Drobo BeyondRAID 4 Bay Diskless Storage Array Enclosure - DR04DD10

Pros: The concept is easy and installation of hard drives was very simple.

Cons: After three Drobos I have not had a single on that works. All of them have had major issues including not being able to connect, taking significantly long to transfer files (25 hours for 1GB) or just freezing during transfer.

Pros: I purchased this along with a 3TB hard drive. I planned to use 2 of my other old ones until I can buy more 3TB drives. I put the 3TB drive in and it was marked as failed. I put the other 2 older drives in (much smaller) and they worked as expected. Turns out, that with the firmware that comes on the drobo, it can't read drives over 2TB!! I had to update the firmware and my 3TB drive works fine now. I just wanted to post this so someone else in my situation can expect to do this.

Cons: none

Pros: Great for the simpleton user. It sets itself up, consumes your drive space how it chooses and gives you no options for setting it up.

Cons: See pros

Other Thoughts: If you're an advanced user and want total control of your hard drive storage system, then this is NOT for you. The device does not give you direct access to the drive(s) nor are you allowed to set it up yourself. Personally, I want to configure my drives myself so when (not if) they fail, I can easily replace the failed unit and move on. So, if you're computer savvy, have any common sense, and can decide for yourself how you want your system, then buy something else. If, however, you need to be spoon fed every little thing, then this item is for you.

If you need any kind of support, be prepared to be ignored when the unit breaks down and you lose your data because this company has no time for the consumer once they get your loot. Buy something else.

Pros: If you have good hard drives in it - it works just like it is suppose too - I have 4x 4tb hard drives in it and they are set to only allow me access to 8GB so two hard drives show up as M drive and then other two drives on it mirro information.

I use it in a media center station - with over 356 DVD ISO being shared on it that I own, the media center windows connects to device and loads up the ISO and it plays image just fine. I also have a secound one I bought for work and we put it on a server at off sit location and have it accessable thro the network all of our servers are connected to it and do a full backup to the device and it works great for that also.

it does take while to send copy things to the drive for example 50 gigs takes about 15 mins to copy for me i have timed it. but also you have to remember when you are doing raid level mirror or higher level raid stuff it slows down the copying becuase it has to duplicate that information twice onces to one drive and then two secound drive its been my exprince that when this happens it takes twice as along to copy when i removed all of the drives from the drobo and then only had one 4tb drive in it, it then copied twice as fast 50 gigs then took average of 6 to 8 mins to copy.

Cons: no real cons could have support usb3 but no big deal for mass storage and backups you would not really have noticed speed if you are moving 100 gigs too 200 gigs worth information even using usb 3.0 would take while.

Pros: Easy to hot swap hard drives, rebuilds and allocates space automattically

Cons: Extremely slow read/access/transfer speeds
Firewire does not work and crashes constantly
USB connection drops frequently causing the system to power off or not be recognized at all.
Extremely unreliable for storing your sensitive data!

Other Thoughts: With the ability to store 12TB using 4x 4TB hard drives, the USB 2.0 interface and Firewire interface is useless for a device that can store this much data!
Average transfer rates are around 20MB/s on USB and a little but higher with Firewire, if you can preventing from failing!
Transferring 1 GB worth of data takes 51 seconds.
Transferring 1TB takes 14.2 hours!
Transferring 12TB takes 7.11 DAYS!

USELESS! How much would it have cost them to add eSATA or even USB 3.0 for this base model? So Stupid! go with a system that supports eSATA or USB 3.0!

Pros: Ease of use, high level of data protection

Cons: SLOW. REALLY SLOOOOOW. For a NAS device with a gigabit NIC, I expected far more out of this NAS than it ever delivered. It's sluggish to wake up, often causing clients attempting to connect to shares on it to time out when they try to access it. I have a 100% gigabit network, and plenty of other network devices that have no problems moving data with exceptional speed.

The other reason I rate it so poorly is its very narrow window of drive error tolerance. I have used drives specified by Data Robotics in it since day one, and on more than one occasion when increasing the array size by adding a new larger drive, found the drive to be flagged for errors and rejected by the Drobo, in one case in less than four hours of use! Inspection of the drive by Seagate and an independent lab showed it to be working within their specs, so the issue has to be the Drobo.

After my last attempt at expansion, which ultimately caused me to have to reject two drives that were brand new within a day of adding them, I called it quits.

I am getting rid of it and buying a D-Link 345. Hopefullly it will be faster and far less picky about the drives.

I would add that I involved Drobo's support folks with my issues, and they were pretty much unfazed. My "failed" drives were blamed on the OEM or drive firmware, despite it being at or above the current version.

Other Thoughts: None, other than as an IT professional who works with large SAN arrays, I am disappointed in the product and could not in good faith recommend it to anyone.

Pros: Love this device. Tried it both USB and Firewire... not much difference in speed. Have replaced two drives and put it through lots of HD video and Photo editing. No problems so far. Bought one for my parents because it was so easy to use.

Cons: Fan can get a little loud for being on the desk right next to me. Speed can be a little slow over both USB and Firewire, but I'm just using it as a backup.

Other Thoughts: Remember this does not replace a good backup strategy. Have multiple backups on different devices in different locations!!

Pros: Nice little unit. Its pretty painless for my users that need big volumes. Support was stellar and they addressed my issues very quickly.

Cons: They are a tad slow for really data intensive stuff.

Other Thoughts: I have 5 of the 4bay, 2 of the 5bay, the DroboFS and a Drobo Pro at work. I had one 4bay fail after a year but they replaced it with no issue. Both 5bay drobos failed within a year but they replaced them very quickly and gave me free drobocare on both for the hassle. Only giving 4 stars because of the inital failure...But they honored their product and bent over backward to right it.

Pros: On paper, this is an awesome concept.
Seemed to work OK with very large image files (50GB and higher)

Cons: Simply didnt work right. Used 4x 500GB drives, after about 1TB of data copy started spitting Read/Write failures left and right. Reported a bad drive so i replaced it. Contacted customer support and even got a replacement unit, same issue; Write failures. Was doing data backup with many small files and documents, seemed to crash it out after a number of errors 100% of the time.

Other Thoughts: The drive it reported bad was put in another station, ran a block level check and everything came back fine. Used that drive in another computer for a year+ and it never caused a problem.

Pros: Better than a thumb drive

Cons: Too expensive, support is NOT 2 yrs as stated-may be near end of life. Cheaper to buy 4 external 3tb external drives with a usb 3.0 hub if you are using it in a 2012 server oe Win8.

Other Thoughts: Too slow-not a NAS