{"id":9672,"date":"2020-09-04T12:54:41","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T02:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=9672"},"modified":"2020-09-04T12:54:45","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T02:54:45","slug":"goodbye-drobo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2020\/09\/04\/goodbye-drobo\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Drobo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The FARR model of data protection starts with fault tolerance \u2013\u00a0a fundamental requirement to provide a guarantee of data integrity and recoverability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The FARR Model: Fault Tolerance, Availability, Redundancy, Recoverability<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a data protection professional, I tend to take data protection seriously even with my home equipment. A bit over seven years ago I caved and bought into the home-NAS game. In fact, after seven years of operation I finally replaced the first round of drives in my Synology 1513+ a while ago, since I was getting concerned with their age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I don’t only use NAS. Some things don’t play well with network-attached storage in the consumer market \u2013\u00a0take Apple’s iTunes\/TV apps, for instance. iMovie, too. Aperture, back in its day. And don’t even get me started on just how utterly abysmal TimeMachine is when you try to work on a SparseVolume presented by a remote server. So for that local-access storage, I tended to use Drobo DAS units. Of these, I’ve had 3: a USB-2 4-drive model, a USB-3 5-drive model, and a USB-3 4-drive model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this week, I retired the two USB-3 systems. Good riddance.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, I’ve been having increasing stability issues on my macOS desktop at home \u2013 a reboot might complete successfully or fail on shutdown. OS upgrades were a nightmare of will-it-work-or-will-it-hang? Even standard OS patching would result in massive challenges where it might be fifteen minutes or more from the point of a startup chime before anything appeared on the screen. Honestly, it was like playing Russian Roulette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll admit, I blamed a lot on Catalina, which is perhaps the most unreliable operating system I’ve used since SunOS 5.4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of all those challenges, I figured when I transitioned to a new desktop recently I’d ditch the existing user profile that I had been faithfully transferring from computer to computer since 2004. Everything went swimmingly until I was ready to transfer the Drobo storage across from the old system to the new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now admittedly, I had been getting a bit annoyed with Drobo. Despite Catalina warning on every reboot that Drobo’s software probably wouldn’t work with a future macOS, Drobo had seemingly been somewhat silent on the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when I installed the Drobo drivers on my new desktop and rebooted … everything fell apart. In fact, the system wouldn’t even come up. The system couldn’t be repaired<\/em>; I literally had to boot into recovery mode and completely wipe the OS and start again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well gee, Drobo, thanks for that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A month later and I’m finding that with the Drobo software removed, all those other problems have disappeared as well. Yes, I had to unexpectedly buy a new DAS storage system, but unlike Drobo, the software associated with it doesn’t cause system instability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only annoyance I have with the new solution is that OWC’s SoftRAID XT front-end interface has a terrifying quirk the first time you launch it where it’ll briefly report your storage is either offline, or in degraded mode, or both \u2013\u00a0until it connects to the back-end daemon and confirms the actual status. (Until I worked out what was going on, that left me with a few heart-flutters.) Oh, and the interface is a little … ugly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
SoftRAID Interface<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That being said, I can put up with ugly if it works. (As Leonard Cohen once sang, We are ugly, but we have the music.<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, macOS Catalina is still a steaming pile of happenstance and misadventure, but at least I can patch<\/em> it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew Drobo had been acquired by StorCentric, but I hadn’t realised how poorly things seem to have become since the acquisition. Wikipedia’s Drobo article is positively scathing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company’s acquisition by StorCentric was announced in August, 2018. Most Drobo products have been Out of Stock since the beginning of 2020 with fans of Drobo wondering about the lack of communication addressing the shortage and the future of the company. The store on drobo.com<\/em> still lists all Drobos as ‘sold out’ as of August 2020.<\/p>Wikipedia Article about Drobo<\/a><\/strong>, sourced 4 September 2020.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Drobo had a good story back in its day. BeyondRAID offered an interesting way of letting consumers or perhaps more correctly, prosumers, access RAID in a non-confronting way, and a way which allowed longer-term expansion. I did grow systems from 2TB drives to 4TB drives. But, BeyondRAID is hardly unique these days. Synology’s Hybrid RAID, for instance, delivers something similar, regardless of whether they take different approaches. I transitioned my 1513+ from 3TB to 6TB drives earlier in the year without a single outage and it’s now presenting over 23TB usable compared to the original >11TB usable I’d started with 7 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it would seem that whatever StorCentric might have planned for Drobo, consumers aren’t part of the picture. They’ll want to hope they have more schtick than BeyondRAID \u2013 and no need for drivers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when Stage 4 lockdowns end in Melbourne, I’ll be taking two Drobos to the nearby recycling centre for scrapping.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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