Drobo B800FS Beyond Raid 8-Bay Dual Gigabit Ethernet/SATA 6GB/S Storage Array

We bought this unit to replace (and quadruple storage) a really old fileserver. The networked fileserver was a lot of power (though old and out of date) for simply running a large storage device which could be accessed by multiple users in a small business work environment.After many calls and Q&A with the folks at Drobo we purchased this and are in the process of implementing it with only four (1/2 of 1/2 capacity) 2TB hard drives.So far all tests and phases of implementation have been quick, effortless, and flawless and I'm in love with this solution.===UPDATE 3 MONTHS IN SERVICE===We've actually been using the Drobo for 3 months now. Since I chose not to simply copy our existing file structure and data over to the new storage device but required area owners to move individual files and folders themselves based on them being current and relevant, the initial transition was difficult (our process not the Drobo itself). However, now that I've got folks trained, and used to mapping individual drives rather than on big drive (a structure we chose to use) the system is functioning great.I can report that we are using it now in a workplace with 26 full time employees including two graphic designers moving large files across the network to and from the Drobo for daily work with no complaints as to speed or reliability. In addition there have been no complaints about downtime, or data loss... it's just working! (knocks on wood)

This device has a sleek, well thought out design. I only wish the performance was as polished as it's presentation. It's like wrapping a Chevy Cruze in a Corvette body. It looks the part but the performance was terrible. In September of 2015, I purchased this device as a target for my backups. I didn't have a chance to get it up and running until after the return date had passed. To say that I was disappointed was an understatement. According to Veeam, the fastest transfer rate, I have ever reached with this unit, was 20MB/s . My backups were taking incredibly long and Veeam cited the Drobo as the bottleneck. I recently purchased a Synology and I am now getting 100MB/s and better average according to Veeam. This was a very expensive server room ornament. In addition, I installed the same model WD Red 4TB drives in both devices and they were plugged into the same switch. Identical configurations.

Wish I knew this product was outdated and on it's way out to be replaced with a newer version.

It was easy enough to set up and get going. I loaded 8 4TB NAS drives. It seems to be reliable but SLOW. You could use it for most applications but for disk intensive things like backup or video editing, it isn't cutting it.They supply a software dashboard but aside from setup, it doesn't do much. For example, I have a file on the Drobo I can't seem to read. There are no diagnostics to help me. What I wouldn't give for a Drobo chkdsk!I had to call Drobo tech once and they were knowledgeable and patient (I didn't want to believe I had 8 bad WD drives, but I did!)If Drobo fixed the speed, this would be a five star product.

I thought this was supposed to be a piece of cake to install. It wasn't. It wasn't a real hassle, but neither was it so simple. It eats up more drive than I thought it should as well. I populated the bays each with 3 TB drives and imagined that there should have been a loss of a couple of TB's for overhead etc, but found there was 6TB of lost space. Out of 24TB I have 18 usable TBs of space. I settled for that as just the way it is. I then copied 300Gigs of photos I have on my Thunderbolt drive to a share I created. It calculated that it would take 4 Hours to copy from my Mac to this Network drive. That's quite a long time for a Gigabit network connection I thought, but after 200GBs it slowed down even more and finished with that little job 8 hours later making almost 10 hours in total time to copy all those files. I hope it's my fault and that I misconfigured something somewhere, but so far i can't find anything to show this to be true. When I find out what I can do with that second ethernet connector perhaps there might be some more x-fer speed available I hadn't experienced yet. I have only had this since last evening and only time will tell what else will come of all this. I'll update in a Month or so if anything improves. I still MIGHT recommend this to someone with a few grand available if only for the peace of mind in knowing files are on a RAID device that has redundancy protecting your files.

Our law firm purchased two of these and we have one in each of our two geographically separated offices. We are using Drobo Sync to synchronize the two devices. It was very simple to set up and manage. Even an average level tech type person could figure it out pretty easily with a little investigation and/or a phone call to the Drobo folks. I also cheated and used our firm's IT guy a little bit, but not much - he just helped me with the VPN setup and static IP information in the two locations so that the two devices could basically consider themselves to be on the same network even though they're about 40 miles apart. Couldn't be happier with how these are working. Warranty is expiring soon... so we'll see how they do from there.I should note that I actually DID have one drive fail on me a month or so after setting up... and the Drobo handled it beautifully... I received an email notifying me of the drive failure (this is, of course, configurable) and letting me know that I was still safe even if one more drive failed (our setup is such that we can handle two simultaneous drive failures - that is also configurable). I got the replacement drive (thanks WD) and popped it in, and the Drobo automatically did it's voodoo and it worked seamlessly.