5 questions for Drobo

I love my Drobo. I have a 4-drive FW800/USB-2 unit, purchased mid last year. It has pride of place sitting on top of my Mac Pro. But I do have a few questions for Drobo regarding its capabilities, performance and compatibility:

  1. Why are your logs in binary format? It’s my unit – why do I have to submit a support case just to get the logs read?
  2. Why don’t you use SMART status? OK, this is more just a techo curiosity question, but still…
  3. Why does performance fall through the floor for certain applications? For instance, I can’t run my Aperture library against the Drobo. This isn’t just the difference between SATA and FW800 performance, it’s the difference between an import of 5 x 30MB photos happening near instantaneously, or taking >3 minutes.
  4. When will my Drobo get an update to support 3TB drives? Or if it’s not going to get such an update, will you at least tell us?
  5. Have you, as I requested on a couple of support cases, run any compatibility tests with WD20EARS green drives? I went through 4 drives in less than 6 months, and while 2 of them had physical faults, the other two, since being pulled from the Drobo, have worked flawlessly in other systems. If there’s an issue with their wake-up speed or spin-speed, surely that didn’t just affect me.

 

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