Agree. And you can do a secondary back up of the Mac and its direct-attached drives inexpensively to BackBlaze. It does not get much easier than that.
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Having been in charge of a few Drobos and looking into support after problems arise, the consensus I found was move to another platform. Find another RAID situation, I will being as well next time I need one.
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I found Beatles wallpaper on Ebay! So you can find darn near anything there.
But with electronics be careful. Be sure to check their feedback. Sometimes mega sellers are the biggest crooks. Ebay has a money back guarantee so don’t let anyone snowjob you.
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I ended up with a 4-bay Synology, coming on Sunday. Also bought a 14-TB hard drive to back up the Synology. Data transfer starts Sunday; we’ll see how it progresses.
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For me my Drobo 5D3 has been faultless since purchase in 2018 and overall I do like the solution.
NAS is great, but for large file workflow it just doesn’t cut it. My use case requires a DAS, and Drobo offers the best solution still.
I’ve been burnt by software RAID previously, so would rather a hardware RAID solution, Drobo is truely foolproof (I’ve done a pile of server builds with RAID in my time).
I’m also concerned about The future of Drobo (part of StoreCentric), so now considering other options.
To give me piece of mind, I ensure I have a second local copy of my Drobo to cover failure (as well as Backblaze online backup), my photos are also replicated into Google Photos (nothing better for finding that “one” photo). I’ve also got a Drobo maintenance plan, was reasonably priced). I’m also lucky to have a friend near who also has a Drobo, so could extract data that was in a pinch).
When my Drobo no longer suits my needs or it can’t be fixed, I’m honestly not sure what I’ll do. NAS, DAS or a few disks with that I sync via scripts), but it’s likely nothing will offer the same simplicity (and yes that comes with a trade-off).
I agree, like the Drobo’s. I wasn’t prepared for the possibility the Drobo itself would fail and not the associated hard drives. Otherwise i would have bought another external drive to back up the data a long time ago.
i was ready to plunk dollars down for another Drobo - 5N2 - and was happy to see the improvements in it from the 5N. But with nothing for sale and had nothing for sale since about October or November of last year, along with Twitter updates from them (we’ll have a few Drobo’s to sell in August…), it just didn’t seem a viable platform any more.
Besides, I had the dead Drobo since Memorial Day and there is only so long I’m willing to go with no backups outside of Backblaze.
I’m happy with where I am today. My Synology is being delivered today and we’ll start the transition. Should be interesting.
Thanks for the comment.
Let us know how your transition to NAS goes, good luck!
Also thanks for sharing details about Drobo, I had no idea supply was such an issue, and I agree with the thinking they are in trouble.
So I might end up joining you at any point!
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I’ve been much happier with my Synology NAS after moving off a Drobo 5N. Better software, more reliable connections from devices, and much more functionality that I’m gradually taking advantage of.
I know this an oversimplification, but from here Drobo seemed to be hardware company that software was an add-on, while Synology seems to be the opposite.
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If you don’t need the fault tolerance of RAID then a JBOD enclosure is more than adequate for directly attached storage. I don’t need that level of fault tolerance so RAID isn’t part of my strategy. Others can’t afford the downtime. YMMV
Hi nlippman do you still have the 5d3 drobo to sell? thank you in advance
@frankiegallo32 No, sorry. I sold all of my Drobos on eBay a few years ago. Good luck. I hope you can find what you need.
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I’m surprised Drobo’s even still around. I used one for a number of years at work. When they (work) finally upgraded my workstation to an M1 MacBook, I had to a) downgrade the security settings to get the Drobo to play nice, and b) it—hardware or software, I’m not sure—caused random lockups and reboots 2–3 times per week. I spoke w/ IT and got them to allocate enough space on the NAS for a backup, sent a second backup to OneDrive, and use a 2 TB SanDisk SSD for extra protection. Certainly not as elegant as the Drobo once was, especially since I could use Time Machine, but their lack of stock, support, and upgrades tells me the writing’s on the wall.
They aren’t really still around. They have announced that they are no longer providing support (software or hardware) and have “transitioned to a self-service model.”
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Neal, would you happen to have that Drobo 5D3 till for sale? Mine died this morning… and I need a replacement to access my data.
Edit: Nevermind, just saw your answer!
So my Drobo 5D3 was working just fine with my Mac this past week, I shut it down Friday night and then this Saturday morning I wanted to switch it on… and only the Fan is running. The Drobo itself won’t power on, the power brick is working fine (tried another power cable just to be sure) but no luck. I removed the hard drives, tried to re-set the Drobo, and everything else which I found online, and still nothing works.
Finding out Drobo went into Liquidation in Januar 2023 means I don’t need to expect help from them, so I hope someone here might either help me find out what’s wrong with my Drobo & help me fix it, or then maybe has a working but un-used Drobo 5D3 or Drobo 8 standing around which I could buy so that I can rescue my data.
While I have no experience with recovering data from Drobo drives, I notice from a quick Google search there are articles (and products?) out there that will do this on another computer. I’m guessing that as the drives are striped into RAID, makes things more complicated than just connecting to another computer that can read the file system. Dunno. If you don’t find another Drobo device this might be your way out.
I had Drobo for a number of years, based on strong recommendations from a “well known” Mac podcast. After a few years of struggling with their [weird?] software and the device kept reporting the drives were flawed (but apparently not when tested elsewhere), I switched to Synology NAS box, using the flawed-but-not-really hard drives from the Drobo. That was about 4 or more years ago. Much nicer and more extensive software, and easy to make routine backups of the NAS onto an attached USB drive and the important files to Dropbox Backup as an offsite backup. Much happier camper.
I am not surprised Drobo, as a company, failed.
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I recommend setting up a TrueNAS or other ope NAS server on PC. PC’s are easy to get parts for. Using a NAS that isn’t tied to proprietary hardware or operating system makes it easy to move your disks into another system and access the data.
I like TrueNAS zfs as metadata about the array is stored in the array. You plug in the drives , run the import command , and you have access to your data.
FWIW I have a Drobo Pro 8 bay that I’m not using. If someone wants to buy it for a reasonable bid I am willing to separate it from my life. Shipping from Sweden will probably be the biggest expense…
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Hej! As I’m based in Finland shipping should be fine! I don’t think I can yet send you a PM, so maybe drop me an Email hello [å) hendrikmorkel for com?
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