First, the Drobo FS has a small issue that it’s disks do not spin down when idle. It has a nice setting to control this; however, it doesn’t work. DRI knows about this issue and have yet to release any fix. If you ask me, I think this is something that should have been found by their quality assurance process before they released it and asked people to pay over $600 for it. Anyone wonder why they sell WD Green drives with it….I wonder if it’s because they never stop spinning and it’s easier to sell low energy drives than to fix the device??

Second, the Drobo FS has a *feature* that anytime you reboot the device it regenerates the user/password files. Why is this an issue? The default password for the root user is “root”, so any drobo that enabled ssh is pretty much a security risk. After weeks of arguing with DRI about this *feature* which is deemed unsupported because Drobo Apps are technically unsupported, they released an updated dropbear droboapp which includes a special script to *set* the root password so it doesn’t reset during reboots. It was a nice try, but doesn’t really solve the issue because someone who doesn’t really know about the issue would never know to use this script instead of using passwd. Worst of all, if you use the underlying linux system to add users to your drobo for use with the drobo apps, the users are deleted on reboot. I wonder what other hidden *features* the Drobo FS has in store for its users, only time will tell?

The reply from DRI support is that “Drobo Apps are unsupported and your using this is at your own risk.” and my reply would be that “the use of the Drobo FS as more than an expensive paper weight is at your own risk!”.

So in summary, the Drobo FS is nothing more than a super expensive toy for home use!! Oh yea, and DRI markets Drobo Apps as a means to compete with every other NAS that has built in features that exceed the Drobo FS but if you use it you are not supported and half of them don’t work anyway.

Should I mention that UPNP/DLNA support is not really true since these drobo apps are a complete pain to setup and configure and forget about asking support for help because “Drobo Apps are not supported!”.

I consider my purchase a waste of money and time and i’m going back to my DLink which actually works. Sure it doesn’t work perfectly and do everything I want, but it does what is expected and didn’t cost me a monthly rent payment to buy it.

Basic benchmarks show read speeds around 65MBs on a iSCSI connection to a ESXi host.