Friday, February 8, 2008

Beware the Drobo Storage System

Back in September, I approached the booth at Photoshop World where the Drobo was humming along quietly. I was interested in the box, and thought it might be a solution. I asked a few questions of the booth attendant, and she just didn't know the answers, and the guy that did was talking to the person next to me about all sorts of non-Drobo things, as far as I could tell. After about 10 minutes waiting, I decided that I would do my research online instead.

What did I find? Beware the results.

(Continued after the Jump)

The immediate deal-breaker for me is it's proprietary file system, and I couldn't find anywhere that gave a justification for this, in fact, it seemed to be glossed over.

What is a proprietary file system? Well, back in the days of VHS vs. Betamax, VHS was an open system, that anyone could use, hence the broad adoption of VHS. Sony, on the other hand, developed Betamax, a proprietary way of playing tapes, and no one else could use it. So, Betamax died. Just as with this, if you have a drive on one computer, you can unplug it, or take it out if it's an internal drive, and plug it into another brand of computer, and the drive will work. With Drobo, if you're not plugging your drive into another Drobo, the data is just plain inaccessible. For me (and many others), that's just a deal-breaker.

There are, as you probably know, two types of people in this world - those that have had a hard drive fail, and those that will. If the you're the former, you'll question seriously a proprietary file system. If you're the latter, you'll be taking risks for which you don't know the consequences, until you have had a failure, and then you'll get religion.

But what other problems are there?

ZDNet did an interesting review, but they say "Another consumer friendly innovation is that the Drobo doesn’t require the user to pick up a screw driver to put the hard drive in to a carriage bay." Sorry, this isn't a selling point for me, in fact, owning professional drive systems from places like Wiebetech, OWC, and so forth, not to mention Apple's expensive RAID solutions, require that users can wield a screwdriver.

The review correctly criticizes the speed, at between 11 and 16 mb/sec. So, when you shoot 500 images on an assignment with a D2X/Mark II or better, be prepared to wait a long time just to copy your files over, open and update raw files with camera raw, and write them back. A FW800, GigE or SCSI connection will serve you much better.

What surprised me is that the reviewer says:
We can build a server that supports this configuration with gigabit throughput for about $600 including shipping and that lets you serve data on the network at 70 MB/sec or more out of a single Gigabit Ethernet adapter which can be shared by all the PCs on the network. That does however require some skill or at least willingness to learn how to build a PC. But this isn’t the market that Data Robotics is targeting; they’re after Photographers or other professionals that just want something to work out of the box without having to mess with all these settings let alone build something. Those people lose money by the hour and they can’t afford to waste time building or learning about this stuff.
The reality is, with the S L O W throughout, you'll be losing money by the minute as you wait for massive amounts of images to be copied to and fro, and this will add up - I promise you.

Photographer Doug Plummer reported on his problematic experiences with the Drobo and the good folks over at Luminous Landscape are (and have been) debating this for awhile too.

Don't trick yourself into thinking there is an easy path to effective storage, where you don't need to understand the behind-the -scenes issues at hand. You had to learn things like depth of field relative to focal length, and flash duration. So too, do you need to understand how to do effective image archiving and storage, and why the Drobo, as a turnkey solution (or any solution) just is not a good choice, in it's current incarnation.

Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

23 comments:

Zandr said...

Both the price and the performance of the Drobo are way out of line for what it offers. The only advantage it has over conventional RAID devices is moderately efficient use of mismatched drives, and even that's not all that great.

But I do think your concerns about the "proprietary file system" are misinformed. First off, it's not the filesystem, that's going to be ext3, HFS+, NTFS, etc. The proprietary system is one layer down the stack, and is to do with striping and RAID superblocks.

The problem is that *all* hardware RAID systems are proprietary in this regard. You can't take a RAID set out of your Wiebetech box, hook it up to your Apple RAID card and have it work. This means that a controller failure can result in a loss of data if you can't replace it with the same make, model, and sometimes even firmware version.

This is unfortunate, and argues strongly for Linux software RAID or ZFS for critical data storage.

Eric Schmiedl said...

What storage system do you use?

Anonymous said...

I use a Drobo on an iMac, and really, really like it for its simplicity, the drive spanning and the monitoring tools that come with it. For me , the USB speed isn't a problem since my primary data bottleneck rests with my memory card reader, not the write to the disk.

I have already added drives, and love the expandability of this product. The ability to swap in a larger drive without re-copying all of my data is a big thing for me, and I suspect will be useful for anyone with dozens or hundreds of gigabytes of photos to be archived. At the same time, the additional efficiency of Drobo versus RAID 1 is something to consider as photo file sizes increase. If you shoot RAW with a camera with more than 10 mb, storage needs add up quickly, and the additional storage yield of a Drobo vs. a RAID 1 setup may feel significant.

I have RAID setups on multiple Windows boxes, and also find that useful. From opening the box until now I am pleased and impressed with the Drobo, and as an actual user, don't share the suppositions you put forward in your review based on your readings online.

Anonymous said...

I currently am just using a 250GB Maxtor external drive right now. I'll be upgrading soon... Perhaps to one TB, though not sure yet.

Thanks for the warning on the Drobo. Proprietary file system? Screw that! For my day job, I do computer forensics and I like resting in the knowledge of being able to recover data even if a drive fails. But I'm not willing to deal with a proprietary file system. No way.

Anonymous said...

Drobo is perfectly fine for a backup drive. I am not sure ANY usb device would be any faster. The great thing about drobo is you can use if for backup or archive and have raid protection. While I think that for photographers or video people the current configuration of 4 drives is a little small. I think it is a perfect solution for an office environment.

Drobo is a consumer level device and you are talking about using it in a pro environment. Kind of like panning a point and shoot camera for not taking pictures fast enough while you tried to cover the track and field event at the Olympics. Doesn't mean the camera is bad, just that picked the wrong tool for the job.

test said...

aleksandr is correct about the propriertary file system that Drobo uses; just like any other RAID array you can't just take your disks out and plug them in to another (different) system and expect that they'll just work! So really one cannot compare Drobo against other redundant solutions based upon that line of argument. Yes, Drobo is expensive when compared against other products, which by the way don't offer anywhere near the ease of use or functionality of this device.

Let's just say that Data Robotics closed down in 5 years - that may leave users with a big problem since the software wouldn't be supported going forwards and therefore probably wouldn't be compatible with future releases of Windows or Mac OS. A problem, yes, but if this happened the Drobo user could buy a new storage system and copy the data over - by which times ZFS might be built in to the major OS offerings making it easier for us all to have data over multiple, redundant disks.

Currently Drobo isn't perfect, but for many users (myself included) it has taken some of the pain out of data storage and worrying about bit-rot for image archives.

It isn't super fast for data transfer - agreed. However it was designed to be a solution for managing large amounts of data in a cost effective way with the least possible stress; it wasn't designed to be a super-fast processing drive. Indeed, the bandwidth of even USB2 isn't fully realised with this device - the data transfer rates are slower than USB2. So in that regard a FW800, FW400, Gigabit Ethernet or SCSI connection would ultimately be pointless on this device.

So if you're a batch Photoshop user and you're thinking of getting Drobo to be a drive to handle that kind of processing, you're barking up the wrong tree! However, if you're a user of software light Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, the nature of the processing and data read/write is very different - the images remain on the drive and are accessed (read) individually - there's no need "for massive amounts of images to be copied to and fro". For those users, the Drobo works exceedingly well and after comparing a Firewire 400 drive (single disk) with the Drobo, the access time for a 16.7 megapixel RAW file is only a fraction slower (in the order of 1-2 seconds).

Personally I have my Macbook Pro (with a 7200 RPM disk), a G-DISK firewire 400 and a Drobo. I use the laptop and G-DISK when I'm working on a project for high speed, create a backup of the RAW files to the Drobo on import, then when I'm done with the project, I just move the RAW files from the working drives to my archive on the Drobo (which by the way are still visible and accessible in my image library). I also have a more portable large capacity disk that I backup my images to and keep that off-site.

I think the word beware is a little strong. Drobo was designed to do many things, but not everything. The title 'Is Drobo right for you?' may have been more appropriate.

For another decent and honest review, head over to Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/06/27/meet_drobo/page11.html

TJ Asher Photography said...

I don't see Drobo as an online data storage. I see it as a backup solution.

They do offer an add-on module to make it an online data storage but for the money, there are other more cost-effective solutions for NAS (network attached storage).

Your argument about the proprietary file system and VHS/Betamax simply does not hold water. This is a complete load of misinformation.

Any RAID system or ZFS system will render an individual drive useless without the rest of the set. Even Apple's own RAID arrays. You cannot simply pluck a drive out of the array and hope to read it on another machine. That's not how RAID or ZFS works. To suggest that it should is ludicrous.

The Drobo file system is very similar to ZFS in that you can add any size drive to the array, unlike RAID where the smallest drive dictates the max amount of storage you can get from the array.

Your comment that you need to wield a screwdriver to have "professional" storage is a joke. Did you need a screwdriver to install a new drive in your Mac Pro? I doubt it. Is it professional? I guess not, according to your logic.

Your opinion piece just does not have enough facts to back it up.

No, I do not use Drobo nor do I intend to buy one. I have other "professional" online storage devices to server my multi-terabyte storage requirements. And guess what, some don't require the use of a screwdriver.

Oh, and I have had many hard drives fail on me over the years which is why I have multiple redundant backup solutions.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like someone got a little pissy by not getting enough attention at Photoshop World and decided to bash the product instead.

Let's see, it took you 6 months to figure out how to bash it? Must be a slow news day.

pogomcl said...

I picked up a WD MyBook in Prague after asking techies what to do about my vanishing space and several HD failures. As the total nontechie, I needed an easy solution without screwdriver as my computer is sealed. They recommended the WD terrabyte. I've had as many motherboard meltdowns as HD failures in 4years so not excited about either. You might want to get one and test it as I don't know about such things, but it took nearly 10hours for the disk to be formatted for use... and I should be able to carry it about with me and plug it in to any other Windows system without problems.

Anonymous said...

TO JOHN HARRINGTON,

Congratulations. I bet this blog will get you a lot of traffic. Are you really the ignorant, small-mined man your blog makes you seem? Or are you a shrewd blogster who decided to draw traffic by creating a blog that dumps on a product many, many others really like?

Since you have links to purchase your books on your blog, I assume this is a stunt taken at Drobo owners expense.

Thanks to you, John Harrington, I had to waste almost 90 minutes of my time calming down my photographer friend Vinny. He bought a Drobo in large part because I have two of them and they work perfectly for me. Vinny found your blog, and started getting nervous. I am a little peeved that you wrote such an irresponsible blog. Unless you have a Drobo, your words are just hot air.

John, are you ignorant or shrewd to critique a product based only on here-say evidence.

Joh, are your ignorant or shrewd to citique a product and in your writing show you really don't understand computer storage? You don't have a grasp on what Drobo does. Its just a friggin big disk drive, your computer controls the file system, not Drobo.

John, are you igrnoart or shrewd to critique Drobo for having the same operation as all other RAID systems have -- you can't take drives from any RAID and put them into your computer, or another vendor's RAID box and read them. Only the same type of array it came from.

Jon, are you isgnorant or shrewd to write a blog that casts you as a vengful, small minded ass who is dumping on a product because you get all your questions answered at a trade show?

John, are your ignorant or shrewd to end your post bashing a solution many of your peers use?

John, am I a cynical bastard who thinks you only dumped on Drobo to get traffic to your site so that you can push links and ads to your book?

Your silence will be inerpreted as an affirmation that you are an opportunist. So, what say you?

Anonymous said...

the guy above me probably works for drobo. lol.

Anonymous said...

John

I would go to moderated comments straight away.

These pencil-dicks who are hiding behind anonymous tag-lines are going to try to take you down.

The ugly behavior/essay written two spaces above is shocking.

John Harrington said...

>>> I bet this blog will get you a lot of traffic.

Not interested in this.

>>>a shrewd blogster who decided to draw traffic by creating a blog that dumps on a product many, many others really like?

I decided to take serious issue because I've been asked, offline, on over a dozen occasions, about the Drobo, and others have suggested it's a great product, so I opted to publicly be critical of it, and state why. Just because someone likes it, doesn't make it good for them.

>>>Since you have links to purchase your books on your blog, I assume this is a stunt taken at Drobo owners expense.

Right, that would be, uh, the book I gave my entire advance away to, to the ASMP,NPPA, and APA? No need to draw more traffic, we get a combined 100k in pageviews each month, this piece in Drobo is but a blip on the traffic radar.

>>>Thanks to you, John Harrington, I had to waste almost 90 minutes of my time calming down my photographer friend Vinny. He bought a Drobo in large part because I have two of them and they work perfectly for me.

I think what you meant to say way "I had to spend 90 minutes justifying my purchase of a product that others find serious fault with, and they have valid concerns that friends of mine are concerned about. And I advised my friend to buy the same as I did, and, so far, they're working fine." Could it be that if your Drobo's go down, Vinny's purchase is your insurance policy so you can get your otherwise inaccessible data off your drives?

>>> Vinny found your blog, and started getting nervous. I am a little peeved that you wrote such an irresponsible blog. Unless you have a Drobo, your words are just hot air.

Welcome to the blog Vinny. You should be nervous. Be sure to have the data on your Drobo backed up in more than one location. Be sure to read the well written blog that was referenced above for Tom's Hardware, and the ZDNet review I reference. All of us have concerns of varying degrees. This, rightly so, should give you pause.

>>>John, are you ignorant or shrewd to critique a product based only on here-say evidence.

No, I, and others who's sole job is to review products, have been critical of the product. As someone who was a computer programmer in high school and college before Windows, and who has maintained an attention to Information Technology during my years as a photographer (and which has been helpful as a digital photographer), I am not ignorant on these issues, and I have done my research on this product.

>>>>>in your writing show you really don't understand computer storage? You don't have a grasp on what Drobo does. Its just a friggin big disk drive, your computer controls the file system, not Drobo.

As someone with almost 1/2 a petabyte (that would be about 500 terabytes) of redundant data, on tried and true drive systems, and been able to recover data on the six drives over the years that have failed on me, with minimal effort, I understand computer storage all too well. I do understand what Drobo does - and they are not a JBOD. They have an intermediary interface that would preclude me from plugging my drives that would be removed from a Drobo, into some other computer, and access the data. That's a problem. A BIG PROBLEM.

>>>are you isgnorant or shrewd to write a blog that casts you as a vengful, small minded ass who is dumping on a product because you get all your questions answered at a trade show?

Not sure how many times you're going to call me "ignorant or shrewd", and my research filled in for the lack of insight I gained from the trade show booth visit.

>>> are your ignorant or shrewd to end your post bashing a solution many of your peers use?

If I measured my success or smarts by what many of my peers do/use, I'd be doing work for hire jobs, signing heinous contracts that take many of my rights for pennies of their value, and otherwise make some bad business decisions. Friend, colleagues, and competitors read this blog for business insights on how to run their business right/better, and for insights into "Best Business Practices for Photographers". It is my learned opinion that the Drobo does not meet this "best practices" standard, and that's my opinion- take it for what it's worth.

>>>John, am I a cynical bastard who thinks you only dumped on Drobo to get traffic to your site so that you can push links and ads to your book?

Yes, you are cynical. I don't make blog posts for that reason.

>>>Your silence will be inerpreted as an affirmation that you are an opportunist. So, what say you?

Really? You're going to dictate what my response is, or should be, and if not, that you're right? You just may be the reason I switch to moderated comments. Let's see.

Anonymous said...

With all these readers defending their storage tactics and equipment maybe John should look into writing another blog on how some of his reader's store their archives. I have experience storing archives for over twelve years for a major Ad Agency I worked for. I was able to find and retrieve content in less than five minutes. Files were stored on CDs and DVDs. We also stored files on a server as well as backing up to CDs and DVDs. My experience tells me to back up my files in multiples and keep it simple. Find a catalog application to monitor their whereabouts and as time goes by take the more valuable archives and re archive them to fresh media or whatever the technology has to offer. Welcome to the digital age.

Joe Faraoni said...

John,
I am curious about your workflow.
From ingest to output. Do you intend on visiting this topic in the future?
I don't believe I have seen it on here yet.

Anonymous said...

Boy did you ever strike a nerve here! I tend to agree with you concerns on this type of device (not just Drobo, but any USB RAID box). The reason being the RAID setup. As is constantly harped on in photo fora any time someone ask about RAID--it is not a backup solution because of the semi-proprietary data storage method. It is a safety net that allows you to keep the data online with limited drive failure. BTDT.

Even with one of these devices, normal backups are still essential. My preference is separate external hard drives for several reasons.

As easy as PCs are to build these days, anyone as dependent upon them as most of us are really should have some understanding of how the guts go together. It's not rocket science.

Anonymous said...

Hey Anonymous

There's one thing that you forgot to tell your friend Vinny...........find another anal retentive friend that's not a photographer.

He seems like he's a big boy and can make up his own mind; so what does he need you for?

Oral support?

BTW how did you calm him down?

Zandr said...

They have an intermediary interface that would preclude me from plugging my drives that would be removed from a Drobo, into some other computer, and access the data. That's a problem. A BIG PROBLEM.

Since you have half a petabyte of storage that you apparently don't understand, let me say this again. You can't do that with any other RAID system either.

pogomcl said...

seems like a nasty war here. Sorry for the WD MyBook comment, but it seems to be very functional and at least as quick as my opsys. I also do the dvd backup as well. It comes with software for automatic back-up, but I haven't used it in this way because I will look for an online backup system later.

I am accepted for stock photography, so I shoot by large RAW format and hundreds per day. no microstock here--AGE, Photolibrary, Alamy, etc

Seems a waste of time to address someone such as anonymous or vinny. People who are so abusive, don't really deserve space.

Anonymous said...

John, love your blog but wanted to make 1 quick correction (and nothing to do with Drobo). In a nutshell, neither betamax nor VHS were open-ended. Without the boring details, Sony screwed up and only managed to get 3 companies to license its product - Sanyo, Toshiba and Zenith - so that made 3 companies selling betamax. However, JVC/Matsushita (inventor of VHS) got everyone else to license THEIR product and it was only a matter of time before betamax faded away.
An aside: Sony seems to have won the format wars this time - I believe that Toshiba is throwing in the towel regarding HD-DVD, making Sony's BluRay the winner.

Anonymous said...

A NAS Alternative:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/07/thecus-bay-nass
the N7700, specifically.

They don't have it on their web-site yet, but they got this older NAS...

http://www.thecus.com/products_spec.php?cid=12&pid=32

GigE should give a practical max of 40-60MB/s, with large frames/blocks whatever they're called, which is equal to the fastest CF reader there is ( Sandisk Firewire ).

The Pro version has multiple GigE links, with failover, possibly with aggregation
( seems to be windows-drivers / mac drivers, so I don't know how much Linux there is in there, or how configurable it'd be )

Set 'em up RAID6 with a full complement for best reliability.

Just one useful alternative to the Dodo boxes...

Oh, the Samsung 1TB drives are faster & quieter than the other full-speed TB drives, because they did it with 1 fewer platters.

If you want l-o-w power & good reliability, though, go for the Western Digital GreenPower TB drives: they run at around 5000 rpm, so they're quieter/slower/lower-power that way.
More expensive, though...

Cheerses!

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Anonymous said...

BETTER than NAS, because it does away with the entire ethernet bottleneck, is eSATA...


http://www.lian-li.com.tw/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=331&cl_index=2&sc_index=5&ss_index=13&g=f


built-in port-multiplier with, apparently, RAID in the port-multiplier chip.

Instead of GigE's 50MB/s, you should see 100-150MB/s through this one.

Because that's about the max streaming-speed of a new hard-disk, however, I'd stick with the slower more energy-efficient drives ( WD "blue" drives or Green Power drives or suchlike ), instead of going with the faster drives:
why waste the money on speed that won't be reached?

Anyways, I agree with you totally on the Drobo drubbing, and it looks like there's some kind of chinese-SPAM thing going on here ( repeated phrases repeated repeatedly? yikes! :)
so I'll just scram.

Seriously, though, that RAID-5 enclosure with some disks, directly attached to your machine...
( unless you want NAS.. )

Cheerses,

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