I own two 2nd-generation Drobo 4-bay devices, and I’ve definitely had a love-hate relationship with them. Both Drobos had to be replaced at one point because of issues with the Firewire connections. Fortunately Drobo’s customer service did a good job of working with me (the second time around at least), but it was still a frustrating experience.
The biggest problem by far though with the first two generations of Drobos, and a constant source of frustration for me, was the speed of the devices, or the lack thereof to be more precise. Both of my Drobos were ridiculously slow for both write and read speeds. I quickly realized I would only be able to use them for backup and storage of music, photos, and video footage (and NEVER for video editing), and cringed every time I had to make a large file transfer to or from my Drobos.
Then I got an e-mail a month ago from B&H offering me $50 off a new 3rd-generation Drobo (since I was a previous Drobo purchaser), with the new Drobo claiming to have a new architecture three times faster than the last generation. I of course scoffed at this, remembering claims of increased speed in the 2nd-generation upgrade with the new Firewire connection, which never even came close to reaching the full potential of Firewire speeds (in fact the Firewire connection on my devices never surpassed USB 2.0 speeds). At the same time, I will admit I was a bit curious about the claims, and very much wanting them to be true. Not finding a single hands-on review of the new Drobo online to back up the new speed claims, I decided to be the guinea pig and pre-ordered one from B&H, thinking that if the speed claims were false, I could always return it (a dangerous assumption since the hard drive migration process is only one-way and I would not have been able to migrate my drives back to my older Drobo, something I’ll get to in a moment).
My new Drobo arrived yesterday afternoon. Drobo claims all you need to do to migrate your hard drives from an existing Drobo 4-bay to the new Drobo 4-bay is to make sure the firmware on both Drobos is updated, then with the power off on both devices just move your hard drives from the old one to the new one. I did this, powered up the new Drobo, gave it about 5-10 minutes for hard drive activity to die down a bit (the Drobos have different firmwares and different “architectures”, so I figured it would need a little time to reconfigure things internally), and then ran my speed tests (which I also ran on the old Drobo right before migrating, and also periodically over the lifetime of the Drobo).
I ran my speed tests with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (and checked results with iStat Menus disk usage menu) with stresses of 1TB and 5TB (and ran the tests several times). For reference, these tests were run on four identical 3TB Western Digital Green drives with a combined usable capacity inside the Drobo of 8GB, of which I was using almost 6.5GB (so they were pretty full, which partially explains the super slow speeds on my old Drobo, though the speeds weren’t much better when the drives were mostly empty). These were also tested on a 2013 15″ Retina MacBook Pro (using Firewire connection of 2nd-generation Drobo and Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter… which I’ve actually gotten slightly better results out of than connecting the Drobo Firewire directly to my 2009 MacBook Pro). I migrated these hard drives from the old Drobo to the new one, and ran identical tests before and after the migration. These are approximate AVERAGE speeds:
Drobo 2nd-Generation results (before migration):
Read: 15 MB/s (peak 30MB/s)
Write: 10 MB/s (peak 22MB/s)
Drobo 3rd-Generation results (after migration):
Read: 130 MB/s (peak 200MB/s)
Write: 80 MB/s (peak 180MB/s)
Again, I did nothing else to these drives but move them from the 2nd-generation Drobo to the 3rd-generation Drobo, and I was seeing way more than just Drobo’s claimed 3x performance improvements. I’m not claiming that everybody will see such drastic improvements (though I hope they do), as not everybody may have been experiencing such horrifically slow speeds on their 2nd-generation Drobos. And of course there are a ton of other factors to take into consideration.
The main point here is that this new generation of Drobo does seem to be a vast improvement over the previous generation in terms of speed, and it’s clearly internal architectural improvements and not just the addition of the USB 3.0 port (as the Firewire connection was not the limiting factor on the last generation of Drobos). It took them long enough, but it seems that Drobo have finally gotten it right this time with their original namesake device!
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR PEOPLE MIGRATING TO THIS NEW 3RD-GENERATION DROBO FROM EITHER 1ST-GENERATION OR 2ND-GENERATION DROBOS: If like me you are interested in buying one of these new Drobos for performance improvements over your current Drobo and want to migrate your hard drives, based on the migration charts on Drobo’s website this is a one-way road… i.e. once you take your drives out of your old Drobo and install them in the new 3rd-Generation Drobo, you WILL NOT be able to migrate these drives back to your older Drobo.
Also, for people wanting to migrate drives over from another type of Drobo (i.e. not the standard 4-bay Drobo) to this Drobo, you are out of luck, but interestingly you can migrate drives from this new 3rd-Generation Drobo to the Drobo 5S if you are considering moving up to the 5S in the future. Here is Drobo’s official migration chart that shows which devices you can migrate drives to and from:
http://www.drobo.com/resource-center/migration/
There are a few other things I’ve noticed about the new Drobo. First of all, there is a new feature that lets Mac users format part of the Drobo for use specifically with Time Machine (this way Time Machine won’t eventually use up the entire Drobo capacity), but this option seems to only be available when you are first setting up new drives in the Drobo… i.e. this option is not available for people migrating drives from an existing Drobo.
There are also a handful of new features in Drobo Dashboard (that only appear when a 3rd-generation Drobo is selected) that may be useful in some cases. Under ‘Status’, there is now a drop-down menu that gives you two extra displays on top of the original ‘System Information’, one of which is ‘Drive Information’ that allows you to check the status and info of your hard drives in each individual bay (it even displays the serial number and firmware of each installed hard drive), and a ‘Performance Load’ display that shows read, write, and IOPS speeds. Under the Tools menu, the ‘Standy’ button for older Drobos becomes a ‘Shutdown’ button for the new Drobo, which ejects your Drobo from your computer and then turns it off (rather than leaving it on in standby mode like it does with older Drobos). And a new option now appears on the left column called ‘Drobo Settings’, which gives you the option to rename the Drobo (but only for internal naming in Drobo Dashboard… it will not change the name of your Drobo in Finder), a new option called ‘Dual Disk Redundancy’ that takes up more space for backup (doesn’t say how much, so not sure if this is similar to a RAID 1 setup) so that you can have up to two drives fail at once and still be able to recover all your data. This is grayed out for me because I migrated an existing disk pack… you would have to set this up when you initially install your drives in the Drobo. There is also a ‘Disk Drive Spindown’ option that will spin down the disks after a period of inactivity (again, it doesn’t specify how long, and doesn’t allow you to set this) to save power and disk life. And lastly there is an option to dim the lights on the front of your Drobo, and this one you can adjust, using a slider that goes from 1 to 10. These are the only additions for the new Drobo that I’ve run across in Drobo Dashboard.
On top of the above additions to the new Drobo, there is also new battery backup technology included in the Drobo, but only time and bad electrical wiring in my house and neighborhood will tell how well this works.
The exterior of the new Drobo is nearly identical to the old one, having the exact same dimensions and almost same materials. The only noticeable changes are the addition of a much-needed power button on the back of the Drobo (I always had to unplug my old Drobos if I didn’t want them to stay on in standby mode all the time), and the presence of only a single USB 3.0 port compared to the two Firewire ports and one USB 2.0 port on my old Drobos).
Overall I’m very pleased with the performance of my new Drobo, with even a simple task like browsing files on the Drobo in Finder feeling almost as snappy as viewing files on my internal SSD (a huge improvement over often waiting several seconds for a folder to open on my old Drobos). And obviously transferring large files to and from the new Drobo will be a delight compared to days of yore. Lets just hope that this Drobo is more reliable and durable than my last two have been.