welcome to an unboxing featuring what is possibly the worst retail box that I've
ever seen this is the drove o as you can
tell by the small sticker located somewhere on the outside of what
otherwise looks like a shipping carton so I went and I opened it up thinking oh
there's probably a retail drobo unit inside no no they sent me an oem one
which is fine there are retail boxes and that's what you'll see at your local NC
Store but for the purpose of the video that we're doing they just sent me an
oem one because I don't think they realized I was going to do an unboxing
in addition to the actual Tech tips video so here we are let's find out what
comes with the data robotics droo s
welcome to the world of drobo all right so we have power got
your AC to DC adapter got your AC power
cord which is your standard computer one rather than being that notebook one that
there's never one handy when you need one so that's perfect restore CD as well
as a getting started guide which is about 4,000 Pages thick I really hope
this is in a number of different languages
here yes it is oh good because if the manual was that thick and the whole
point of this product is that it's easy to use then a step was missed somewhere
okay here we go USB 3 cable eSATA cable
nice long robust feeling EA cable very very
confident about this particular SATA cable it's about a on linous height so a
little bit more so it's about 6 ft tall
long uh and then we also have a fire wire B cable so they include high
quality versions of pretty much all of the cables you require and nice long
cables too so they're not like a lot of companies with their external enclosures
that include short little rinky dinky cables so that you have to put the box
next to your monitor or next to your PC they give you the option to put it
somewhere more convenient so this is also a 6t long cable and that's the USB
3 A to B so that's the extra pins are
all in there remember you can use a USB 2 A to B cable so that's like your
standard printer cable but it will only operate at USB 2.0
speed so let's go ahead and Tuck all of this stuff away and get the actual drobo
s itself out of the box so comes very
very well packed you can see it's using a closed cell foam with a good inch of
empty space an inch plus of empty space on all sides so your drobo is going to
be nice and protected in transit all right let's take these off
there you go I always prefer closed cell
foam because it is more durable and more resistant to multiple impacts it also
has nice little dust cover on it so it's not going to get scratched or
anything okay let's go ahead and extract
it so the Dr OS is the natural progression from the original drobo so
this isn't sorry this isn't the network version of the drobo that's the drobo fs
but the advantages that this one has over the original drobo is that it
has five Bays as opposed to the original
drobo four bay it also has a much much
wider variety of interfaces so the original drobo was only USB and then
there was an additional version of it that I think added fire wire something
like that yeah and then the drobo S adds to that by providing not only USB but
USB 3 es oh I think there was an es version at some point as well okay
whatever this one is the current one this is the one that matters USB 3 two
firewire 800 ports eat your power
Kensington lock so that you can make sure that it doesn't walk away on you a
power switch on the back oh it's just a power cycle switch interesting or oh
okay we'll have to find out why it is that it turns itself off right away
maybe it's a matter of it has to actually be plugged in in order to do
that you've also got a reset button here and the cooling fan at the back of the
unit so I wonder if I can even take this apart the drobo was meant to be more of
an appliance so you can see here there's a warranty void if removed so I'm not
going to be taking the panels apart and actually pulling the uh the unit limb
from limb let me just see if I can figure out how big that fan is at the
back cuz I wanted to be able to tell you guys yeah that's a 120 mm fan I can see
the blades moving now so it's a 120 mm fan at the back which means that it's
going to stay nice and cool and also be very quiet when it's pulling air across
the drives remember once you install a drive in here it will stay open like in
fact you know what let's let's just throw a drive in here really quick so that you guys can see uh here we go so
here are some of the drives that we're going to be using to test out the drillo
I haven't talked much about what makes drobo special overall though so let's
show the easy installation first let's just kind
of yeah there we
go hold
on there we are so it locks in place like that so you can put it up to five
drives and once it's open you can see there's actually a gap so some air flow
will come through so what makes drobo special drobo is the easy answer to raid
so raid can be complicated because you do need a RAID controller so you need an
actual logic board if you want to have any kind of reliable raid five or Raid
six okay so you need that you need highly recommended you need
identical drives so raid works best when
you have all the same hard drives so that they all perform exactly the same
and so you don't have any weird issues like with your WD greens dropping out of
the raate array or one drive performing better than the other one or one drive
performing slower than the other one dragging down the performance of the whole array drobo you don't have to
worry about that because rather than using a standard type of raid it
actually uses their proprietary uh non
raid but also redundant backup so what
that means is that it protects you from drive failure much like raid but it
doesn't use a standard raid so you just pop in whatever old drives you want
whether you you want to mix up capacities you want to mix up
manufacturers you want to mix up speed bins none of that matters you just throw
in whatever you please and drobo will automatically balance the storage around
between the drives to provide you redundant storage so safe storage as
well as convenient storage now the other thing that drobo does really well and we
will of course be doing a full episode on this is protects from data loss so if
any one of those drives fails it will notify you and all you have to do is
replace the drive it'll rebuild itself and take care of you that way dble is
also scalable in a way that raid isn't really raid you usually have to get
everything you want unless you're talking about very expensive raid cards
like Hardware raid cards youd have to have everything you want for your storage pool you have to add it all at
the same time and then you're pretty much kind of locked in drobo you buy one
of these you buy one driver or I'd recommend two drives at least you buy
two drives and then as The Sweet Spot changes for cost per Gigabyte in terms
of hard drive capacity you can add drives that are higher capacity and less
expensive in order to expand the drive as you go so you might buy it with two 1
tab drives now while hard drives are expensive due to the shortage and then
as prices go down you might add a 2 terabyte and then you go okay I'm out of storage now add a 3 terabyte and so on
and so forth so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the droo S don't
forget to subscribe not only to lonus Tech tips but also to NCIX Tech tips for
more content like this as well as more content about this and check this out
there's a handy little guide there all
the drives have their own indicator LEDs which tell you what's going on nothing
system healthy add a drive here soon cool don't remove this drive because
it's balancing data add a drive here and drive failure replace