So, today my volume (drobo mounted via a droboshare) unexpectedly disappeared on my Mac. I will never buy another Drobo unit again.
The net effect was that I got an unreliable solution that I have to manage, worry about and spend time and money on. I bought a Drobo so that I can have reliable data storage without worrying about reliable data storage. You need a working Drobo unit to do that, and it has to recognize the filesystem and mount it. What you should also realize is that when your Drobo unit fails, there is no way for you to read data off the drives. Given that support people will forget what was written before, or begin by asking what your address is and when you bought your Drobo, it will easily take a week before you get to the real issue. Responding after one business day is not enough. When you make "reliable data storage devices", you really need to have support that cares about customers, reads their emails and responds instantly.
#Mac uninstall drobo dashboard mac#
There is NO FSCK (Filesystem Check) program for HFS+ at all! Data Robotics will tell you that you can switch your Drobo between a Mac and DroboShare and you will be ok - but that seems to be exactly what resulted in my data corruption problems. I looked closer: the DroboShare seems to use the plain Linux support for HFS+ that is known to be shaky. What's worse is that now I don't trust the Drobo at all. Despite my asking, Data Robotics was unwilling to provide an upgraded (better) unit. I have so far been through TWO Drobo replacements. Which is why I was slightly miffed when Drobo Dashboard kept crashing on me and reporting unreliable data, annoyed when it hung in the middle of the night when doing my first real backup, slightly angry when support told me my Drobo is defective and needs to be replaced, and really pissed off when the second unit I got corrupted my volume and lost data (when connected to a DroboShare). I bought the Drobo so that I can trust it with my data and forget about failing drives and losing data. SMB introduces other annoying problems, too - I couldn't copy my music collection onto the Drobo, because some filenames had non-ascii characters in them.īut all of the above are merely inconveniences. As an example, I found it impossible to create a sparsebundle disk image for use with SuperDuper on the Drobo. What you should also know is that using the DroboShare will provide its own annoyances. That's about 6 times slower than when connected via FireWire-800. What they won't point out is that it connects to your Drobo with a USB cable, which (together with SMB) pretty much limits your transfer speeds to about 5-8MB/s. The DroboShare comes with Gigabit Ethernet, as the marketing will point out. I used a DroboShare to setup my Drobo in a remote location where I can't hear it.
And that means the fancy fast FireWire-800 interface that you just paid for is pretty much useless. You won't want to have a Drobo under your desk, or anywhere in your vicinity, trust me. I don't know why, as the drives are very cool to the touch. To make matters worse, the fan in the Drobo turns on very frequently, even when the drives have been spun down for hours.
#Mac uninstall drobo dashboard pro#
To give you an idea of what I mean by Loud, one single Drobo with ultra-quiet WD Green drives spun down is louder than my 8-core Mac Pro with 4 drives and an army of fans in it. And it isn't the drives, it's the fan that cools the whole thing.
Being a Mac user, I expected an "Apple experience": plug it in and forget it's even there. Expectations were high - Drobo marketing pushes the devices as easy to use, reliable and flexible. Convinced by people on podcasts (mostly TWiP and This Week in Tech) raving about how great the Drobo (from Data Robotics) storage device is, I decided to budget two into a project I'm working on.
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