The Home Tech Podcast: Drobo Special from San Jose, CA
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Jim is with Mario Blandini from Drobo and a visit to their international headquarters in San Jose for the first ever Home Tech Podcast from Drobo. Mario and Jim talk about Drobo product direction, hardware vs software development, RAID usage and even some new product announcements! Drobo is now shipping a new 12 bay Drobo for enterprise business that need more storage.
Mario also breaks down some of the new naming convention for the latest line and talks about the future of expanding Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology. He also covers some of the future when it comes to using smaller form factor drives and responds to the hacking community. Jim gives Mario some ideas of what he would like to see in the future including some tips for the Home Server Community.
Mario also announces the first ever Drobo on Windows Home Server 2011 Add-in challenge. If you are a Windows Home Server Add-in developer and write a successful add-in for the WHS 2011 platform that manages a Drobo unit, Drobo will reward you with one! For details, watch for the “official announcement” over at the HomeServerShow.com after Wednesday night’s live show (10/12/2011)
Love it or $$$$ it, this is a show you will not want to miss.
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Drobo has a lot of issues with performance. The stability and disk replacement is nice, I have one of the version #1 Drobos, and do appreciate the features. However, I don’t like the fact that it takes 2-3 days to reconfigure for a 2TB disk replacement. This is a huge “hole” in “reliability”. Yeah, you can get a new Drobo with 5 disks, and get better stability. But, in the end, the devices, overall, are just too rigid in configuration and too slow in performance to be a single storage solution.
I have to buy other storage that is “fast enough” for digital media production, and use Drobo for “storage”. But, because I now have two places to keep data, I have to make sure that “Drobo Copy” or rsync or something is keeping stuff “safely” in two places etc. So, there’s still no direct “benefit” to have Drobo over some other storage system.
When you look at the extensibility and flexibility of a ZFS based system, using Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or MacOS-X, you get a lot more flexibility in using a greatly more resilient system. Not only that, it is very performant and very extensible to zetabyte (64 bit) sized pools.
Tools to manage ZFS are still immature, overall, for people who know nothing about managing storage. But, that could trivially change. But, also, ZFS disk management is pretty straight forward.
Drobo really needs to focus on performance, and chaining. In particular, they really should build Drobos which have thunderbolt chaining for “expansion” so that storage space can be expanded with fantastic performance. They could still provide other types of “to-computer” connectivity if they wanted, but in the end, thunderbolt performance should be the goal!