Gadgetory

welcome to an unboxing featuring what is possibly the worst retail box that I've ever seen this is the Drobo s 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 NCIX 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 drove o s welcome to the world of drill bo alright 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 feet suspect I really hope this isn't a number of different languages here yes it is oh good because if the manual is 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 eSATA cable there very confident about this particular SATA cable it's about a one-line as height so a little bit more so it's about 6 feet tall long and then we also have a FireWire 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 blocks 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 6 foot long cable and that's the USB 3 a 2b so that's the extra pins are all in there remember you can a USB 2 a 2 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 it comes a very very well packed you can see it's using a closed cell phone 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 take these on there you go I always prefer closed cell phone because it is more durable and more resistant to multiple impacts it also has a nice little dust cover on it so it's not gonna get scratched or anything ok go ahead and extract it so the Drobo s is the natural progression from the original Drobo so this is sorry this isn't the network version of the Drobo that's the Drobo FS but the advantage is that this one has over the original Drobo is that it has five base as opposed to the original Drobo's four base 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 wear something like that yeah and then the Drobo s adds to that by providing not only USB but USB 3 eSATA I think there was an eSATA version at some point as well ok whatever this one is the current one this is the one that matters USB 3 2 firewire 800 ports eSATA 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 that's just the power cycle switch interesting or ok 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 actually pulling 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 sell you guys yeah that's a 120 millimeter fan I can see the blades moving now so the 120 millimeter 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 that in fact you know what let's just throw a drive in here really quick so that you guys can see here we go so here are some of the drives that we're going to be using to test out of the drill both I haven't talked much about what makes dribble special overall though so let's show the easy installation first it's just kind of yeah there we go that rear so 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 rate 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 5 or raid 6 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 raid array or onedrive performing better than the other one or ones I'm 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 non raid but also redundant backup so what that means is that it protects you from drive failure much like rate but it doesn't use a standard rate so you just pop in whatever old drives you want whether 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 between the drives to provide you redundant storage so safe storage as well as convenient storage now the other thing that drove Oh 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 durable is also scalable in a way that RAID isn't really RAID you usually have to get everything you want unless you're not talking about very expensive rape cards like hardware RAID cards you'd have to have everything you want at 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 I'd recommend two drives at least you buy two drives and then as the sweetspot 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 extend the drive as you go so you might buy it with two one terabyte drives now while hard drives are expensive due to the shortage and then as prices go down you might add a two terabyte and then you go okay I'm out of storage now add a three terabyte and so on and so forth so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Drobo S don't forget to subscribe not only to Linus 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