I wrote a few days ago that I’d had trouble getting a second Drobo storage device that actually worked. Well, it was eventually replaced and now works fine (except that one of its LEDs is blown, but at least the storage side of things seems functional at last).

I also mentioned back then that I’ve owned my original Drobo for getting on for a year, and that it’s never put a foot wrong -which is absolutely true, and is the reason the malfunctioning second one was such a disappointment.

I would like to take this opportunity, then, to mention that even that original Drobo is behaving really badly when it comes to a disk re-organization. On Monday, I swapped out one of my 1TB drives for a 2TB one. This causes the Drobo to shuffle the 2.3TB of data currently stored there around until it’s all protected once more. No problems with that: it’s an online affair (i.e., the data stays accessible throughout) and is precisely what the Drobo is supposed to be good at.

It’s just a little disturbing that it’s now Wednesday night and the thing is still re-organizing itself. What’s more, the Dashboard application that tells you where it’s up to is showing 0% progress and warning me that it expects to have finished in about 98 hours’ time. If that’s true (and quite frankly, I have no idea if it is or isn’t), it will mean the thing has spent the best part of a week shuffling around, internally, just 2TB of data. Asthmatic snails have been known to move faster, I fear. My friend Google has drawn to my attention the fact that this sort of behaviour isn’t new, either!

Again, I stress (as do the Drobo website articles that mention it might take “a few” hours to reorganize!) that my data is accessible while all this is going on. But to have one’s data unprotected for that length of time (it’s only fully protected once the thing has finished its reorganization) is, I think, unacceptable.One hard disk failure now, and I lose everything.

Worse, the Drobo website emphasizes that you should not power down the Drobo during a reorganization… and we have a giant thunderstorm predicted to come our way tomorrow evening. They quite often knock out the power, so you can imagine the amount of nervousness here at the moment!

Couple this technical deficiency (as I see it) with their mostly-hopeless technical support and I would have to say that, despite a year’s unproblematic storage duties, I would never touch a Drobo again. It’s lovely at just sitting there storing stuff, true enough. But when it comes to doing the one thing you actually need it to do without drama (i.e., deal with a disk failure or upgrade), it doesn’t cope at all elegantly or efficiently.

Since Drobo Number 2 was purchased for a friend of ours and has thus left the building, I am still in the market for a storage device that can handle 4TB and up, extensibly and dynamically, because I want a backup for my Drobo, dumb as that might sound given that the Drobo itself was purchased to be our secure and safe storage device! Such a storage device needs to dynamically extend its storage ‘pool’, but hopefully without days of unprotection whilst doing so.

I have thought about building my own PC and sticking ZFS on it (which does all of that sort of thing very nicely), but it’s a little too ‘low level’ for my tastes! So now I’m looking at this. The Thecus has all the right specs (for me at least) and an attractive price (about AU$390… compared to the Drobo’s AU$550 and up). It, of course, doesn’t have the looks (Drobo is to Mac as Thecus is to mid-1990s beige PCs, I think!), but it looks like it might have the functionality I require. And, best news of all, it’s nearly Christmas, so I don’t have to put up a watertight business case to get one… I just have to ask!