Reviews

Hardware review: Second-Generation Drobo

➡ Updated 1/14/19: I have revised my opinion of Drobo devices. After experiencing multiple, serious data loss events on multiple Drobo models, even recent ones, I no longer consider them safe for my data.

➡ Updated 11/23/09: The new Drobo S is now available. It has five drive slots, single or dual-drive redundancy, and triple interfaces (eSATA, FW800 and USB 2.0).

My review of the new Firewire Drobo is somewhat overdue, but I wanted to spend a few good months with it before I wrote it. I have now spent that time, and am happy to say this new Drobo can be an avid computer user’s single storage device. Whatever reservations I had about the first-generation Drobo were eliminated by this new version, and I can now wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who needs to store a large amount of data and safeguard against a hard drive failure.

Background

You may or may not know that I also reviewed the original Drobo. I published that review in December of 2007, after spending about a month with a USB Drobo, and updated it frequently since then, outlining the various good or bad points I found during my heavy-duty use of the device. Since that time, I became the owner of four Drobos (three USB Drobos and one Firewire Drobo) and found a couple of firmware bugs — I’m not claiming to be the first one to have found them, just saying I also found them — which were later addressed by firmware upgrades. The bugs were an overestimation of used space, and a significant drop in transfer speeds after the Drobo’s used space reached 80% or greater of the total available space. I had a number of different issues with my Drobos, all of which were detailed in my original review, and are now resolved.

I also wrote about the Drobo from the perspective of product design for the consumer and corporate markets. Tom Loverro, one of the execs from Data Robotics, responded at length to my article with some very interesting insights about the inception and introduction of the product to those markets.

What’s new

What is it that differentiates the new Firewire Drobo from its predecessor? I’ll summarize it:

Faster read/write performance thanks to an upgraded core processor and faster transfer method (Firewire vs. USB); slower read/write performance was a big point of contention with the first-generation Drobo
Two Firewire 800 connectors in addition to the USB 2.0 connector, so you can daisy-chain other Firewire devices to the Drobo
Different design for the cooling grille and a bigger cooling fan (the fan, without the cooling grille, was a silent upgrade that was also applied to some late builds of the first-generation Drobo)

Faster read/write performance

The official specs from Data Robotics quote the transfer speeds as follows:

FireWire 800: Up to 52MB/s reads and 34MB/s writes
USB 2.0: Up to 30MB/s reads and 24MB/s writes

I can vouch for the faster read/write performance myself. As a matter of fact, I can safely say that the performance approaches that of my WD My Book Studio Edition II, which is also a Firewire 800 device, that I have used in both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. In layman’s terms, I can copy about 800 MB – 1 GB per minute to my Drobo, while I can copy about 1 GB – 1.2 GB per minute to my WD My Book Studio Edition II drive in RAID 1 config. These are large files I’m copying, ranging in size from 1-4 GB.

If we do some quick math with the official figures, we can see that you could get up 2040 MB or about 2 GB per minute written to the Drobo over a Firewire 800 connection per the specs. In my real world experience, I was able to get about half that, as you can see above. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Again, you have to compare the Drobo with another Firewire 800 device, and I did. If I can get about the same performance from my Drobo, which has to write the data across four drives, as I can get from my WD Studio Edition II, which only has two drives to worry about, then I’m pretty happy.

Two Firewire 800 connectors and different cooling grille

Have a look at this photo to get a better look at the different back design for the new Drobo. You can see the two Firewire 800 connectors, the USB 2.0 and DC connectors and the different grille design below.

Miscellaneous notes

In the other-things-that-are-different department, I noticed that Drobo now allows people to format its volumes in the EXT3 file system (Linux), in addition to NTFS, FAT32 and HFS+, although they do say that Linux support is in beta on their website. It has nothing to do with the new Drobo 2.0 hardware, as this involved a firmware upgrade and a Drobo Dashboard upgrade, not a parts upgrade, but it’s a pretty cool move on Data Robotics’ part.

Another thing that looks a bit different is the power supply. The original one was a simple plastic brick, but the new one has a line motif going across it, parallel to its long axis. This newer power supply was also shipped with some of the late builds of the previous-generation USB Drobo.

If you look at one of the photos I posted above, the one of the new Drobo’s back, you’ll see a Reset slot. Can you see it, to the left of the FW800 connectors? It was present on the back of the original USB Drobo as well, to the left of its main (and only) USB connector. Sure enough, there’s even a tech note about it, which explains how to wipe the Drobo clean. This means it’s a dangerous little slot, so don’t use it unless you really mean it.

I never got around to posting the Drobo’s dimensions in my original review, so here they are. They haven’t changed with the new Drobo. I like the form factor, I hope it keeps staying the same. In all likelihood, it will stay the same for this four-drive version of the Drobo. I know, thanks to a product survey sent out to selected Drobo customers, that Data Robotics is thinking about or working on an 8-drive and possibly a 16-drive version of the Drobo, one of which (or both) is rack-mountable. Those should be some very interesting products for the enterprise or for those with larger storage needs than what the four-drive Drobo can provide. I understand that Data Robotics is also working on the capability to safeguard against two drive failures in those larger Drobo models, which should be a very cool feature indeed.

In terms of storage flexibility and the safety of one’s data, I believe the Drobo is unmatched. There is no other product like it on the market. The only thing that’s holding it back at the moment, storage-wise, is the capability of the hard drives themselves. Only recently have the problems present in the 1.5TB drives from Seagate been worked out, and only in recent weeks have I seen 1.5TB and 2TB drives from other manufacturers like Samsung and WD. This means, according to the Drobolator, that you can get up to 5.5TB of disk space on a single Drobo unit, which is pretty amazing, but still far from the 16TB limit. I think 16TB is a lot of space to get from a single device, and it should suffice for the needs of most people for the next few years.

Cheers to the new and improved Firewire Drobo!

The Drobo is available for purchase from Amazon or B&H Photo.

Images used courtesy of Data Robotics.

Lists

Gadget Monday – March 16, 2009

Here are this week’s seven cool gadgets. Did you see last week’s edition?

SwissBike XO

A foldable mountain bike with 26″ standard wheels. It can be folded or unfolded within 30 seconds, and even fits inside the trunk of a MINI (a definite plus for me). It’s got a front suspension fork, 27 speeds and disk brakes to boot. Total weight is 27 lbs, but the price stings at just under $2,300.

[via LikeCool and SwissBike]

Novanta Workstation by Luke Riggall

This well-designed aluminum and steel work desk has a bevy of features that set it apart from others. It has, among other things, cable channels, a built-in all-in-one computer or display stand, a built-in iPod dock, USB and audio hub, speaker grilles with integrated speakers, and a built-in power strip. Very nice indeed!

[via Yanko Design]

Promotional: Play your favorite tunes with an iPod alarm clock CD player.

Hangchair by Studio Niels & Sven

It’s a chair and hanger in one. Now you can hang your coat and shirt on the back, and even hang the chair away in a closet if you need the floorspace.

[via LikeCool and Studio Niels en Sven]

Beetle Cycle Helmet

Finally, a bike helmet that folds so it’s easy to carry around!

[via The Design Blog]

Ice Invaders ice cubes

Simple, retro and cool. A pure silicone ice cube tray that makes cubes in the shape of the little Space Invaders critters from the video game.

[via LikeCool and Fred&Friends]

Sylvania ECOlight

A water-power LED light for your shower. It’s powered by the water flow itself, so it needs no batteries. It has a built-in temperature sensor, so it turns blue if the water is cold, or red if the water is hot. Cool stuff!

[via The Design Blog and Osram Sylvania]

My Paper Bag by Ramon Middelkoop

It looks like a paper bag, but it’s made out of leather. The design is very nice and useful too, but I worry about the suede finish, which could get stained as you start carrying stuff around in the bag.

[via LikeCool]

Places

The Crystal Trio in Venice

The Crystal Trio are a Russian group from Siberia who play on special instruments made of glass: the verrophone, the glass harp, and the glass flute. The glass harp is the key instrument used in their performances, and it consists of a series of glasses arranged in rows; they vary in size and in the amount of distilled water present in each glass.

The members of the group are Igor Sklyarov, Vladimir Perminov and Vladimir Popras. We saw them in Venice, Italy, during one of their street performances in the weekend of the annual Venice Carnival. They perform classical pieces, which sound amazing when played on their glass instruments. I recorded a short segment from their street performance, which can be seen here. At the end of the clip, you can see my wife walk toward them. She bought one of their DVDs.

See this video on blip.tv, Vimeo or YouTube

Lists

Condensed Knowledge – March 15, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

Thoughts

The future is the past is the future

Back in late 2008, I heard of a technology that was touted as new: instant price matches, made available by scanning the barcode of a product in a store, through an iPhone app called Checkout SmartShop. I chuckled. This idea wasn’t new at all.

I worked for a company called BarPoint for a few months in 2000 or 2001, I can’t recall exactly. As you can see if you visit their domain name, it’s up for sale now. Back then, it was working just fine, and they were working hard to put together an online directory of products whose prices could be instantly matched from many stores. They even had gizmos with little barcode scanners you coud buy and carry with you to a store; they were little Palm PDAs outfitted with small add-on barcode scanners. These gizmos would connect back to the BarPoint servers via built-in dial-up modems, and would quote you prices from other stores.

They had investors lined up, had cleared about two rounds of investing, had bonafide employees, etc. Unfortunately for them, it was the end of the dotcom boom. They were still burning through the cash and not generating any profits, because they didn’t get off the ground fast enough. I left as they started to cut employees. Other co-workers hung on through a company move from nice offices in downtown Ft. Lauderdale to a warehouse in Deerfield Beach (both in South Florida), and many efforts to revive the company. Things didn’t work out for them. You’re welcome to follow the site’s progress and slow death on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

What is obvious now is that they had two things going against them: the idea was ahead of its time, and the market crashed. Back then, this wasn’t so obvious. People thought the idea was cool and wanted to make it work. I thought it was cool and even thought they might somehow pull it together and start making profits, even after I left. I bought some stock in the company, only to watch its price sink to very near $0 over time.

The interesting thing about the iPhone is that it’s truly a game-changer. It penetrated the market quickly, and app development for it is so easy that you don’t need an army of people, like BarPoint did. You also don’t need to sell the devices, or worry that device adoption is reserved for a very small segment of the market. The iPhone is practically everywhere. I don’t even know if Kigi Software, the makers of the Checkout SmartShop, is a real company, or a dba name for one or two smart developers working from home. But that’s what’s cool about these times. The price for bringing an interesting product to the market is no longer prohibitive, like it was for BarPoint. Almost anyone can do it if they want to, nowadays. And the end product is something that kicks BarPoint in the rear quite effectively.

You simply enter the barcode into the iPhone using the numeric keypad, and you get instant price matches. Voila.

You can even find out where the product is being sold in other local stores, or read online reviews. It does everything the BarPoint product would have done if it could have gotten off the ground.

Very nice indeed.

Raoul Pop

One man's life