![]() ![]() In short, the Drobo S is a single large storage unit that is designed to consolidate your data into one place, or serve as a backup device to store data from multiple machines on your home or office network. If you get to near full capacity, Drobo S will notify you through lights and its dashboard software. Drobo S also proactively monitors the amount of free space available on the unit. During such failures, the system will blink with red lights in front of the unit and will prompt you with warnings (through Drobo Dashboard), indicating which drive must be replaced. Lastly, the self-managing and self-healing features of the Drobo family are very attractive – if a drive experiences a failure such as a bad block, the system switches to a “self-healing” mode, where it will try to work around bad sectors and return to normal state. Traditional RAID technologies such as RAID 5 and RAID 6 have certain limitations and do not provide as much storage as BeyondRAID, especially when mixing small and large hard drives of various sizes. On top of that, “BeyondRAID” has some great features like mixed drive size utilization, which allows mixing any size SATA hard drives, and instant expansion, which allows users to insert additional drives when more storage is needed. While designed with simplicity and reliability in mind, the Drobo S uses a fairly complex, proprietary “BeyondRAID” technology with a single or dual drive redundancy, which means that your data would be safe even if two drives were to fail at the same time, as long as dual drive redundancy was enabled before drives failed. I will do my best to make this review as objective as possible, with plenty of data and screenshots to back up my words.ĭrobo S is a 5-bay Directly Attached Storage (DAS) device developed by Data Robotics, targeted at “creative pros, photographers, videographers, small office/home office”, as stated on their website. Lastly, I wanted to test and see how well the new Drobo S works with the latest technologies like USB 3.0 and how the new eSATA port performs in comparison. Second, I have been working with some of the best DAS/NAS/SAN storage solutions during the last 5 years (from small business to enterprise-level storage solutions like EMC Clariion) and having a pretty good idea on what to expect from a storage array, I wanted to see what Drobo has to offer compared to other similar products like Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. While some well-known photographers have already endorsed Drobo as a photo storage solution, I wanted to see exactly how fast and reliable this unit is for storing photographs, compared to internal and much cheaper single/dual disk external storage. First of all, Drobo products are gaining more and more popularity among photographers and in many cases are becoming a part of their workflow. There are several reasons why I decided to write this review. ![]() I guess I will simply call it the “new Drobo S” for this review. Although the Drobo S is officially known as the 2nd generation unit, my PC recognized it as a 3rd generation Drobo S, so I’m not sure what I should call it. Can it be true that it only works with hard drives? Seriously? Finally, I'm hoping someone with the appropriate technical background can answer this question: Do you really want to be "secure erasing" files or free space on solid state drives? If secure erasing SSD means overwriting it with random patterns over and over, as is typically done with hard drives, doesn't that just increase wear on the SSD and shorten its useful lifetime? Thanks for any replies.This is a review of the new Drobo S second generation 5-bay storage array by Data Robotics. Beyond that, DG is just a collection of so-so utilities. I suppose it has a real-time component, but no Mac user should need that anyway. And why did DG feel the need to tack on a "me too" malware scan? There are tons of those out there already. I can't see why anyone would use "Drive Pulse" (or TechTool's equivalent real-time drive monitor). TechTool Pro always seemed to me to be better. ![]() Even the interface seemed overly slick with all those moving parts. I used to own and use "Drive Genius," but I can't say I ever liked it and I didn't like the pretensions of having "Genius" in the name. ![]()
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