Drobo Ragnarök
As per Ars Technica, Drobo is making it official:
I was a very happy customer of one Drobo, and a very grouchy customer of a second.
To recap, Drobo was a “storage robot”, a device that had all the advantages of a RAID array without needing much in the way of management. The headline feature was that you could mix-and-match drive sizes and types. It took the form of a box of hard drives plugged into the back of your computer, and it handled the rest. It was perfect if you wanted expandable storage with a RAID-like defense against individual drives failing, but also didn’t want to tinker with configuring things yourself.
I bought my first one in 2014, and it was exactly what I needed at the time. I was digitizing a bunch of old VHS video, and needed some expandable storage that wasn’t susceptible to individual spinning drives going bad on me. The fact that I could mix-and-match drive sizes was a nice bonus, but the best feature was that I didn’t have to configure anything; it would “just work.” I was in that prosumer mid-point where I could have figured all that out, but was willing to pay more so that I could spend that time with my kids instead.
The usual complaints about Drobo were that there were expensive—true, and slow. The model I bought connected over thunderbolt and supported an SSD cache, so generally I didn’t notice a speed difference between the Drobo and the internal “fusion drive” of the iMac it was connected to. The fan was surprisingly loud, but not distractingly so.
The big disadvantage was that it wasn’t actually RAID, it was something proprietary they called “BeyondRAID.” The upshot being that the only thing that could read a drive from a Drobo array was another Drobo.
This worried me before buying the first one, and we started joking about the coming “Drobo Ragnarök” where all Drobos would die and no new ones would be available, and our data would be lost.
“Ragnarök! RAID is not a backup!” we laughed.
April of 2019, I got a partial Ragnarök. My Drobo died hard. Of course, I had almost everything on it backed up, except the project I was in the middle of. I then proceeded to have the worst customer service experience of my entire life, which ended up with me buying a new Drobo at full price in what was essentially a hostage ransom and swearing to never spend money with them again.
There was an amazing moment where I realized that not only were they not going to help me troubleshoot—I remain convinced it was the power supply—nor were they going to repair or replace my dead unit, they weren’t even going to offer me the “store manager discount” on a new model. Overnight, I went from the guy who would enthusiastically recommend Drobos to looking people dead in the eye and saying “do not buy one under any circumstances.”
The replacement arrived and fortunately loaded the old disk array fine. The first thing I did once it woke all the way up was to set up two different complete backups of the data. Never again!
That second Drobo is humming behind me as I write this. The new one is definitely louder. I’ve glaring at it almost daily the last 4 years thinking I needed to replace it, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of money on that sucker and as long as it’s backed up I might as well get some use out of it…
I may have bought the last Drobo in the country; somewhere around the start of the twenties they stopped being available, and the company limped along promising that any day now they’d come back into stock.
The supply chain disruption from the Disaster of the Twenties was an easy excuse to cover the fact that the niche they’d carved out no longer existed. Most people were using cloud storage for everything, and anyone who actually needed a big pile of local files needed them in a form that wasn’t held hostage by one company’s increasingly flaky hardware.
It’s too bad—a hassle-free, flexible, “it just works” RAID-like solution has a market. Drobo found it, but couldn’t keep it.
Drobo Ragnarök.