Storage Firm Drobo Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (appleinsider.com) 44
Longstanding Thunderbolt and network-attached storage company Drobo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late June, and will hold its first creditors meeting on July 17. AppleInsider reports: First formed as Data Robotics in 2005, Drobo manufactured solutions for remote and network storage. Parent company StarCentric filed bankrupcy papers with the California Northern Bankruptcy Court (San Jose) on June 20, 2022. According to official court documentation, the company is to hold its first creditors meeting on July 19. There is also a final deadline for filing claims against the company, which is October 17, 2022.
The company has no commented publicly on the decision. However, the company appears to have been badly affected by the coronavirus. [...] Drobo's online US and European stores are currently both showing every product as sold out. The Chapter 11 filing implies that the company is trying to reorganize and return to full operations at some point. It isn't yet clear what the reorganization will look like, nor the magnitude of the creditors' demands.
The company has no commented publicly on the decision. However, the company appears to have been badly affected by the coronavirus. [...] Drobo's online US and European stores are currently both showing every product as sold out. The Chapter 11 filing implies that the company is trying to reorganize and return to full operations at some point. It isn't yet clear what the reorganization will look like, nor the magnitude of the creditors' demands.
Cloud storage (Score:1)
These days, cloud storage is just too easy to set up and attach. If you want to be in the computer hardware business, you'd better be ready to constantly update your product, because no product remains in its current form for more than a few years. The hard drive itself is quickly dying off these days.
Re:Cloud storage (Score:4, Insightful)
As for Drobo, they've been dead for a long time. I tried to buy from them almost 3 years ago and everything was "sold out".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The hard drive itself is quickly dying off these days.
Uh, what do you think cloud storage services are using to store your data? Spinning rust isn't going anywhere, even if you aren't as likely to see it in the box sitting right in from of you.
What is going away are 2.5" form factor drives. Cheap NVME storage has put the last nail in that coffin.
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Cloud storage is moving to SSD just as fast as the rest of us. Nobody wants HDDs any more. Yes, you can still get them, but the proportion of SSD to HDD is moving steadily towards SSD, even for low-cost cloud storage.
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SSDs have come way down in price, but even the cheapest consumer QLC SSDs cost around 5x as much as a high capacity enterprise HDD. Cloud storage isn't going to be using SSDs for bulk storage as long as that's the case, because they'd rather make more money. It still makes more sense for low-cost cloud storage solutions to use SSDs only for a caching tier.
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We're both right. SSD prices will continue to fall, until it no longer makes sense to keep making spinning platters.
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AWS has been using SSD storage as its default storage option for some time now. You need to explicitly pick magnetic storage if you want it. It's slightly cheaper, but much slower (as expected).
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"The hard drive itself is quickly dying off"
What exactly do you think bulk storage in the cloud uses?
Spinning HDDs still significantly beat out of SDDs in cost per TB, and don't suffer from the long retrieval times of tapes. For this reason alone, HDDs are not obsolete just yet. They're now just specialized for bulk storage. SDDs will probably eventually catch up and surpass them, but until then, they'll occupy an important niche.
A lot of that is in the cloud these days, obviously, but other NAS manufact
Re: Cloud storage (Score:5, Insightful)
I can confirm that Drobos suffer from dependability issues. It is neat that you can hot swap them and mix and match different sized HDDs, but you are stuck using their proprietary software and the hardware has a high failure rate.
The best thing you can do is get a dumb cabinet that does nothing but i/o and use ZFS. Your drives with last longer, your data will be safer, and you will not be trapped in some proprietary ecosystem that could go bankrupt at any moment. If you use TrueNAS the company might go under but as an open source project it is not going anywhere.
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Of course, cloud providers still use a lot of HDDs, but they are moving to SSDs just as fast as the rest of us.
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Those guys were actually kind of late to network-attached storage period; with their most iconic items being direct-attach boxes that did a proprietary RAID-alike inside and made the resultin
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Cloud storage is an easy addiction. Open a drive, or a S3 bucket, store your stuff. However, there are a few things that should be thought about:
It needs to be treated like a set of media, like disks, tapes, optical, punch tape. It has advantages, but it has disadvantages.
Even with object locking, it is very easy to lose everything on cloud storage. A cloud drive is easy prey to ransomware which can encrypt everything, then purge all previous snapshots. If someone gains access to the cloud account, all
Exaggerated reliability (Score:4, Informative)
About 10 years ago, my company relied on a Drobo for backups. It was to be super-redundant, even a hard drive failing completely wasn't supposed to cause any data loss. In reality, we were constantly having trouble with data corruption. In the end, the Drobo controller itself failed, causing us to lose all of the data on ALL of the drives. We did not go back.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile my DIY ZFS server has suffered multiple drive failures over the years and yet has never had any data loss or data corruption issues... and that's including me completely replacing the entire server out from under the storage array, changing not only the hardware but even the operating system (OpenSolaris -> Linux). I just exported the array on the old server and imported it on the new server and everything kept ticking.
I'm not saying companies should replicate what I did, none of this is enterp
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I have had great luck with ZFS so far. Even on consumer grade hardware where I took an old PC, added a few SSD cards, tossed in some drives with a SATA card, made sure I had enough RAM, it works well. Especially when you have a pair of SSDs as a ZIL so all your random I/O stuff is hitting the SSDs, as opposed to the drives, speeding things up greatly. I've never lost data with ZFS, and backups are easy with ZFS send. Encryption/compression/deduplication? Easy peesy. Just make sure to have enough RAM f
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DAS just doesn't make sense to me at all for anything more complex than a single USB drive when the hardware required to turn something into a consumer-grade NAS costs almost nothing. For the basic use case they basically just need to throw a cheap ARM SoC that has built-in SATA and Ethernet controllers and wire a drive and ethernet jack up to it. Which is AFAIK exactly what Western Digital does when they sell you a single-drive NAS for $190. Almost any use case that needs a 4-8 drive storage array needs th
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There is a very narrow market for high performance DAS, and it is mainly to handle local files that need accessed during production. Video production, CAD, and to a lesser extent, audio production all rely on fast local storage.
Most other applications can be done with a NAS, or even a FC HBA to a high speed SAN. In the PC world, this can handled by a workstation with a lot of NVMe channels, where the OS can be on two NVMe drives, the data be on the rest of the NVMe SSDs, and software RAID be used. In the
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This is all based on the premise that the need is for a high performance DAS... which the Drobo isn't. Poor performance has been one of the complaints about them for a long time. They should have transitioned to selling only NAS devices a decade ago.
Even the narrow use case where a high performance DAS is required makes less and less sense as time goes on. 25 gig ethernet is now affordable. Mikrotik sells the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe (a dual port 25-gig NIC with a built-in router) for $199 USD, and a similar Mel
Not a huge surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Drobo we're the high end option some years ago but since then they're not even something mentioned in the same sentence as Synology or QNAP.
I'm surprised they lasted this long.
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They never evolved with the times. For a while, they just provided RAID to USB. Then, they got into iSCSI and NAS stuff.
One thing that I remember was their closed format for their RAID system. With a Synology NAS, if the NAS fails, I can plug the drives into another machine, have Linux md-raid stitch the drives together into a volume, use eCryptFS to decrypt any encrypted shares, then recover all data. With QNAP, I can use md-raid, mount the volumes using Linux LVM2 (QNAP uses block snapshots), decrypt
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By contrast; pretty much anything from QNAP or Synology at that price point at least has an expansion slot and explicit support for 10GbE or faster NICs, typically support for at lea
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Had they continued with a Mac focus, they would have had at least that niche, similar to what La Cie and OWC do.
Drobo might not have had to file bankruptcy, had they made a unit from anodized aluminum, kept with the latest USB and Thunderbolt protocols, and offered things like the ability to use their unit as a powered dock, with ports on it like HDMI, so one can just plug their MacBook Pro into the dock, and have everything, even easily accessible storage for Time Machine or whatnot. Drobo could even have
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From what I've read all their devices were ARM SoC based(unsurprising); and it looks like they are somewhere between all Marvell and heavily skewed toward Marvell SoCs; and what Drobo
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One of my guesses is that Linux didn't make headway on ARM as an embedded OS until about ten years ago, so the Drobo firmware might have been based on some commercial OS... or even something homegrown, where bog-standard stuff like Linux's md-raid wasn't present. This, plus the fact that the hardware to allow a machine to be a USB target is relatively rare (USB OTG can do this, but AFAIK, only something like the Raspberry Pi Zero has that present.) I'm sure the software to take drives, RAID them, then pre
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I think; but am not certain, that at least the iSCSI-oriented product line went Linux at least for the most recently released product; I'm not sure if that was a voluntary move or if something forced their hand; but certainly vxworks doesn't give them the body of fairly robust platform support that just comes with the territory.
Unsurprising (Score:4, Informative)
They were pretty innovative when they launched 15 years ago, but their technology and feature set basically hasn't changed in 15 years, to the point that their primary models are still direct-attached instead of wired or wireless network and they still force users to supply their own mSATA SSDs for caching despite mSATA being essentially a dead standard that all the major SSD vendors abandoned years ago. They do have some network attached models, but no wireless support and no support for add-ons that run directly on the NAS like their competitors do (Synology lets you install add-ons that do everything from Plex to mail and web servers to VPN hosts). From what I can tell, they're basically stuck in the past, and at this point there's little reason to buy their products when the competition offers enormously more functionality.
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Yes, Drobo was great over a decade ago, when direct attached storage was king. They had an innovative way of taking a bunch of disks and presenting them to the host PC as a large disk with built in redundancy and all that. And the host PC merely sees it as a USB disk.
Very neat technology.
Problem is today, direct storage isn't that big a use case - sure you buy USB disks to expand storage in your PC, but people want storage on their network so they can store photos and videos and movies and watch them anywhe
Re: (Score:3)
The reason why they didn't pop up on your radar is probably the same reason they've gone bankrupt, in addition to their feature set being stuck more than a decade ago (without any improvement to their pricing), they've built a reputation for unreliability and data loss, to the point where data stored on a Drobo was thought to be less safe than solutions with no redundancy at all.
You would think that over the intervening 15 years they'd have resolved their reliability issues, or migrated to a new software st
Re: (Score:2)
I have read a lot of gripes about data loss. To my knowledge, there is no bit-rot protection in the Drobo protocol, which is a bad thing. If I wanted something similar to a Drobo for block level storage, I'd be using something like Linux's DM-integrity as a base layer (before RAID), because it would easily detect a checksum error on a drive, mark it as a hard read error, so it would be obvious to the RAID and filesystem layers above.
I have not seen much mentioned about Drobo cleaning up their act, and I h
Re: (Score:2)
TrueNAS Mini (their 4 to 8 drive SFF storage appliances, they sell them on Amazon) is probably a good option for people who want a similar sort of turnkey professional solution and want the extra reliability of ZFS (where you get snapshots and per-block checksums and scrubs and flexible storage pool allocation and all that jazz). All that you're losing is the ability to add drives on the fly, but is that really critical? People who are buying these sort of things are probably better off just buying the four
Well crap (Score:2)
I have an old Drobo I bought some time ago, but never actually hooked up as I never could decide what mix of drives to use...
I guess this at least saves me the trouble of trying to set it up, I'll just buy a normal RAID enclosure like I should have done in the first place.
Too bad though as it seemed like a really robust system, even if it didn't offer the best performance. I was really in it for the really large volume support.
I do hope they make it out of bankruptcy though so they can carry on support for
Re: (Score:1)
If I were them, I would have went full quarantine and tried to have implement some kind of clean room situation for the logistics of maintaining their manufacturing infrastructure. No idea how economically feasible that would be, but it might be a compelling selling point. It should have been a software house ultimately and focus on a old school buy to own NAS suite with annual version upgrades.
Of course, I'm sure there real market was metadata reselling. So why bother with their products when they're pr
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WFH is mostly connecting to your company's VPN and doing whatever you would've done in the office. Now, I suppose if your job involves downloading torrents all day
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WFH is mostly connecting to your company's VPN and doing whatever you would've done in the office.
Well I can't really argue with that since I couldn't eve be bothered to set up the Drobo I had, while I was working at home the whole time...
I just wanted soemthing that could hold my entire set of digital photographs taken over many years, which wouldn't fit on a single drive. Of course then the problem is how do you back that up, and I never wanted to buy a second Drobo.
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> Too bad though as it seemed like a really robust system
Unfortunately, it wasn't. They were notoriously unreliable and prone to data loss.
Re: (Score:1)
Unfortunately, it wasn't. They were notoriously unreliable and prone to data loss.
Well then at least on the positive side I dodged a major bullet as data loss with images is pretty awful.
Thanks for letting me know.
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Yeah, I've still got a few dead Drobos I pulled from client sites. Reliability is absolutely awful, I've seen better than 50% failure rates. And when they fail, you've got to move the drives into another Drobo of the same generation to recover. I'm still in the process of talking clients who still have them into replacement before they fail.
Migration Path (Score:1)
In case admins are searching for a migration plan: Drobo -> Dropbo -> Dropbox
Shitty products with shitty support (Score:2)
Bought a Drobo 4 bay storage solution and then it turned out it can't use the Seagate drives I bought for it.
The only solution that they could come up with was the advice to buy some other drives.
Yep... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked with a guy that went to work at Drobo about a decade ago.
After he got the offer I warned him of all the issues he was likely to encounter... customers with crappy networks affecting iSCSI connectivity who would of course blame the storage... performance issues due to lack of spindles... more performance issues due to lack of CPU power... more performance issues due to lack of sufficient memory to keep all the metadata in ram... etc... I even provided him links to multiple articles and videos discussing known problems and limitations with Drobo that the company refused to acknowledge.
He called me up a few weeks later to tell me just how right I was.... poor guy sounded miserable. Sounded like he spent most of the day talking to customers that had no knowledge of how anything worked but somehow thought it was a good idea to buy a NAS for extra storage instead of an external USB hard disk. He called them the "AOL users of the storage world"... I had a good chuckle at that one.
I was a happy Drobo customer, until I wasn't (Score:2)
Years ago i wanted to retire my FreeNAS box, because it was load and big, so, I bought 2 drobos. 1 was a primary storage volume and the other was a backup of the first. I used it as the storage for everything that we had, photos, movies, etc.
After 8+ years of reliable usage a drive failed. "No big deal" i thought, and i swapped in a new drive. Everything failed after that. The system didn't recognize the drive. The knwoledge base said to update the firmware, which bricked it.
I went to best buy and grabbed a
US Store Offline (Score:2)
Commodity items (Score:2)
These have become a commodity item and there are plenty of options on the market. [amazon.com]
My drobo was due for an upgrade anyway, so I think I'll stash the data elsewhere and upgrade.