Data Robotics Drobo FS

The Data Robotics Drobo FS is a five-bay storage array with Beyond RAID technology for quick and easy back-up. We were pretty keen to get our hands on it too, as it's the first opportunity we've had to test a Beyond RAID system. We've got high hopes for the Drobo FS, especially given its high-end price tag, but it'll have to pull out all the stops to rival the Synololgy DS1010+ that we're currently in the process of testing.

The Drobo FS has five 3.5-inch hard drive bays. It can therefore be used with desktop PC hard drives or 2.5-inch drives fitted with adapters. It has an excellent-quality finish, with a black metal casing and a shiny plastic front that lets light from the hard drives' control diodes filter through. It's an attractive NAS that's subtly stylish!

The front plate is magnetic, making it easy to remove for access to the drive bays inside. Drives can be installed without screws and simply slide into the bays. The back is almost entirely taken up by a ventilation grille, behind which is a 12 cm fan. Just under that, there's an On/Off button, an Ethernet port for network connection, and a power socket that hooks up to the transformer, which is unfortunately not integrated into the system itself. There's no USB or eSATA connections either, so you can't hook up an external hard drive. However, the Drobo FS has a great way of keeping your data extra-safe, as we'll see later in the review.

You have to install the Drobo Dashboard software supplied (Mac or PC) in order to set up and adjust the Drobo FS, as there's no web-based admin service as found in competitors' models. For us, this is almost certainly one of the biggest weaknesses of the Drobo FS. However, this will apparently be put right at the end of 2010, as Data Robotics is working on developing a web-based control system.

 

Once you plug the NAS into the mains and switch it on, all you have to do is insert the hard drives into the bays and they'll be automatically formatted and integrated into the Beyond RAID system. Beyond RAID allows the NAS to create one virtual drive from several smaller drives with different capacities. Unlike RAID 0, 1 or 5, Beyond RAID allows dive space to be pooled and shared. A page on the Data Robotics website allows you to calculate the total available capacity in relation to the disks installed.
One handy thing about the Drobo FS is that you can add extra drives as and when your storage needs grow. However, part of each drive will be reserved for hard drive redundancy, so you won't lose your data if the system fails. If something does go wrong, you can simply remove the faulty disk and replace it with a drive of at least the same capacity. Your data will then be reconstituted using backed-up information stored in the redundancy space on the other drives. Five 1 TB drives, for example, would give you a total available storage space of 3.7 TB, the rest being reserved for emergency back-up or the future addition or replacement of drives. Plus, it's possible to play things even safer by using a double-redundancy system that can cover two simultaneous drive failures. That does, however, reduce the available storage space even further, almost cutting it in half.

The rest of the set-up process is fairly simple, and creating users and shared folders is very straight forward. It's just a shame it's not possible for users to share a sub-folder with other users.

The following performances were measured with two 150 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives.

The speeds aren't particularly exceptional and are notably slower than the Synology DS209, which is something of a reference in the world of NAS. Write speeds are decent at just over 20 MBps, and it still does a good enough job of reading weighty files, even if it's slower than the Synology or current record holder, the Lime Technology unRAID.
 

We then tried adding three 1 TB drives (two WD Caviar Green and one Samsung F1) to test out the system's response to adding extra drives and to test the system's performance with five drives installed. We noticed a significant drop in performances, almost certainly due to the extra processing power required to back up and distribute redundancy data over the new disks. The drop is noticeable and variable, but shouldn't be more than 10%.

Although the NAS administrator has to use the Drobo Dashboard Software to set up or adjust the drive (but not to access it), the software itself is very easy to use ... perhaps even a little too easy. Everything is simplified to the greatest possible extent and many useful functions seem to be missing. For example, the drives aren't clearly identified in the Dashboard and there's no 'Recycle Bin' for recovering accidentally deleted files. Plus, as supplied, the Drobo FS only offers NAS functionality, as there's no FTP, torrent tool, web server etc.

Thankfully, the excellent DroboApps service allows you to add functions, some of which could prove pretty essential. These add-ons have, in fact, been developed by the user community and have then been made available for other users to download. The design and handling can therefore change dramatically from one application to the next, and they don't necessarily integrate into the same control interface as the Drobo FS itself. You can therefore add an Apache web server, an FTP server or a bit torrent client as and when required. Installation is simple: just drag and drop files downloaded from the DroboApps site into the DroboApps folder on the Drobo FS. Then, restart the system and your new function should be installed! Actually using the add-ons can be a little more complicated, however, as they're often in a command-line interface or via an SSH connection. Some are therefore best kept for Linux buffs only.