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:
- 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?
- Why don’t you use SMART status? OK, this is more just a techo curiosity question, but still…
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.