data robotics

Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10

Data Robotics : DR04DD10
Price : $405.99
Offer Price : Visit store to see price

"Terrific Storage Device but NOT Complete Backup "Solution"" 2010-07-11
By Christopher A. Blevins
First off, this device is WONDERFUL. It performs a function that "complete packages" do for thousands of dollars. I have mine setup via an Airport Extreme router with a large iTunes library and Aperture Library being shared between multiple computers and also a large movie library being streamed to a Playstation 3. I've never experienced any hangup time besides the wireless delay (not Drobo's fault). I started off with 4 1TB hard drives in it from Amazon..the Western Digital Green drives. This resulted in 2.7 GB of available space. Perfectly within norms because of size misadvertising as well as Drobo taking one complete drive to backup the others.

The drive saved me already once within a month of purchase. I got one defective drive apparently that suffered a cooling failure. Woke up one morning and noticed the drive flashing bright red. It does a good job of notifying problems..including the blue capacity lights on the front. Note that if you're like me and have the drive networked via Airport Extreme or a similar network bridge, the Drobo Dashboard application on your computer WILL NOT recognize the Drobo because of the lack of specific firmware signals. You can still plug the into your computer occasionally to do firmware updates when they are available. Anyway, the Drobo was about 1/3 full after I moved my near-death 1.5TB old external's data to it. Morning after I transferred all the data, that one internal Drobo drive failed, and Drobo was busy shuffling the data around to ensure continued drive failure protection. When this happened, my free space available was cut drastically due to the Drobo claiming another drive's space to protect the existing data again. Western Digital RMA'd the drive for free (did that rather than return to Amazon due to WD doing free overnight shipping of replacement). After a few hours of Drobo shuffling, the lights were again green because Drobo had copied all of the stored data to another drive again to ensure redundancy. When I got the new WD drive in the mail, I plugged it in the Drobo and 10 seconds later after Drobo initialized and formatted the new drive, the free space returned to its previous state.

So far, the drive has performed flawlessly to my expectations; especially considering I wasn't sure if I ever would need the redundant storage. But I did a month after I started using the device. A quick note about backups. The Drobo serves as an excellent local/network backup tool. However, it doesn't protect against flood, fire, curious children, and the like. The use of this device shouldn't impede offsite backup techniques. Mozy, Crashplan, Carbonite, etc... should still be used if you want to make your data both accessible from anywhere (although the Airport Extreme has a nice remote file access feature) and protected against localized electronic disasters.

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Data Fusion in Robotics & Machine Intelligence

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Price : $69.00
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Robotic Exploration and Landmark Determination: Hardware-Efficient Algorithms and FPGA Implementations

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Price : $139.00
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US Robotics Sportster 14.4 V.32 Bis Data/Fax PCMCIA Modem with Dongle Kit - Refurbished - CJE-0227

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Price :
Offer Price : $19.50

Drobo S 5-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Storage Array DRDR3A21

Data Robotics : DRDR3A21
Price : $805.99
Offer Price : $689.87

"Great Product" 2010-05-06
By J. Tappan
I am an IT professional with over 20 years of experience working with storage systems ranging from mini frame computers to the latest iSCSI based systems. This device is NOT the fastest ever storage device. Far from it. What it is, however, is a very elegant storage system designed for the average home or SOHO user who needs a large RAID based storage system that can be expanded on the fly using any drives they happen to have laying around. There is no other storage device (in this price range) that has that ability.

If you are comfortable moving all of your data off of your storage device, breaking the RAID set, installing new drives, repartitioning the RAID set, reformatting the RAID set, and then moving all of your data back because you need more space then by all means choose one of the many available RAID based enclosures on the market that are less expensive. If you are not comfortable with this scenario then the Drobo is exactly the device you need.

The simple reason that this device underperforms compared to those devices is purely based on the calculations required by the BeyondRAID technology built into this device. Drobo have tried to address this performance gap with the Drobo S by incorporating a faster processor. This does help greatly and the Drobo S is faster than the standard Drobo over all of it's interfaces. In order to justify the price gap over the standard Drobo they have added an extra drive bay (5 in the S), the eSATA port, and the ability to survive from 2 drives failing simultaneously.

Having said all of that the performance over FireWire 800 is not bad. I am using 5 Western Digital Green 1TB drives in it (which run very cool) and am seeing 70 MB/s on reads and 50MB/s writes. These drives average out at about 75 MB/s for both reads and writes in most independent tests I have seen. That means my read speeds are almost at the drives maximum. Obviously the writes are quit a bit slower, but RAID write performance is almost always slower due to the calculations required.

Bottom-line is that this device does exactly what it is expected to do. Provide the end user with a painless external storage device that can survive one or two drive failures and expand on the fly to accommodate your ever increasing storage needs. The trade off for that simplicity is a "slight" performance penalty over some plain vanilla RAID enclosure.

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