back to article Data Robotics gives up and changes name to Drobo

Drobo-storage maker Data Robotics has changed its company name to Drobo. Drobo is a 4- and 8-bay desktop storage product that users can populate with hard drives they source themselves and which can be of dissimilar sizes. The box has a simple blue, green and red coloured light management system which signals when it is …

COMMENTS

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  1. jake Silver badge

    Whatever.

    I've been using removable media for about four and a half decades.

    Carry on, all ...

    1. johnnymotel
      Coat

      What?

      u still on floppies?

      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        WTF?

        Re: What?

        8" hard-sectored ones by the sound of it......

    2. craigj
      FAIL

      Re: Wahtever

      The news is the company name change, not the product.

      Strange you took the time to post a message and not read the article.

      Carry on, jake...

    3. LaeMing
      FAIL

      Fail. Just fail.

      Either a very very very out-of-touch person (by about four and a half decades, presumably) or someone who thinks pretending to be makes them 'edgy'. For some reason, the post made me think of why my mum loves the show 'Grumpy Old Men' but hates the later counterpart 'Grumpy Old Women' - she says the former are grumpy about interesting things, while the latter mostly just seem to like whining for the sake of it.

      ...

      I really really like the concept behind Drobo.

      I am still very much on the fence regarding the particular implementation, and probably will be for a few more years of 'burn-in' time.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Kids ... Pay attention ... It allows you to retire early :-)

        http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1113324

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Trollface

        very very very out-of-touch?

        Maybe he wears saggy trousers to compensate

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Stop

      El Reg equivalent of First!

      failing to read the article and posting nonsense asap should get these people banned.

      1. JudeKay (Written by Reg staff)

        Re: El Reg equivalent of First!

        That's harsh dude! It would also probably halve comments... :-)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Trollface

          Half the comments.

          On this post are off topic.

        2. Ru
          Thumb Up

          Why is this bad?

          Send the 'I, for one...' comments the same way whilst you're there!

  2. jubtastic1
    Thumb Down

    Nice name

    And Drobo is a cool concept, shame the IO performance degrades so quickly.

    Not sure if it's fragmentation or index bloat but throughput has dropped by a factor of ten over the course of a year.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well done...

    Jake, read up on what the Drobo devices actually do, and you may be pleasantly surprised. Their 'beyond RAID' system is pretty clever and very flexible, and saves you juggling data around as your storage requirements grow.

    Not a replacement for a SAN, but a godsend for anyone that works with lots of local data (our multimedia designer creates way too much 'temporary' data to slap on the network or their local drive, but a 4 bay Drobo solved the problem).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Insert Title Here...

      [Their 'beyond RAID' system is pretty clever ]

      What more clever than what the competition have been doing for years??

      http://www.qnap.com/pro_features_RLM.asp

      Oh and BTW I've never had a QNAP degrade IO over time! Give them a try some time... the New pro+ line are absolute stormers on teamed Gigabit networks!

      1. jubtastic1

        Not the same thing

        QNAP does proper old fashioned RAID, striping across drives or mirroring, expansion involves rebuilding a drive from parity, basically an exact copy of the previous drive on a larger disk, repeat for all drives then enable the extra storage space. Performance is notably better if all the drives are of the same model.

        Drobo does block level mirroring across whatever drives it decides are best suited for the data, if you drop a drive and replace it with another of different capacity, you'll end up with different blocks written to it than the original, essentially, what drobo does is ensure all data is on the array twice, it doesn't matter what type or size the drives are because they don't need to be in sync to read data off, drobo just reads from the most convenient drive.

        That's the theory, and technically it works well, you can mix and match any old drives in there and expanding the array requires *nothing* more than popping a drive out and sliding a bigger one in, in practice however, throughput steadily slows down until it's unbearable to work with and starts causing timing issues with some applications, the only fix I've found is to clone the entire array, wipe it and then copy everything back, this will need repeating every x months, depending on the data and churn rate.

        Fine for backup, no good for live storage.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    What's in a Name..

    Surprisingly popular boxes maybe because of their name? But compared to a QNAP, a Drobo box sux.

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