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Jimbo

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  1. jfkbike - for RAID enclosures such as Drobo, it is recommended to use enterprise drives. Having said that, we have many happy customers using consumer-grade and/or green drives with great success. The key to using consumer/green drives is to understand that (1) performance will be lower and (2) drive failures will be higher. <br /> <br /> bleedink - Lots of questions, so I hope I get them all:<br /> <br /> Drobo offers DAS, NAS, and iSCSI SAN products. The DAS products (Drobo, Drobo S) are block level, do not have a full file system, and therefore cannot run applications. The DroboShare was intended to turn a DAS Drobo into a NAS Drobo that has a full file system and can run apps. <br /> <br /> The challenge with the DroboShare was that it used USB to connect to the Drobo, so despite having FireWire and GigE, performance would always be limited by USB. We essentially combined Drobo with DroboShare when developing the FS and eliminated the USB bottleneck. That is why we consider the FS to be a replacement for DroboShare.<br /> <br /> Regarding firmware improvements, we do have recent releases for ALL products. The current 1.4.1 firmware for your 2nd Gen Drobo was just released in November. Continual improvement is something Drobo has always done and I don't see that changing.<br /> <br /> I hope that helps.<br /> <br /> Best,<br /> Jim<br />
  2. Howdy Folks - It is obvious that many of you are passionate about your data and storage options which is great. I think Chris nailed it with this comment: "If you browse any NAS manufacturer's forum you'll see many unhappy users. This is just how things work. Happy customers rarely take time to post about their experiences." We have shipped over 200K Drobos and I can tell you the vast majority are very satisfied customers. <br /> <br /> There were great points brought up in the comments, so I thought I'd jump in to address some of the key ones and will be happy to respond to any others that pop up:<br /> <br /> Nottlv - UnRAID is a great product and does allow for some of the advantages we deliver with BeyondRAID. The key difference is that most Drobo customers - while they certainly could build their own - want a simple, turnkey solution which is what Drobo delivers.<br /> <br /> a2rt - As many have mentioned, Drobo does have some performance penalties associated with data protection. On top of that, the FS has to deal with network overhead which further reduces performance. For folks that need high-performance, we recommend our Drobo S (USB 3 / eSATA) which typically delivers 2-3X the performance of the FS. <br /> <br /> dschamis - Sorry to read about your troubles and I can assure you and the other folks here that your experience is in the very small minority. Even though we have over 200K arrays, there are very, very few documented cases of data loss where the Drobo was either partially or completely at fault. Most of the time it is double drive failure, file system corruption on the host, power surge/outage, or simple operator error (i.e. removing too many hard drives at once). I will say that we have helped many customers get their data back - even when the fault had nothing to do with the Drobo device. <br /> <br /> Jfkbike - Sorry to see you were disappointed in DroboShare End-of-Life. The Drobo FS was effectively a replacement for the DroboShare, so we did try to give reasonable time tune before sending formal EOL notices to customers.<br /> <br /> Jerico - Lion was a huge nightmare for all NAS providers. Despite having access to early Lion builds, there are no guarantees that Apple won't make last minute changes. We recently released new firmware (1.4.1) and Dashboard (2.1.1) for the FS which has addressed every known issue with Lion.<br /> <br /> Bleedink - We used to require a serial number to enter our support forums since many of our competitors were joining and simply throwing around FUD that was not productive to anyone trying to get help. We have since dropped this requirement, so anyone can join.<br /> <br /> Great discussion. I'll make sure to monitor and address any other questions that pop up.<br /> <br /> Best,<br /> Jim Sherhart<br /> Drobo
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