Black Diamond Productions

The honest answer from me is that I have one and well I have had multiple issues with it over the past year plus I have had it.

I have the Drobo Pro – Actually won it in an online contest so I am not complaining but here is the list of issues both related and none related to the Drobo itself.

1. Tons of issues with getting iSCSI setup – when it finally worked after about 6 firmware and software / dashboard updates it does work well – but there were definitely growing pains early on with WIN XP especially – it’s much easier to use on WIN7 now.

2. It’s pretty loud – just take it into consideration – I know it has to be loud but if you are putting it in your room vs. an office it is a constant fan drone you will hear.

3. I had massive drive failure issues with Seagate – Not related to Drobo – I purchased 8 Seagate drives for it and basically all of them failed in the first month of operation – Seagate replaced them all but this was pretty scary and I am very lucky I setup the pro in double redundancy or I would have lost data.

4. Speed – Unlike some here the speed over iSCSI is actually good – it’s not like a local drive but it’s good.

5. Virus Scanning – Some virus scanning software will severely affect transfer rates – you can in some exclude the Drobo location – so if you are moving files the scanner will scan them and thus slow your transfer way down..

6. Cool Feature: If you are using Backblaze etc – it will look at this drive on iSCSI as just more local drives and back it all up – that said Backblaze can get a bit overwhelmed with this much data and can cause your system to run slow when it is producing file lists each day. If that happens call Backblaze… I had to re-upload all my data twice so far to backblaze because of issues locally with the config files.

7. Support – Support for Drobo is good – thou in the beginning it was not so good – the people are great but even they did not have answers to the questions I had – after some time we got the issues worked out thou.

Pretty sure I have many other things to add – Watch this post for other issues as I remember them – Sadly one of the issues of having a blog for me is so i can post things so I remember them. To do this thou you need to remember to actually post them in the first place!