Reviews Drobo 5N2 Review

Everyone on /datahoarder hates Drobo for its BeyondRAID filesystem. If the Drobo dies, you're screwed apparently

 

"soul download manager"
Satan's own NAS box?

 

can vouch for this drobo support generally insist you buy a new drobo to try and solve your problems. ive had crap luck with em used to own the orignal 8bay nas. my dad however had the 2nd gen 8 bay nas and he had no problems but having seen my probs with drobo support he switched to a synology nas instead

 

That was my understanding with Drobo - if the Drobo unit fails, it's a case of get another one, move all the drives across at the same time then powerup the new one so it can find the existing drives and get up and running again. So far my Drobo S has been holding up well for media storage, it's very loud and not really ideal but the simplicity of their redundancy system was too good to overlook (as it predated Storage Spaces as used in Windows 8/10). It's annoying that getting the unit repaired if it fails is pretty much out and having to drop another £3-400 for a replacement unit to keep my data doesn't thrill me either, mainly thanks to their propriety system.

The main issue is that the software allows you to set up an initial storage pool but it appears to be a hard cap - my Drobo S (purchased August 2012) is maxxed out at 4x4TB drives and I couldn't make a pool bigger than 16TB with 1 HDD for redundancy - if I move my drives to a newer unit, my understanding is that the existing pool is still stuck at 16TB unless I start over.

It also takes forever to replace a drive - doing so on my Drobo, it takes about 24 hours for it to shuffle data around before it's back in protection mode.​