Updated: 5/13/2013: Still working great. Nice and quiet. Trouble free image storage. Absolutely zero complaints from me and I use it EVERY SINGLE DAY for anywhere between 2 to 10 hours.
Updated: 12/19/2012: Still kickin' butt. I have about 140,000 images on my Drobo. Works great. No complaints and not one hiccup. It's still quiet, and efficient. Would I buy it again: a Resounding YES! I'm shooting with a D700, and a D800. Both cameras set to raw+fine jpeg so many of you know how large these files are. My Drobo is my priimary source for image storage. As you read my review you'll see why. So far I've had no major issues. No reboots. No hangs. I breezed through many of the one-star reviews here and I must say I was shocked and horrified at what I read. I don't know what I would do if I lost all my photos -- especially the thousands of scanned and shot family photos. However, I take my backups seriously. I actually backup up my Drobo using 3rd party software onto a couple of LaCie Rugged hard drives. These hard drives go where i go: To work, vacation, photo trips, office, etc. They are never left at home with the Drobo just in case. Even if my Drobo were to break I still have access to all my files, images, movies, dvd's as I trust no device to manage and protect my files. I trust ME.
Updated: 8/15/2012: Going on 5 months now and still kickin' butt. I returned from shooting a destination wedding about three weeks ago and added over 6000 images. It just swallowed them up. About a day into the editing process, a drive I had just received back from Seagate, and I had installed in the drobo received the red light of death. I popped it out when it was safe to do so, swapped in a smaller drive so I can re-send the junk drive back to Seagate, and the drobo kept on truckin'. You can continue to work on your data as it re-writes the necessary data across the new drive but you can use it. So, I would still recommend it.
Updated: 6/20/2012: So far so good. Have added another 5000 images to date. The only problem I've found is it doesn't have an on/off switch (at least this model). However, I have worked around that. The device is working beautifully. Not blazing fast, but decent enough where I don't mind. I maintain my LR4 library and catalogs on there as well as other documents.
Updated 5/4/2012: Last night I upgraded to Mac OS X Lion as I need to move over since Apple is moving me away from MobileMe to iCloud. So far, my Drobo is working flawlessly on Lion. I read where many folks were having issues with the Drobo and Lion so I was a bit afraid to make the leap. I did backup my Drobo onot several externals just in case things went south. I don't know if it makes any difference, probably not, but during the upgrade I made sure my Drobo was active and showing on the desktop. In other words I did not unmount it before doing the upgrade to Lion. I bought my Drobo on March 30th.
Hope that helps.
I do write reviews. I feel it is important for folks to know about others experiences. I write reviews here, and since I'm a photographer, and travel extensively I also create reviews for tripadvisor.com I just want to throw that out there in case anyone wants to know where I'm coming from.
I was hesitant to order the Drobo based on the reviews here. I know enough tech to be very dangerous being an ex-IT Manager for twenty years. I read some of the reviews, and was scared off. But since my MacPro (with it's 8TB) of space spread over 4 drives took a dirt nap I said what the heck and ordered this item.
I pulled the 4 drives out of the MacPro tower once received the Drobo. I'm now using my 2010 15" Macbook Pro (laptop) with a 27" external screen, LR, and my Drobo. The setup and installation was a snap. Easy peasy. To start, I only started with two HD's as I wanted to test to see if it was in fact that simple to add drives. So I inserted one 750G, and a 1.0G drives and they formatted automatically. I then started to copy about 1TB of images from my external backups to the Drobo. I let it do this overnight as I didn't know how long it would take. In the morning, everything was complete, zero errors, and all seemed well.
A few days later I got really adventurous and decided to install a third drive. This time I went with a 1.5TB. I inserted the drive with zero effort, and the Drobo software worked it's magic. My HD space was now increased with no problems again.
Several days after that I decided to install the fourth and last HD. I inserted another 1.5TB and this is where I had a problem which was totally of my doing, not the equipment. It wouldn't recognize the HD. After a quick call to Drobo Tech support which was EXTREMELY helpful, they pointed me to the fact that upon originally starting to setup the Drobo I had failed to allocate it the maximum (16TB) of space. In order to fix MY error, they told me I would have to backup the Drobo, then re-format it and re-initialize/format it and this time to select the max 16TB on the slider in the setup screen. Sounds complicated, but trust me it's a very, very visual item.
Anyway, I then had to re-backup the Drobo back to externals, again overnight. The next day I formatted the Drobo, and then again overnight let all the data copy from the externals back onto the Drobo. The reason I mention this is because some folks have complained of the Drobo either quitting, or corrupting, or just plain causing problems when it runs for some time; I'm here to say that has NOT been my experience at all. I have pushed that unit to what I feel is the max I would ever push it letting it run for six or eight hours copying terrabytes of data and it so far has performed flawlessly.
Anyway, here it is about a month later and I am loving it. At first I thought the Drobo which is what I use to store my Lightroom catalogs, and images would be slow but quite honesly, having moved from a four year old MacPro tower and now using my new Macbook laptop (8G ram) with the Drobo connected via Firewire 800, it is a very workable solution. I'm very, very satisfied with my equipment. The only niggle and nitpick I have is this model drobo does not have a on/off switch. If it had that, to me it would be a perfect solution. I understand the Drobo Pro, and other models do in fact have the on/off switch. I wish mine did as well but I can live with it. Oh on a side note to test the unit I removed one of the drives to see what would happen and nothing happened. The unit continued to serve up files as if nothing was wrong while in the background, it re-wrote the data across the other three drives. Be aware though the unit does need alot of "overhead" space that it reserves just for instances like this. To me, it seems like a waste of HD space, but if it helps protect my data I'm all for it. Just note that as in anything else, it's important to maintain separate backups. I still use my Lacie Rugged externals to backup my images, and keep a copy at a separate location.
Overall, I'm very, very satisfied with my Drobo. It's a less expensive solution for mass storage as I wanted something simple, and easy to use.
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Reviews with images
Not reliable - no longer trust it.
I've had this since Nov. 2009 (writing this update in April of 2011.) The Drobo S is terrible. Sorry I purchased it. Drobo recommends running Windows Chksdk on the drives. The problem? I had a power failure during a chkdsk. This should be no biggie. But for some reason, the Drobo became unreadable. Took about 20 reboots until it would read - and then unreliably. So I moved all my files from the Drobo. 400,000 files. Many of the images were corrupted and unusable. Checked other backups made using the Drobo as the source. The same files were corrupted - going back 10 months. So Drobo had been silently corrupting my files for months. After copying the files, I reset and reformatted the Drobo. This process - copying the files, etc. took three days. After the reset, the Drobo still had problems. Checked the HDD's - no problems. Formatted again. Things seemed to be working. So I copied all the files back - these were split up among 5 different HDD's. Took another two days. The next day? I can read the files, and can copy from the Drobo, but I can't copy anything TO the Drobo. Diagnostics show no problems. Riiight. It's going in the trash. It can not be trusted. I, like many people who purchased this device, assumed RAID or redundancy. Not so. One drive gets an error, all the drives can be affected. A simple power during a chkdsk should not trash four separate physical HDD's!I thought this would be a great external storage solution. Man was I wrong. I am sorry I purchased this - a TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY!Original review (5 stars): Took all of 5 minutes to unpack and install. I used two 1.5 gig HDD's (install from the top bay down.) The Drobo includes a USB cable and Firewire 800 cable. If you don't have a Firewire 800 card (and you probably don't) you will need to buy one. I picked up a three port card and a Firewire 800 card reader. Firewire 800 is way faster than USB 2.0.I copied all my data with my existing USB port - the Firewire 800 card was ordered after the Drobo arrived. I did not realize it was Firewire 800 - I have Firewire 400, as do most PC's.I installed two drives to start. I'll add more as needed - a full backup took 700 gig, so I have a while to go. My primary worry was saving my digital photos (35,000!) and music.So when you get your Drobo, you may need the card as well. It's worth it for the added speed.Followup #1: March 9, 2009: I purchased a Laqcie Firewire card because it has multiple ports. The Drobo only "supports" two cards, and the Lacie is not one of them. They suggest using the third party FireWire driver from Unibrain. Before the Unibrainn driver - the Drobo would not startup with the Lacie card. With the Unibrain, the Drobo worked flawlessly.LaCie 130821 FireWire 800 PCI Card Design by SismoI called tech support, and they suggested this fix. Tech support was helpful and answered the que within a few minutes.DaisyChain: I have a Lexar Firewire 800 card reader attached to the Drobo's second FireWire port - works great!Pro Series Compactflash Readers Firewire 800
Top reviews from other countries
Caninphx
Buy this if you have lots of data to store.
Reviewed in Canada on May 5, 2015