Excellent analysis. All your videos are deeply analytical and useful. This is one of my favorite channels. Just a small side comment: please try to place the microphone on a stand that doesn't touch the desk (I assume this is the case). Every time you hit the desk (which happens quite often), it creates a low-frequency thump that can be somewhat annoying at times.
This is a great video, and it is sad that it is necessary, since at its peak Drobo was hard to beat for plug-and-play simplicity. However, the video fails to focus on one of Drobo's biggest strengths, and that is its implementation of BeyondRaid and the ability to hot-swap drives without worrying about fitting a predefined array size. Being able to add drives over time rather than buy them all up front really helps manage costs. Can you do a video on BeyondRaid alternatives? Synology's Hybrid RAID is the closest thing I have been able to find.
I've been a Drobo customer since first buying a 4-bay Gen 2 over a decade ago. When the 5D3 came out, I bought it immediately to retire the Gen 2 and it's run well but the company itself began going downhill soon after I purchased it. Finally in 2021 I felt I could no longer rely on them for my primary storage if something went wrong. And I had another old server I needed to replace so I purchased a QNAP TVS-h1688x with a Thunderbolt card and relegated the Drobo to backup duty for the NAS hooked up to an aging Mac. But I now keep more data than the Drobo can backup on its own so I invested in a OWC Thunderbay 8 with SoftRAID. Together that works for my total backup needs for the QNAP. The next big problem for us existing Drobo owners is software compatibility. Drobo Dashboard still works but the driver installation is an older method being deprecated by Apple and at some point, it will stop working.
DROBO's are a ticking timebomb. I've even bought a used spare one for parts just in case! I've currently backing mine to Backblaze then adding a Terramaster D8-332 I think. A brand I was not familiar with till your channel. So thank you.
Thanks a very good video. Something I think you missed, and to be honest, most videos I see online miss, the upgrade abilities of drobo, synology etc. The 5D3 was perfect for me because I could keep adding drives to expand without replacing every drive in the device or buying a new enclosure. Because it is a DAS, I can back it up to my Backblaze account. With options like RAID 5, you are capped by the drive size. With NAS options from synology (as good as they are), you can not back up to Backblaze because of their T&Cs. This is massive!!!! I am now looking at UNRAID, but you mentioned that people are worried about the safety of the process, is this something I should be aware of, and have you done a video on this? You are right; I do need to look at swapping my drobo though grrrrrrrr. Thank and great video again.
Heya Andrew, I'm in the EXACT same situation as you, with an old Drobo (5C2, because no Thunderbolt) that's already been warranty replaced once, and using Backblaze. If you find a reasonable solution PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know! I've been looking around desperately for a while now. =)
I believe one of the major issues back then was that TB is a licensed technology and what I've learned, quite expensive to license (from Intel) and was co-developed with Apple. Not an ideal combination nowadays as Apple moved away from Intel silicon (and corporation, so it seems). Whilst TB has many advantages, it also has both technical & implementation challenges. (you made plenty videos in the past, covering many aspects about TB). The "good" news is that due to this stance from Intel (and Apple et al), TB never got "diluted" (read: bad implementations, haphazard compatibilities, unclear standards etc etc) as much as for example USB did get over the many, many years. But TB paid a "price" (pun intended) for that; it never got the mainstream coverage as e.g. USB (2, 3 etc) got and still was quite expensive to implement (cables, chipset, license etc). Indeed add to that the current chip-shortage & higher costs, I believe that would just add fuel to the fire called BroBo. Sadly enough!
I don't really need the thunderbolt part. I want drobo for the way it manages raid. I wish there was a software alternative.. I'm right now using Unraid, but it doesn't even come near the comfort of Drobo sadly. I loved that I could just pop out a disk and replace it with a bigger one and the drive sorted itself out while adding the extra space. There doesn't seem to be any alternative that even comes close to this comfort. Unraid kinda, but then you lose the benefits of raid AND the disk replacement is still a hassle.
My 5Dt stopped working in OSX Ventura… i cleaned out all the dust, nothing but 5 red lights. Then i read somewhere that somehow the OSX resets the permissions. so i went into security/permissions for the two settings something like Dashboard and D66… toggled them off, restarted the computer and turned them on again and it worked…
If you use the onboard raid system software on these enclosures it’s faster, but what happens if that system fails? Send aware the drives for recovery? Buy another exact unit and hope it works? Yes I know I should have backups. For a MAC home user, not too concerned about speed, I wonder what is the most stable and safe system long term? I ordered a new Mac Mini pro with just 16gb ram and 1tb storage. My computer has thunderbolt 4. Maybe I’ll just use the owc dual dock and wait until thunderbolt 4 enclosures are widely available at a reasonable price. I currently have 3 - 8TB wolf drives that are in my 2009 Mac Pro. I bought them thinking they could be used in a future MAS drive once I got a new computer. Now I think a NAS isn’t needed.
I love my Drobo, but fear their stance on macOS Ventura and newer OS releases. Their official page says " As of January 27th, 2023, Drobo support and products are no longer available. Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model. The knowledge base, documentation repository, and legacy documentation library are still accessible for your support needs. We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data. "
I’ve had Drobos forever and my current unit is too flaky to trust. After looking at direct connect units I ended up with a Synology nas which is so nice and does so much more plus it lets me share all my data on all my computers at home and work.
My problem is that I can't use a NAS (my backup provider doesn't support them on my plan, and the plan that does support is like 50x more expensive), so I have to stay on a DAS... Sure, there are ways to make a NAS appear as if it's a normal external/internal drive, but people have had quite a lot of issues with that and cloud backups still.
Do you like the search functionality on Synology? Because native spot light search on Mac isn't supported and search them in general is dog slow and a horrible experience.
I bought a Drobo FS-5 in 2011 as my first NAS. It failed after a few months and I was sent a replacement. That never worked out and there was a catastrophic failure and I lost all my data (I didn't understand the importance of secondary backups). After some back and forth, I was finally fully refunded. I then went ahead and bought a QNAP. Now I have 4 QNAPs, and some external HDDs backing up. Drobo was a complete failure.
Shrug, I've had a fantastic usage experience with mine, the one time my first one failed they sent in a replacement and it worked, and still works, just fine. But obviously since they're gone that's no longer relevant. Any ideas of DAS devices (BackBlaze doesn't allow NAS backups) that can do similar expandability to Drobo? Having to invest in getting 5-8 16TB drives at once on top of a new DAS is just not feasible, and it's not like that space will last forever...
Thank you for the video. Didn’t see any comments on the Promise Pegasus32. Replacing my Drobo 5D3 but that’s a backup of my two older Promise Pegasus R4 and R6 (Thunderbolt 1). Those have been super reliable so started looking there. So is there a problem with those. Also have one OWC and a Terra-Master D5 Thunderbolt but trying to decide how to go.
Hey guy, can you tell me what is better than my drobo 5d and not so expensive like a sysnology because financially i cant afford a sysnology , something faster and can at least hold 4 hd, i appreciate any kind of info you can offer, because t his drobo is driving my crazy with its sloooooooow speed
I went for the OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini (TB3) with 4 * 8Tb Samsung 870 QVO's in the end. Total costs where I am with 23% VAT was €3040 for a 32TB SSD RAID. ( I back it up twice to HDD"s in TM units using ChronoSync so I only care about capacity and speed for 4K editing) I run it using Apple Raid in RAID 0. I see no point to SoftRaid. Empty disks using Blackmagic gave me 1100/1300 speeds. It then took 60 hours 15 mins to copy over 28 Terrabytes from my TerraMaster with spinning disks. Running the same BM tests gave the same speed results! So far, seems great for 4K editing in FCP - instant response compared to having to wait for the HDD's to spin up in the TM unit for example. The fam is too noisy on the OWC unit - a well known problem they are too cheap/lazy to fix which is why I am not a fan or OWC gear - they come across as penny pinching, but lets see how it lasts over the next 5 years ;-)
Yo yo ma man! Quick question if I may champ, how would you compare the Thunderbay 4 bay RAID mini versus the Yottamaster 5bay RAID usb 3.1? Not seen you mention the latter brand, I had someone recommending that to me but wanted to check with the Grand Poohbah of storage devices. Will be using for editing ProRes raw and populating with 4/5 Samsung Evos. Cheers chief!
Would an Areca RAID TB 3 be able to accommodate the drives currently in my Drobo 5D3? or would this be hell to rectify. Why does Level1Techs say Hardware raid is dead and is a bad idea in 2022?
Thank you, for making a video about this sad topic of an unresponsible acting company. But I deeply miss one big thing in this video, at least for Mac users, the gigantic driver problem. Drobo, as all other companies on the planet knew since 10 years, that Apple would change their macOS architecture. And they did not Programm their driver to the new architecture so there is now, to use a Drobo on Mac, is a Russian roulette with their own data!!!
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Excellent analysis. All your videos are deeply analytical and useful. This is one of my favorite channels.
Just a small side comment: please try to place the microphone on a stand that doesn't touch the desk (I assume this is the case). Every time you hit the desk (which happens quite often), it creates a low-frequency thump that can be somewhat annoying at times.
This is a great video, and it is sad that it is necessary, since at its peak Drobo was hard to beat for plug-and-play simplicity.
However, the video fails to focus on one of Drobo's biggest strengths, and that is its implementation of BeyondRaid and the ability to hot-swap drives without worrying about fitting a predefined array size. Being able to add drives over time rather than buy them all up front really helps manage costs.
Can you do a video on BeyondRaid alternatives? Synology's Hybrid RAID is the closest thing I have been able to find.
Yes, please make this video. The best thing about Drobo was the ability to upgrade the array as you went.
I've been a Drobo customer since first buying a 4-bay Gen 2 over a decade ago. When the 5D3 came out, I bought it immediately to retire the Gen 2 and it's run well but the company itself began going downhill soon after I purchased it. Finally in 2021 I felt I could no longer rely on them for my primary storage if something went wrong. And I had another old server I needed to replace so I purchased a QNAP TVS-h1688x with a Thunderbolt card and relegated the Drobo to backup duty for the NAS hooked up to an aging Mac. But I now keep more data than the Drobo can backup on its own so I invested in a OWC Thunderbay 8 with SoftRAID. Together that works for my total backup needs for the QNAP. The next big problem for us existing Drobo owners is software compatibility. Drobo Dashboard still works but the driver installation is an older method being deprecated by Apple and at some point, it will stop working.
Can either of those units do the Drobo's party trick of expanding storage by just putting in a bigger drive?
DROBO's are a ticking timebomb. I've even bought a used spare one for parts just in case!
I've currently backing mine to Backblaze then adding a Terramaster D8-332 I think. A brand I was not familiar with till your channel. So thank you.
Thanks a very good video. Something I think you missed, and to be honest, most videos I see online miss, the upgrade abilities of drobo, synology etc. The 5D3 was perfect for me because I could keep adding drives to expand without replacing every drive in the device or buying a new enclosure. Because it is a DAS, I can back it up to my Backblaze account. With options like RAID 5, you are capped by the drive size. With NAS options from synology (as good as they are), you can not back up to Backblaze because of their T&Cs. This is massive!!!! I am now looking at UNRAID, but you mentioned that people are worried about the safety of the process, is this something I should be aware of, and have you done a video on this? You are right; I do need to look at swapping my drobo though grrrrrrrr. Thank and great video again.
Heya Andrew, I'm in the EXACT same situation as you, with an old Drobo (5C2, because no Thunderbolt) that's already been warranty replaced once, and using Backblaze. If you find a reasonable solution PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know! I've been looking around desperately for a while now. =)
I believe one of the major issues back then was that TB is a licensed technology and what I've learned, quite expensive to license (from Intel) and was co-developed with Apple. Not an ideal combination nowadays as Apple moved away from Intel silicon (and corporation, so it seems).
Whilst TB has many advantages, it also has both technical & implementation challenges. (you made plenty videos in the past, covering many aspects about TB).
The "good" news is that due to this stance from Intel (and Apple et al), TB never got "diluted" (read: bad implementations, haphazard compatibilities, unclear standards etc etc) as much as for example USB did get over the many, many years. But TB paid a "price" (pun intended) for that; it never got the mainstream coverage as e.g. USB (2, 3 etc) got and still was quite expensive to implement (cables, chipset, license etc).
Indeed add to that the current chip-shortage & higher costs, I believe that would just add fuel to the fire called BroBo.
Sadly enough!
I don't really need the thunderbolt part. I want drobo for the way it manages raid. I wish there was a software alternative.. I'm right now using Unraid, but it doesn't even come near the comfort of Drobo sadly. I loved that I could just pop out a disk and replace it with a bigger one and the drive sorted itself out while adding the extra space. There doesn't seem to be any alternative that even comes close to this comfort.
Unraid kinda, but then you lose the benefits of raid AND the disk replacement is still a hassle.
My 5Dt stopped working in OSX Ventura… i cleaned out all the dust, nothing but 5 red lights. Then i read somewhere that somehow the OSX resets the permissions. so i went into security/permissions for the two settings something like Dashboard and D66… toggled them off, restarted the computer and turned them on again and it worked…
If you use the onboard raid system software on these enclosures it’s faster, but what happens if that system fails? Send aware the drives for recovery? Buy another exact unit and hope it works? Yes I know I should have backups. For a MAC home user, not too concerned about speed, I wonder what is the most stable and safe system long term? I ordered a new Mac Mini pro with just 16gb ram and 1tb storage. My computer has thunderbolt 4. Maybe I’ll just use the owc dual dock and wait until thunderbolt 4 enclosures are widely available at a reasonable price. I currently have 3 - 8TB wolf drives that are in my 2009 Mac Pro. I bought them thinking they could be used in a future MAS drive once I got a new computer. Now I think a NAS isn’t needed.
I love my Drobo, but fear their stance on macOS Ventura and newer OS releases. Their official page says "
As of January 27th, 2023, Drobo support and products are no longer available.
Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model. The knowledge base, documentation repository, and legacy documentation library are still accessible for your support needs.
We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data.
"
I’ve had Drobos forever and my current unit is too flaky to trust. After looking at direct connect units I ended up with a Synology nas which is so nice and does so much more plus it lets me share all my data on all my computers at home and work.
My problem is that I can't use a NAS (my backup provider doesn't support them on my plan, and the plan that does support is like 50x more expensive), so I have to stay on a DAS... Sure, there are ways to make a NAS appear as if it's a normal external/internal drive, but people have had quite a lot of issues with that and cloud backups still.
Do you like the search functionality on Synology? Because native spot light search on Mac isn't supported and search them in general is dog slow and a horrible experience.
Very helpful! Thanks!
I bought a Drobo FS-5 in 2011 as my first NAS. It failed after a few months and I was sent a replacement. That never worked out and there was a catastrophic failure and I lost all my data (I didn't understand the importance of secondary backups). After some back and forth, I was finally fully refunded. I then went ahead and bought a QNAP. Now I have 4 QNAPs, and some external HDDs backing up. Drobo was a complete failure.
Drobo is the nightmare of NAS/DAS you can get data unrecoverable
Shrug, I've had a fantastic usage experience with mine, the one time my first one failed they sent in a replacement and it worked, and still works, just fine.
But obviously since they're gone that's no longer relevant.
Any ideas of DAS devices (BackBlaze doesn't allow NAS backups) that can do similar expandability to Drobo? Having to invest in getting 5-8 16TB drives at once on top of a new DAS is just not feasible, and it's not like that space will last forever...
Finaly mate, what is your sugestion? I am a photographer and I have Drobo 5D with 5 bays, what I should buy?
Thank you for the video. Didn’t see any comments on the Promise Pegasus32. Replacing my Drobo 5D3 but that’s a backup of my two older Promise Pegasus R4 and R6 (Thunderbolt 1). Those have been super reliable so started looking there. So is there a problem with those. Also have one OWC and a Terra-Master D5 Thunderbolt but trying to decide how to go.
Do you know of anyone that is capable to fix Drobo's?
Hey guy, can you tell me what is better than my drobo 5d and not so expensive like a sysnology because financially i cant afford a sysnology , something faster and can at least hold 4 hd, i appreciate any kind of info you can offer, because t his drobo is driving my crazy with its sloooooooow speed
I noticed that you did not mention Synology. How does the Synology DS923+ 4-Bay NAS Enclosure compare with Drobo 5d3
Thanks!
Hope this helps bud. Thanks again for the donation
Thanks again for being a remarkably generous soul bud!
@@nascompares Your selling yourself too cheap - if I get a compliment like that for €2, I shudder to think what €10 would get me! ;-)
I went for the OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini (TB3) with 4 * 8Tb Samsung 870 QVO's in the end. Total costs where I am with 23% VAT was €3040 for a 32TB SSD RAID. ( I back it up twice to HDD"s in TM units using ChronoSync so I only care about capacity and speed for 4K editing)
I run it using Apple Raid in RAID 0. I see no point to SoftRaid. Empty disks using Blackmagic gave me 1100/1300 speeds. It then took 60 hours 15 mins to copy over 28 Terrabytes from my TerraMaster with spinning disks. Running the same BM tests gave the same speed results!
So far, seems great for 4K editing in FCP - instant response compared to having to wait for the HDD's to spin up in the TM unit for example. The fam is too noisy on the OWC unit - a well known problem they are too cheap/lazy to fix which is why I am not a fan or OWC gear - they come across as penny pinching, but lets see how it lasts over the next 5 years ;-)
Yo yo ma man! Quick question if I may champ, how would you compare the Thunderbay 4 bay RAID mini versus the Yottamaster 5bay RAID usb 3.1? Not seen you mention the latter brand, I had someone recommending that to me but wanted to check with the Grand Poohbah of storage devices. Will be using for editing ProRes raw and populating with 4/5 Samsung Evos. Cheers chief!
Would an Areca RAID TB 3 be able to accommodate the drives currently in my Drobo 5D3? or would this be hell to rectify. Why does Level1Techs say Hardware raid is dead and is a bad idea in 2022?
Is there a NAS other than Drobo 5D3 that has both USB 3 and Thunderbolt????
Do you see any performance issues with SoftRaid as opposed to on-board hardware raid (I'm coming from a Drobo 5d3)?? I'm looking at the Thunderbay 8.
Can you wipe a drobo 5d3 and then just use with something like unraid?
Thank you, for making a video about this sad topic of an unresponsible acting company. But I deeply miss one big thing in this video, at least for Mac users, the gigantic driver problem. Drobo, as all other companies on the planet knew since 10 years, that Apple would change their macOS architecture. And they did not Programm their driver to the new architecture so there is now, to use a Drobo on Mac, is a Russian roulette with their own data!!!