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Western Digital Green drives are a good choice for a Drobo, especially with the Drobo's notorious overheating problems.
I recently RMA'd a Drobo that had 4 1TB WD Green Drives. The Drobo ran fine though data transfers were slow over USB 2.0 compared to other data storage solutions. My guess is the Drobo is a little underpowered both in memory and processor speed when compared to other RAID boxes. Data transfer rates fall off a cliff and the file system becomes unstable as file utilization nears 100%, a problem Data Robotics has acknowledged. In my case, once there was 2.6TB of data on the device, crashes and constant reboots made the device unusable. Weeks of telephone and e-mail support from Data Robotics failed to resolve the issue.
Fortunately, I was able to get most of my data off the device, though it took over two weeks fighting severely degrade performance to do so. Once I was able to remove the disks, Window's chkdsk, Western Digital's diagnostic utilities, and GRC's Spinrite all gave the disks a clean bill of health. It was also fortunate that my Drobo was still under warranty: after a year you must pay for a 1-year extended warranty and you can only update the firmware of Drobos under warranty.
To summarize my experience with the Drobo:
1. Slow on USB especially as space utilization exceeds 90%.
2. Runs hot.
3. Dashboard and front panel lights useless especially if there are problems, displaying incorrect and contradictory information. While recovering my data, the Dashboard was kept offering to reformat the drives!
4. There is no way to diagnose drive problems while the drives are in the Drobo other than running something like Window's chkdsk. If your unit is connected to a Droboshare network adapter, you're totally out of luck.
5. Data Robotics technical support was very responsive. However it, and firmware upgrades are not free after the first year.
Now to address some points from the review:
1. The Drobo's fan noise overwhelms most drive noise. The only way to reliable determine if a drive is running is to take the front cover off the Drobo and place a finger on the drive. This is Data Robotics recommended procedure as the front panel LEDs aren't reliable indicators.
2. Most NAS/RAID boxes allow drives to be hot swapped, added, and replaced while the unit is in operation and data is being accessed. My QNAP TS-509, which replaced the Drobo, even allows RAID configurations to be changed on the fly. This feature is not unique to the Drobo.
3. The one feature that Data Robotics claims to be unique to the Drobo, being able to fill the box "a la carte" with drives of different sizes, again is not unique to the Drobo. Anyone that's built a storage box running ZFS knows that.
To summarize, the Drobo is a relatively inexpensive RAID-like redundant storage solution that suffers from performance issues even when operating normally. Performance issues are especially noticeable when streaming high quality video from the device. When things go wrong, the Drobo has limited diagnostic capability and what it does have, the Dashboard and front panel lights, can give incorrect and conflicting data leading to loss of data.
I know Dave's review was of the WD 2TB drive, but I thought it was important to pass along this information about the Drobo. Based on my experience, conversations at this year's CES, and online usage accounts, I can't recommend the Drobo as a reliable mass storage device.
As for the WD 2TB Green Drives, I've had two running for a couple of weeks now without issue in my TS-509. The WD20EADS is slightly slower than the Seagate 1.5TB Bararcuda and relatively expensive: approximately $295. However, I'm not complaining: of the six Seagate 1.5TB drives I recently purchased, two failed right out of the box. Western Digital Green drives have proven very reliable, I've owned dozens over the last few years.
Posted by
bluewater,
Saturday, Mar. 28th, 2009
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