I wanted to post this review 2 weeks ago when I first received my 3rd Generation Drobo, but sadly, the unit was DOA. After talking to Drobo via email1, I got the unit replaced via Adorama since they would send out a brand new unit. The ship back got there a week later, and for reasons unknown, Adorama waiting several days to ship a replacement. They did apologize for the delay, and upgraded the return shipping to overnight. I had the new unit the following day, and first thing I did was power it up with no drives in it to make sure it worked. It did power up, and went through it’s initial setup scheme. Being confident it would work, I powered it off, and dropped it in place of my 2nd Generation unit, and swapped the drives over. Power up didn’t take that long, but you could tell it was doing some migration of the data as they drives could be heard chunking away for a while afterward.
Initial testing showed the new unit getting about 36MB/sec over USB2 (sadly, my Mac Mini is only USB2), where the previous 2nd Generation Drobo only got about 16MB/sec over Firewire with the same drives.
- a less than ideal experience as they made me register the unit first, then refused to answer questions I had asked several times like “do you send a new unit or refurb” and “what is the shipping process” [↩]