Drobo Pro

I was looking for an external hard drive unit for the longest time, comparing them, and trying to find out what's currently available in the market, what each one offers, how hard it is to set each one up, what's affordable, which unit is the best bang for the buck, and also to figure out what I wanted in one of these units. I'm the kind of person who wants all the features, but I also like convenience.

The other units that I was considering include:
* D-Link
* IOMega
* Netgear
* QNAP
and a few others.  Pretty much searched Google search engine, BestBuy.ca, FutureShop.ca, TigerDirect.ca, Amazon.ca, Staples.ca...

I was able filter most of the units out, because one of the criteria I had was to have a unit that was not fully enclosed.  That is, one that you can install your own hard drives, and replace failed hard drives without needing to send it to the manufacturer.  I think units that require that are crazy!

What I was looking for
* convenience
* easy of use
* as many bays as possible
* $1500 at most
* hard drives can be removed and installed by the user
* to be able to share files over the network by connecting to the device only, not requiring other computers to be on to do the sharing

After a couple years of looking I finally decided to buy one.  It took so long because I didn't really need one, and well, even though I could make due without one now, I decided to buy one anyways.  So, I bought a Drobo Pro! It turned out to be a very expensive unit, but for the features it offers, I'm hoping it was worth it. I actually got it on sale at TigerDirect.ca for about $1500 or so.

Pros
The features that I just liked so much about the Drobo is:
1. It's ability to handle the configuration of the hard drives in it for data redundancy, automatically.
2. I like how I don't have to have all the hard drives from the get-go for setting up RAID 5/6 with this unit, that I can add them as I need to.
3. It has a great feature that allows one to switch out smaller hard drives for larger ones as space runs out.
4. I also like that it works with any brand of internal hard drives, and any speed, and sizes.
5. I also like how the drives are hot-swappable (I know, this feature is common on most)
6. That there is no hard drive 'seat' that you have to screw the hard drive into before inserting it into the enclosure.
7. 8 drive bays for expansion

I'm a man of convenience, so I like things that are easy, and convenient to use, and that's pretty much why I got this unit, even though I know it is lacking in other areas, and is expensive compared to other units.  It's price is anywhere from 2X to 4X the price of other units that offer the same number of bays, and possibly more features in other areas. Though, from what I've read, there may be a lot of units available out there, but many don't offer the unique features that this unit offers.

The Drobo Pro has 8 drive bays, which is just awesome for expansion. It has 3 hardware interfaces, which is nice, because it gives you more options on how you can connect it to your computer depending on what your computer offers. It has Firewire 800, USB 2.0, and iSCSI.

Drawbacks
1. What I didn't know when I bought the unit is that it is not easily shared on the network.  I didn't know much about iSCSI, other than that I can connect it to a router on my network.  I didn't know that I couldn't have more than 1 device accessing the files on the storage unit at one time via iSCSI.  I think the only way to share your files is if you have a single computer connected to the Drobo, which in turn shares the Drobo as a resource on your network.  I think this is a big drawback, because something I wanted to have was a Network-Attached-Storage device (NAS) that can run alone, and share files on the network without requiring another computer to be on.  I wanted to be able to connect to the stored file from anywhere in the house, and backup to it from any computer on the network.  This is not the case with the DroboPro, though I believe there are other Models that you can buy that have a gigabit Ethernet interface, and are built for sharing files over the network.
2. Even though it does offer the 3 interfaces, I've found file transfer to be really slow!  To move 1 TB of data from my internal computer hard drive via Gigabit Ethernet took a full day.  A little more because Windows Explorer kept stopping to confirm what to do with certain files, and if I wasn't at my computer than it would halt the whole copy process.  The transfer speed was slow due to a large number of small files, it was transferring from 15 MB/s to 30 MB/s (Megabytes).  It never got to 125 MB/s which is what I was hoping for.

Issues
I did run into some issues which I will go into more detail about in another posting, and how I resolved them.  In short they were:
1. iSCSI Configuration Issues
- it worked the very first time I added a new IP address, but after changing the IP address a few times, my computer stopped picking up the Drobo Pro for some reason.  I had to switch back to using USB 2.0.  
2. Over iSCSI - my computer didn't mount the 2nd volume I created in Drobo, for some reason it only mounted when I counted via USB 2.0
3. Connection interfaces are not hot-swappable
- if you try to swap from iSCSI to USB to Firewire, the manual instructs you to power down the unit each time.  Being someone who doesn't read the manual until I have to, I didn't know this, and so I ran into many issues when I was hot-swapping the interface
4. Currently my Drobo Pro doesn't mount when connected via Firewire 800.
- I haven't figured this one out yet

[I did resolve #1 to #3, I'll be adding additonal posting to explain each issue in more detail.]

Conclusion
Anyways, I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, and though I've had ups and downs with this unit. Now that I have gotten use to some of it's quirks, I understand how it works better, and I have found that I do like the unit!  I recently got additional hard drives to add to it, and I was able to add them in without any effort, and the unit took care of the rest; formatting, and making the space available.  All I had to do was open the hard drive packaging, and push them into the empty slots.

For more information on Drobo, and units available, visit their website at: drobo.com
Note: I'm not a reseller or anything like that.