Good discussion here folks. I want to respond to a few of you individually, but I think it is important to highlight what @feevrt and a few others have mentioned: RAID does not equal backup. Always make sure you have a minimum of two copies of everything that is important to you. I also apologize for not calling out everyone by @ user name as I am limited to 2 mentions per post.
Progrocktv - Sorry to hear about your issues. It sounds like you had a solid red light which means the yellow “low capacity” light was ignored and you became critically low on capacity. A failed drive would be a flashing red light vs. solid. Swapping in a new drive but not increasing the capacity simply caused an unnecessary rebuild and additional stress on the healthy drives.
KevinJones - The vast majority of people who complain about performance on Drobo are using units that likely have been discontinued for years. It’s great to see they are still getting value out of their trusty old Drobo, but our new products are much, much faster as evidenced by the OP and some of the comments here.
ldillon - I am confused by your comment of Drobo arrays being slow with more than 1 concurrent user. Most Drobo arrays are DAS, so they are limited to a single computer by design and the new networked 5N is plenty fast enough for both home and business. Maybe you are referring to a legacy product like the Drobo FS (has been EOL for almost 2 years now). As you mention, FreeNAS is an excellent product, but the reality is most people don’t have the time or desire to build, maintain, and support their own storage array. Kudos to you for finding something that works for you.
@Medievalist - I stand by my statement as any RAID drive migration requires specific software, software versions, and hardware (i.e. RAID controller, firmware on said RAID controller) to work, but I agree that there are varying degrees of difficulty in making this happen. You are obviously very technical having done a RAID migration using open-source tools, but the reality is the average user is not going to know how to do this. It’s the exact reason we make our disk packs compatible in current and next-gen Drobo arrays.
Jim @ Drobo
