Drobo files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

[Middleman]

So I found out recently (to my shock) that Drobo maker StorCentric had filed for Chapter 11 in late June this year.
It wasn't until a friend of mine notified me of this that I realised what had happened.

The last time I'd heard about Drobo was back in Feb 2020 when soon after the pandemic occurred that they were experiencing with struggling parts shipments from China which impacted production of drive units. I guess the supply chain issues and effects of the pandemic has somehow caught up with them.

Storage firm Drobo has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy | AppleInsider

Longstanding Thunderbolt and network-attached storage company Drobo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late June, and will hold its first creditors meeting on July 17.

appleinsider.com

 

[pastrychef]

I had two Drobos in the past; one of the earlier 4 bay models with Firewire and later a 5 bay NAS. I loved the idea of being able to use drives of different capacities and the dynamic upgradability. Unfortunately, they were saddled with extremely slow CPUs which caused the units to perform horribly.

Having been spoiled by the ability to mix drives of all different capacities and being able to upgrade at any time simply by replacing smaller drives with larger ones, I searched for alternatives and found out that Synology NASes were capable of the same thing with SHR. I switched and have been using the Synology DSM for years. Performance was lightyears better and I never looked back.

 

[Middleman]

I had two Drobos in the past; one of the earlier 4 bay models with Firewire and later a 5 bay NAS. I loved the idea of being able to use drives of different capacities and the dynamic upgradability. Unfortunately, they were saddled with extremely slow CPUs which caused the units to perform horribly.

Having been spoiled by the ability to mix drives of all different capacities and being able to upgrade at any time simply by replacing smaller drives with larger ones, I searched for alternatives and found out that Synology NASes were capable of the same thing with SHR. I switched and have been using the Synology DSM for years. Performance was lightyears better and I never looked back.

Yeah me too. I still have two Thunderbolt model 5Ds for use at both home and work. So far they've been great but are starting to showing their age. I also have friends who use them as well. But this announcement has really kind of shaken our confidence in the product. I heard that they are restructuring the company finances and are actually still offering support for the product. Let's hope they get past this difficult patch.

 

[pastrychef]

Yeah me too. I still have two Thunderbolt model 5Ds for use at both home and work. So far they've been great but are starting to showing their age. I also have friends who use them as well. But this announcement has really kind of shaken our confidence in the product. I heard that they are restructuring the company finances and are actually still offering support for the product. Let's hope they get past this difficult patch.

I think they were really ahead of their time. The concept and design are really nice. Unfortunately, when the first models hit the market, the Arm CPUs were nowhere near as powerful as they are today. By the time, they started putting adequate CPUs in them, others had caught up and offered more for less.

 

[c-o-pr]

Is Drobo design such that if a Drobo box fails do you have to get another Drobo box to access the data? Were there version dependencies for the drives per the model?

Put another way: how captive is a drive to a specific Drobo and can it (its array) be accessed without a Drobo or is the formatting and layout proprietary?

 

[Middleman]

Is Drobo design such that if a Drobo box fails do you have to get another Drobo box to access the data? Were there version dependencies for the drives per the model?

Put another way: how captive is a drive to a specific Drobo and can it (its array) be accessed without a Drobo or is the formatting and layout proprietary?

With Drobo the format they use is standard ie. HFS/FAT32/NTFS but the RAID algorythm they use is proprietary. From what I understand, if a Drobo drive failed you could actually transfer the drives over to a new one and it would have operated as normal (afaik) so long as the firmware version used was the same. It is the same process for upgrading from one of their model drives to another ie. 5D to a 8D. I certainly know that this worked with the older style HDD drives. Although I am not entirely sure if the newer AF marked ones do this (as they have built in encryption).

 

[pastrychef]

Is Drobo design such that if a Drobo box fails do you have to get another Drobo box to access the data?

Yes.

 

[Middleman]

So it looks like Drobo is even bigger trouble as all their customers have just received the following notice:

"Dear Valued Drobo Customer,

Thank you for entrusting Drobo with your critical data. We have found that the upcoming macOS Ventura update is currently incompatible with Drobo. We cannot guarantee compatibility with future OS updates. Therefore, if you are planning on upgrading your macOS we highly recommend backing up data that resides on your Drobo to mitigate any unknown impacts of incompatibility. Furthermore, the Drobo should be shut down prior to performing the OS update. Before any major computer update, have a backup plan in place. Experts agree having 3 copies of your data is optimal, 2 copies onsite on different media types and one off-site copy. For further reading please visit https://www.drobo.com/homeoffice/"

 

[Middleman]

So from what I've heard so far, Drobo has held their 2nd creditors meeting about 2 weeks ago. And it seems they have been owing a number of creditors, most likely affected by the global parts shortage at the moment.
They have cut back much of their staff down to a bare minimum to keep overheads low, but are still shipping out new machines and providing support for customers online. So technically they are not dead in the water yet.

However if anyone is looking to keep your existing Drobo units as a long term storage solution, I'm afraid you're out of luck. It seems that beyond Monterey, there really is no support now because Ventura doesn't supposedly allow the use of kexts (according to one post I read). The Drobo Dashboard driver is effectively a kext-dependent app. Unless Drobo finds another solution for their drivers, Monterey may be the last fully supported macOS for their drives.

Given this is the case you have about 3 choices for your Drobo drives on how to deal with them.
1) Maintain a Monterey-only or older macOS based system until the near future to manage your drive
2) Maintain a Windows/PC based system or convert the Drobo drive to be Windows/Linux compatible
3) Migrate your data to a new RAID/NAS/DAS

If you're looking to migrate there are a number of solutions available now that could replace Drobo. Amongst the most popular so far are OWC's offerings such as the TB3 Thunderbay & Express 4M2 drives and Synology's NAS/DAS drives. I will add Areca drives to that list. Areca is a brand I've been using for years for my storage needs and their drives are reliable and good performers. Their latest drives are available with TB3/USB 3.1 and come in 4, 6, 8 & 12 bay configurations. Whilst the upgrade process is not as simple as Drobo it works well and I highly recommend it.

 

[pastrychef]

So from what I've heard so far, Drobo has held their 2nd creditors meeting about 2 weeks ago. And it seems they have been owing a number of creditors, most likely affected by the global parts shortage at the moment.
They have cut back much of their staff down to a bare minimum to keep overheads low, but are still shipping out new machines and providing support for customers online. So technically they are not dead in the water yet.

However if anyone is looking to keep your existing Drobo units as a long term storage solution, I'm afraid you're out of luck. It seems that beyond Monterey, there really is no support now because Ventura doesn't supposedly allow the use of kexts (according to one post I read). The Drobo Dashboard driver is effectively a kext-dependent app. Unless Drobo finds another solution for their drivers, Monterey may be the last fully supported macOS for their drives.

Given this is the case you have about 3 choices for your Drobo drives on how to deal with them.
1) Maintain a Monterey-only or older macOS based system until the near future to manage your drive
2) Maintain a Windows/PC based system or convert the Drobo drive to be Windows/Linux compatible
3) Migrate your data to a new RAID/NAS/DAS

If you're looking to migrate there are a number of solutions available now that could replace Drobo. Amongst the most popular so far are OWC's offerings such as the TB3 Thunderbay & Express 4M2 drives and Synology's NAS/DAS drives. I will add Areca drives to that list. Areca is a brand I've been using for years for my storage needs and their drives are reliable and good performers. Their latest drives are available with TB3/USB 3.1 and come in 4, 6, 8 & 12 bay configurations. Whilst the upgrade process is not as simple as Drobo it works well and I highly recommend it.

If you want to retain the ability to mix n match drives of different capacities and the ability to upgrade capacity by swapping out smaller drives for larger ones, Synology SHR/SHR2 is the way to go.