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!

This will be the first post of many to cover backing up your images and backup in general…. To start Scott Bourne just posted a very good review of his use of the DROBO…. It’s worth a read… Plus they are running a special on them from the site…

That all said it’s not what I am using currently but we can compare and contrast in later posts…

Here is a snip of the article – click the link at the bottom to get the full story and see the online deal they arranged….

It’s simply one of the most important subjects we can talk about. Backup. While photographers often think nothing of spending thousands of dollars on a lens, they’re typically tighter than the bark on a tree when it comes to spending money for backup.

While money is an issue, the other big problem has been ease-of-use. Most backup systems are hard to master or simply don’t work. Photographers often use this as an excuse not to back up their libraries.

That’s got to stop. And here to help is the Drobo, from Data Robotics

FULL STORY – CLICK HERE