Drobo, Having Stopped Sales and Support, Reportedly Files Chapter 7 Bankruptcy (arstechnica.com) 36
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: StorCentric, the holding company for the Drobo and Retrospect brands, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late June 2022. Now, AppleInsider reports that, based on an email sent by StorCentric, the bankruptcy shifted from reorganization-minded Chapter 11 to liquidation-focused Chapter 7 in late April.
The writing for Drobo was on the wall, or at least on its website. Text at the top of the homepage notes that, as of January 27, 2023, Drobo products and support for them are no longer available. "Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model," the site reads. "We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data." Drobo began in 2005 as Data Robotics and launched into the tech consciousness with the original Drobo, a "storage robot." The marquee feature was being able to hot-swap drives of nearly any size without migrating data.
The writing for Drobo was on the wall, or at least on its website. Text at the top of the homepage notes that, as of January 27, 2023, Drobo products and support for them are no longer available. "Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model," the site reads. "We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data." Drobo began in 2005 as Data Robotics and launched into the tech consciousness with the original Drobo, a "storage robot." The marquee feature was being able to hot-swap drives of nearly any size without migrating data.
They just kinda gave up... (Score:5, Interesting)
They innovated like nuts to launch their products in the very beginning. But then they kinda just withered away as competitors like Synology and QNap just kept going. It's like they forgot it was a marathon and instead ran a sprint. All puttered out and tired after the first stretch.
Re: They just kinda gave up... (Score:1)
And still no resize-on-demand raid solutions for Linux.
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For good reason. Drobo was a great warning to anyone who was eager to offer such a thing considering how often it failed and took out people's data.
Re: They just kinda gave up... (Score:4, Informative)
> And still no resize-on-demand raid solutions for Linux.
How does that work?
If you have four 1TB drives and you add a 16TB drive, how is the RAID set up?
You could arrange most conceivabe normal scenarios with ZFS and drive partitions and RAIDZ or mirror vdevs concatenated together, but many physical drive connection scenarios just aren't possible to do RAID with, like the example above.
Some people use the term "RAID-0" but I don't see how that's Redundant in any way.
Re: They just kinda gave up... (Score:2, Flamebait)
You shard off data from a disk, you indicate that disk can be removed. You are indicated a new disk has been added you resliver the data onto the new disk. Obv that 16TB disk will only use 1tb of space, but once the raid has 16tB of disk then the partition should auto resize to 16tb (or whatever the usable space is)
Let me know when mdadm can do that. ZFS is user land and has a janky solution that doesnâ(TM)t really scale (requires data to be offline)
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With ext4 and btrfs, you can shrink [superuser.com] those filesystems and LVM members, then remove a RAID array member using the --grow option. This isn't a fast process because md-raid has to shuffle a ton of bits around, but it is doable. With btrfs, one can directly remove a drive.
ZFS, you can only remove vdevs, so if one adds a drive to a vdev, it can't be removed. However, ZFS is architected to be very conservative, and the times one has to shrink an array are relatively rare.
With Linux, there isn't anything its RA
Re:They just kinda gave up... (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike Synology and QNap they focused on the wrong thing: technology.
Synology just repurposed btrfs and QNAP went ZFS. Meanwhile DROBO tried to single handedly create a whole new filesystem exclusively for their products and the result as expected was spectacular instability from everyone I know who bought one with data loss a common story.
Synology and QNAP focused their innovation on the user facing software solutions like search, configuration and sync clients.
Re:They just kinda gave up... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with drobo is that it just used ext3 on top of their own proprietary block layer...
The block layer made the filesystem think the drive was 16TB, irrespective of the actual total capacity of the installed drives. But once you hit the actual capacity, things broke because the filesystem thought there was space free but the block layer had nowhere to put it.
The on-disk format was also completely proprietary, so you couldn't take the disks out and recover them on another device. Most other NAS devices use standard linux software raid and/or things like zfs of btrfs which can be accessed on a random linux host for recovery purposes.
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If TrueNAS could run on Drobo hardware they might be a decent buy now that prices are crashing. Unfortunately they seem to be too low end, particularly in the RAM department.
Maybe that's why Drobo did their own custom filesystem. Low overhead so they could sell you cheaper hardware.
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> But then they kinda just withered away as competitors
I have no idea, but did the Professional Managerial Class fire the founders and technologists?
Most of the time those guys are just expensive, annoying, and completely replacable by some n00b in a call center overseas.
^ MBA school
Re: They just kinda gave up... (Score:1)
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Technology shifted from under them, really.
Drobo, for those who didn't know, was really a USB-attached RAID array. What made it special was that it pretended to be filesystem agnostic - it could appear as a FAT32 array to Windows and instead, was transparently converting that to ext3 in the end.
It was a strange and interesting technology - they were taking what was a block-oriented interface (USB Mass Storage) and turning it into a filesystem layer storage. When the OS writes to it, it just writes to it as
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Their product from the start was the only thing in the industry that did RAID 5 well for a USB device. Then, they made iSCSI targets.
The problem is that they just seemed to rest on their laurels. Synology and QNAP came around with NAS models which not just could sling bits, but could add server functionality, be it email, web, backups, syncing, video transcoding and streaming, and many other things. Even now, it is a viable way to back up a small business using a Synology NAS and their Active Backup for
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Another problem was their lack of repair services. When your $1000 unit died on its 366th day, they told you 'tough luck, buy a new one'.
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Worked for me (Score:1)
Bought a Drobo and drives and it didn't work (Score:4, Funny)
And all they could do was blame WD.
So instead of buying new drives, I bought a new QNAP box and it just worked.
Shame about Retrospect (Score:1)
The writing was on the wall when Apple introduced Time Machine for the average user, but Retrospect was an excellent utility for people who might have had more than one type of backup set for their Macs. Here's to hoping it finds a new home.
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Retrospect has evolved to an awesome, but forgotten about backup product. In the mid-1980s, Dantz had DiskFit, which was fairly good enough, when most people had 40-80 MB HDDs, so backups were done to floppies. Retrospect was created in 1989 as a "real" backup program, which allowed for many types of media, be if floppies, tape, hard disks, and expanded to optical and cloud. It also went from a Mac only utility to Mac and Windows.
It has been around forever, and has had deduplication on a file basis, befo
I was a happy 5D3 owner... (Score:5, Informative)
I was a Drobo 5D3 owner; a direct-connect Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosure? BYOD? Works with Mac? There was no other company that offered the same kind of thing at such a reasonable price.
And I was a happy 5D3 owner, at least until it came time to upgrade to the next version of OSX. Then it was a matter of waiting, waiting, waiting for official Drobo support for the new version of the OS.
And then OSX Ventura was coming out, and there was no compatibility w/ Drobo and people trying to upgrade had all kinds of issues. It was simply no longer an option because they stopped supporting the software updates.
So I had to break open the piggy bank and replace the 5D3 with a Pegasus32. Wasn't happy about that, but at least I can stay up to date w/ OS versions...
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I was a Drobo 5D3 owner; a direct-connect Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosure? BYOD? Works with Mac? There was no other company that offered the same kind of thing at such a reasonable price.
Genuinely ask: Why did you go with a DAS solution?
I have a Synology Directly connected with my mac (mini). How? Well, an eth cable from the mac directly to the synology, no switch inbetween. Mine is old so 1Gbps (2 if I bond two eth ports), but newer models can do 10Gbps (20 if you bond 2 eth ports).
Do I want SMB, I've got it. Do I want Blocks? iSCSI is my friend*. More than one computer connected if I want, no biggie, or if I want just one computer, that's possible too. In the end: More flexibility.
I guess
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Why did you go with a DAS solution?
Answer: raw speed/throughput.
A NAS such as my Synology (which I also have) and 2 bonded 10gbps maxes out at 20gbps.
Using Thunderbolt 4, my DAS solutions double that to 40gbps and do not require the setup/maintenance that a NAS requires.
So my Pegasus is in a RAID configuration w/ 4 8gb drives giving me a 24gb storage capacity for working on large files locally with minimal lags and overhead, and my Synology DS923+ has 100+gb network storage for backups and sharing.
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A high speed DAS these days is expensive and fairly rare. The only ones I know of would be something like OWC's Thunderbolt array, or something from QNAP with ZFS that used ZIL/SLOG and L2ARC for caching. Even then, the QNAP NAS enumerates a virtual high speed NIC to communicate with the array, so stuff is presented as shares or an iSCSI target. Most people on the PC side tend to get a PCIe with NVMe SSDs for fast DAS.
NAS can come close though. I've seen pretty decent speeds using 40gigE, or even 10gigE
Fragile at best (Score:1, Flamebait)
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ReiserFS every hard drive I had I would put it on it, and the drive would die within a year. Thank goodness at the time Seagate had 5 year warranties. The filesystem tech was cool, yet it really hammered the HDD.
ReiserFS came to be go-to fs from 2003 through 2006/7 as it was favoured by my employer. Around 40+ servers, a small office, plus my various home computer projects and laptops. I never had any issues with my drives.
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The filesystem jokes aside, I helped a pro photographer move from his Drobo system to a "Plus" model Synology NAS, and it has worked well for him. Mainly because the NAS supports backups to local media and the cloud, as well as btrfs, which is used on top of Linux md-raid, so all the claimed worries about the RAID-5 write hole are not relevant. The btrfs filesystem also ensures easy snapshotting and bit-rot detection, which is critical for media.
QNAP is another contender. The ideal with them is to buy a
Welp. Glad I went Synology (Score:1)
Had an issue where I wasn't going to be able to squeeze 4 drives into my rig due to PSU issues.
So I went with a Synology unit.
It just works. Setup wasn't QUITE as simple. But "it works" buys a lot of good will.
free the software IP (Score:3)
the software IP should be transformed into free software, so that the community can pick-up the pieces.
Just didn't compete.... (Score:2)
I always felt like Drobo had an amateur feel about it, even looking at the outer casing of the product?
Synology and QNAP had a business/professional feel about them, by contrast. I.T. people just felt more comfortable putting those in their server rooms, I think. Their choice to go proprietary for their filesystem was a kiss of death, on top of it.
That said? I'm just not a fan of ANY of these NAS solutions. Sure, many people use them successfully for years. But my experiences have ranged from garbage qualit
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What turned me off from Drobo was the price tag. For secret-sauce RAID, I could buy a NAS case, build a cheap PC, add Linux based RAID, or even a hardware RAID controller, export the volume as a Samba or NFS share, or even an iSCSI target... and be better off. This was way back in the late 2000s before Synology or QNAP was on the scene.
Now with Synology and QNAP, there just isn't any point for a Drobo, especially with all the apps that both platforms offer. The quality of the hardware is "meh" -- pretty