Storing Your Images - Don't Go Drobo

I have several Drobo’s. Most of them are dead. Yesterday, another one blew it’s brains out with no warning. I don’t mean that a disk died. I have not had a disk go bad since I stopped using Seagate drives many years ago. I mean the Drobo itself died. It just started turning itself off with no error message at all. It got to the point where starting it up caused macOS to throw a kernel panic crashing the Mac. And of course, the Drobo never completed start up anyway. In fact, when it went to sleep it caused another Drobo connected via USB to also go through a restart cycle. Talk about crap.

Badly designed software does not handle libraries of files on NAS very well. Adobe is one big offender and large video projects want to be on locally attached drives, and because I like the idea of fault tolerance and do not like the idea of single drive failures, I have Drobo’s. All the Drobos that I have are replacements for other Drobo’s that died where I needed to be able to recover the disk packs, which did not die.

For those applications content to deal with NAS volumes, I use Synology. They are awesome.

Drobos however, are shit.

I have a perfectly functional disk pack. The only way to recover the files is to spend nearly $1000 on a replacement Drobo, because of course, I cannot move the disk pack to the other Drobo that is working since I replaced its power supply. Drobo does not let you do that. So I have to try to guess what was on the Drobo other than all my original photos (which are backed up on the Synology) and all my finished video projects. Its sitting on the floor right now and I will leave it there for a month to see if I get stuck.

I will have to teach Lightroom where to find every photo in my Catalogue now, and hope against hope that it still doesn’t freak out when images are on a NAS. Of course I could pay Adobe some idiot amount to store all my images in their cloud, but my reaction to that expense is fuck that noise. And I would still need to address the catalogue update.

Given that every single Drobo that I have owned for personal or business use has now died at least once, and that I have had to replace every single power supply at least once, here’s my guidance for all you creatives out there. Back up your stuff so you have two copies on separate disk systems locally and one copy in the cloud, but whatever you do, DO NOT use a Drobo for ANYTHING. EVER.

The products fail (100% failure across six units over time, 100% power supply failure), support is arrogant and not helpful, and the whole company just doesn’t give a shit.

I’m going to stop using software that cannot handle NAS storage so I don’t have to deal with locally attached disks anymore.