[REVIEW] Drobo

[the hatter]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Paul Sharpe wrote:

> There was some kind of firmware issue with Seagate 1.5TB drives and
> Drobo recently.

There seems to have been issues with a wide range of non-single-disk uses
of seagate's 1.5TB drive, and even single disk uses with not-windows.
Given most of the vendors seem to be pushing the 1.5TB at the same price
as seagate 1TB drives, I'm mighty suspicious.  Suspicious enough to buy
8x1TB rather than 8x1.5TB for my current raid stack upgrade.[1]

While we're pimping lovely disk hardware, I continue to have much love for
my Infortrend Eonstor Masscube
(http://www.span.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=27&products_id=5582)
That model is now discontinued but they have a million other options.  No
interfaces cheaper than SCSI though (unless you want to mess around with
iSCSI.

As recommended initially by friends from 2 different post-production
companies, both of who use them and their sibling products quite heavily.
Technolust forced another friend of mine to ebay for one of their 3U,
16-slot enclosures which cost them substantially less than a new Drobo.
Expanding partitions by upgrading disks is pretty painless, but not Magic.


the hatter

[1] though it sounds like seagate have finally admitted/resolved these
issues, 2 months down the line and after giving lousy service to a lot of
users, and will require you to do a firmware upgrade on drives that are
currently on retailers shelves.