Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21)

25 year user of mac osx.... used numerous hardware and software based raids ... can setup up storage and recover data from the command line. Before I use any new device for storage, I thoroughly test it. Good thing I did with this one.Purchased the product to use as a simple storage array for a work imac. Nothing more than any basic homeowner or small business would do with it. Just expected smallish storage array with easy to manage software.Of course I upgraded everything to most recent drobo firmware and software. My osx machine is up to date with mavericks. Before any drobo company employees chime in... no, there is nothing wrong with my osx machine.Numerous problems.Drobo would not mount reliably. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Not good for your data.After multiple attempts was able to mount drobo and use drobo software to create storage array.Drobo would then mount and could see the disks presented to osx in Disk Utility DU. I could copy test files to it (2, 1TB disks which I assumed the drobo mirrored). Get them off, etc. Everything seemed fine but things got flakey after a couple of restarts (drobo software would not detect drobo box, blah, blah, blah). Restart it again, and then it would.So I figured I would corrupt a disk and see what happened. After all that is the point of redundancy.But on further testing, dropping or adding disks would cause drobo to drop out of DU and required a multiple restarts to until the disk was even recognized by DU (not to mention the drobo software). You do not want to have to restart your computer in order to control your storage array (and when I say control, I simply mean let the operating system mount it, so the drobo can then deal with it).Drobo then demands more disks (you better have some spares ready to go). This is where it became apparent that the data on the remaining disks was likely gone. Even though I had an additional disk/volume formatted to have a self created backup in the drobo, it would not mount that volume (which it mounted perfectly before the test disk crash). So, I couldn't even get to the backup volume that I had created with an additional disk. This is unacceptable. In the software there appeared to be a backup of the data on a separate disk (I know it was there because I transferred it by hand before i test crashed a disk) and I had no way of getting to see it (it wouldn't mount in DU).After this part, I got fed up. I would never feed the software another disk, knowing that I had a disk available that should have had a valid dataset on it. I think that was just an illusion, because that volume never appeared again in DU. I did not take that drive and test it in another machine to see if I could recover data using some other tools, because it was apparent that this system is way too unsafe for any data (and I shouldn't have to go use another machine to see what is on the disks). I just don't trust it.I expect when the stuff hits the fan you will lose data with this device. You are probably going to lose all of it. It was so unstable (its been a while since I had any disks that were so flakey across restarts) that it was hard to predict exactly what it was going to do. Maybe I got a bad drobo box. Even if that was the case, I think you are dealing with a drobo only system. Which means that if your drobo box does not do it for you (or maybe even breaks), you may never get your disk data back (easily or ever).I quit, took out the drive, went to box it up, and found a crack starting to run across the top of the drobo. It was not there when I started. And no, I didn't throw it. It just sat on the table the entire time. I probably shuffled the disks a dozen times total (including some other tests I ran) and the plastic was cracking.I have no comments on other drobo devices, but that is my experience with this one.Make a good and regular off-site (or at least off-drobo) backup of your data. If you use the drobo mini, I suspect you will need it. Of course you should be doing this with any type of storage you care about, but I wouldn't back burner it with this device.

Drobo technology has finally matured. I've owned Drobos in the past and they were great for backup but not fast enough to use as primary storage. That all changed with the Drobo Mini for me. When I benchmarked it using Blackmagic I realized the limiting factor was actually the i/o on the internal SSD on my Macbook Pro and Macbook Air because transfers to the Drobo Mini were maxing it out. With SSDs the Mini was just crazy fast. With the Seagate Momentus hybrid HDDs and an mSATA cache Drobo Mini is extremely fast as well although the writes are definitely a bit slower than if you use just SSDs which is of course up to you. Bottom line is that bottleneck will no longer be the Drobo - it will likely by the media you use (the SSD or HDDs), the i/o of your computer, or the Thunderbolt or USB interfaces themselves. Of course I love the fact that the Drobo Mini is also finally small enough to fit neatly on my desk under my monitor and is quite to boot (especially with those SSDs). And of course I should mention you get all the benefits of the Drobo software which offers the concepts of redundancy and thin provisioning without any of the headache.I think this is a great solution especially for any creative pros who have large Aperture or Lightroom libraries or lots of video, especially now that Macbook Pro internal hard drives are fairly small. I am using it both for Aperture, other primary files storage including virtual machines and also as a TimeMachine target.Only hitch I ran into out of the box was that I needed to download a new version of Drobo Dashboard for my computer to see the new Drobo Mini (make sure you have at least v 2.3.2 from drobo.com/start). I think they could have explained this better in the documentation. No other issues so far (I should mention I tried inserting the SSDs upside down at first which was embarrassing--so if you have trouble getting the Drobo Mini to recognize your SSDs or HDDs just make sure you don't have the drives flipped upside down :) This is easy to do with Crucial m4 SSDs I should add since they have stickers on both sides). Anyhow, everything else is good but I'll update this review or write another one if anything changes.

Had this for a couple of months, and it does work as advertised. Was not too painful to set up. Formatted HFS+ as main user is a mac video editing workstation. (Thunderbolt) I also have a USB3 cable attached to it, and when I power down the Mac, and then plug the USB into a Win8.1 workstation the drive is detected and works fine ( I have Paragon HFS driver installed in Windows, so it can read and write to it. Speeds are fine ( I'm using four 7200rpm WB black mechanical drives) - about 200 write and 250 read in both OS X and Windows. ( tested with BlackMagic disk speed test). The Drobo dashboard works fine in OS X and in Windows.The only complaint I have is that this thing RUNS HOT. The bottom of the unit will almost burn you if you touch it ( you could certainly fry an egg on it!) and the fans run constantly. And the fans are LOUD, very loud!!! I have this unit pushed way to the back of my desk, and its still annoying. Ideally this should be in a closet somewhere... Also, the power button is awkwardly placed ( especially when you have to locate this thing 'as far away as possible' to try to ameliorate the noise!). Great unit for deaf people, though.

but it won't connect via thunderbolt port, Windows OS is not supported by Drobo or the other way around, what ever, Shucks! Usb 3.0 works fine so it's not all bad.The read and write speeds are not super fast with 5400rpm Hdd's and a 128Gb mSSD (Between 58Mb/s-89Mb/s) is where it likes to be most of the time, at any rate it's a very portable raid array and that is what I needed. The bottom of my Drobo gets pretty warm so I suggest you not stash chocolate snacks next to it.

I had to buy this second Drobo Mini because my first one, not even two years old, bricked on me. It just became a rock with lights on it; absolutely no way to retrieve my data (Drobo's technology is proprietary, so inserting my drives into anything else would have been pointless). Drobo's customer support was dreadful: always slow to respond and totally incapable of helping me sort out the issue. They just kept asking me the same questions over and over. So I took a chance and ordered this second one. Luckily, after I swapped my drives into it I could now access my data; at least nothing was corrupted. Now everything's moved to a G-Technology drive and both Drobos are going to the recycling centre. They look pretty and work well for a little while, but they're garbage. If you decide to buy one anyway, make sure you back it up very, very frequently!

great product