on the Drobo, so I have at least three sets of files at any one time.

About the Drobo
Opening up the box for the Drobo, I was surprised to see the inside of the box lined with black paper to give it an elegant and high-end appearance. After removing the top carton that contains the software and cables, I peered inside the black innards and saw the black sack-wrapped Drobo (black seems to be the theme with Drobo).

Taking the Drobo out, I was surprised at how small it is; most two-slice toasters are bigger.

The front is a cap held by magnets to the main chassis and is easily removed with a slight pull. Once off, you see four slots for the hard drives and two rows of LED lights, one set of four corresponding to the four hard drives provides a visual status of the drives, while another set below the hard drives indicates capacity – the more lights lit, the less capacity you have.

Installing the hard drives is the easiest I’ve ever encountered for any such device, whether it be for an external case or inside a computer. All that is required is simply pushing aside the spring-loaded lock and pushing the naked hard drive in all the way to the back and then letting the lock spring into place. No screws, no strips, no nothing other than a bit of finger power. Simply awesome ease and convenience of operation.

At the rear of the Drobo is a fan unit for keeping the drives cool, a USB 2 port and an IEC power socket. There is no power switch, so once AC is connected, the Drobo is on. I noticed that when I powered down the computer, the Drobo’s LEDs dim out, but the fan unit still keeps going. I think it would be nice if the Drobo were to automatically shut down when it senses the computer is off and then power back up when the computer is on, just like the WD MyBook does.

There really is not much to say about the Drobo operationally, because it works as desired to provide me with additional backup storage. Knock on wood that I won’t have to write an update about a crash or Drobo failure.

My first round of backing up files had me copy a bit less than 900 GB of data from an internal computer drive to the Drobo. This took most of a day to finish, or approximately 18 hours. In comparison, when I reorganized my files in January, I cleaned out the TeraStation of data and then re-copied over all my photo files in one go. The amount was a little less than 700 GB, but over a 100-Megabit network connection, the time was brutal at over 50 hours to finish. Using a Gigabit network connection would have sped up the job, but given how slow the TeraStation is, I suspect that it would have still taken much longer than the Drobo’s USB 2 connection.

Either way, I still consider the process slow, but I can live with it by timing the bulk of any future backup process to occur overnight.

To my layman’s mind, the Drobo is very much like a RAID 5 box without being a RAID 5 or an NAS and requiring a network and IP addresses and all that fun geek stuff related to networks. However, if you did want to use the Drobo in a network, it’s possible to do so by buying an optional $200 network device (Drobo Share) made by Data Robotics, the same company that makes the Drobo.

The Drobo acts like a RAID 5 in that it takes away one of the four drives for protection, meaning some sort of proprietary method of providing parity in the event that one of the other drives dies and requires replacement, or if you wanted to replace a smaller capacity drive for a larger one.

When I installed the Drobo software (optional, as the computer will automatically recognize the Drobo as an external hard drive via USB) to monitor the usage of space, I noted that I only had 1.3 TB of capacity out of 2 TB with the remaining space used for some overhead, but mostly for protection. However, when I see the Drobo in my Windows Explorer, I see 1.99 TB of capacity. Given the whole purpose of the Drobo is be like a RAID without being a RAID, I’d go with the conservative 1.3 TB figure to ensure maximum protection of data.

Drobo Downsides
One of the knocks against the Drobo is that protection is proprietary and that if something goes wrong with the Drobo itself (not the drives), you’re stuck with having to get another Drobo to swap the drives and access the data. Whereas, with a RAID, if the NAS goes bad, as long as the drives haven’t been hooped, you could setup the same type of RAID as before and get access to the files, because the RAID is not proprietary.

Six to one, half a dozen to another, as far as a Drobo or an NAS RAID dying. I’d still have to spend money to buy new appliances to get access to my data, although, I do acknowledge that you would have to trust that the makers of the Drobo will still be in business in the event that your Drobo dies some years later. Perhaps the best way to protect yourself would be to buy two Drobos at once, or in fairly quick succession, so that you always have another incase one goes down.

Another knock against the Drobo is that it takes a long time to integrate a new hard drive into its array, if you were to replace a bad one or upgrade the capacity. However, a RAID is also supposed to be very slow when it has to rebuild its array, so I’d still be twiddling my thumbs either way.

The more worrying criticism might be that as one nears capacity, the Drobo isn’t quite so straightforward to upgrade and you’ll have to watch how much space you have left and whether it’s enough for the Drobo to be able to rebuild itself if you replace a drive. This is perhaps the discrepancy I see in seeing 1.99 TB in Windows Explorer and only 1.3 through the Drobo software, with 1.3 TB being the most I should use while still being within the Drobo’s comfort zone to rebuild itself in the event of a bad drive or desire to upgrade the capacity.

Nice and clean after I moved the Dell LCD out of the way and cleaned up some clutter in preparation for installing the Drobo, however, if you look further down, you'll see the actual reality, post-installation...

Conclusion
The Drobo is so simple and straightforward to use and it’s so compact that down the road, if I need another storage unit, I’d be inclined to buy another and stack them. It’s helped to reduce clutter and with the TeraStation, it centralizes my backup files into two convenient units instead of being spread out over 8-9 external hard drives.

This is not likely the end of the story for my backup storage needs though. Since I’ve given up on burning CDs and DVDs, there’s still the security aspect of having all my files in one location. The larger capacity 2 TB Western Digital MyBook unit is still of interest to me, as a way to backup my files and be able to haul it offsite in a relatively compact manner, even if the MyBook is just a bunch of discs ;-)

As a final aside, for those with an existing NAS box setup as a RAID 5, you can upgrade the capacity if you swap out the drives one-by-one over a period of days. For example, if I felt so inclined, I could upgrade the four 250 GB drives in my TeraStation with say, four 750 TB drives. I would swap out one drive then allow the RAID to rebuild itself (typically a day to complete). Repeat the process until all four of the original hard drives have been swapped out and at the end of the process, end up with a 3 TB RAID 5 NAS that should offer up 2 TB of actual storage after parity has taken its share.

Link to Drobo

This picture is already out of date, as I brought back the WD MyBook into my arsenal of backup drives. The MyBook sits beside the Vantec case at the left of the Drobo. Four 2.5-inch USB bus-powered drives of varying capacities (40 to 160 GB) sit on top of the Drobo. I use these for short-term backups of my notebook data.

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