New storage device coming to market

[Donald Miller]

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html?ID=CreativeCow

[Steve Gledhill]

I took a look at this a few weeks ago. On the face of it it seems a great idea - but before committing to it you should consider that:


I understand it's a proprietary system of data storage so disks being used in this Drobo setup are not simply transferrable into other systems to be read.
For real security you still need to copy data off site so the need for extra external hard drives does not go away.

[ic-racer]

I thought this thread would be about some new container to hold pages of negatives, or something.

That device in the video seems a little scary, when it breaks...LOL. If I were a 'digital photographer' I'd be looking into some device to make standard silver-based negatives for storage in a conventional box. :p

[darr]

Donald,

I looked into the Drobo prior to purchasing the Netgear ReadyNAS+ (http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx). I use multiple computers for my businesses and found this to be a better solution and cheaper. I originally went with a 2-500GB system, but upgraded to a 4-TB with additional hard drive purchases from ZipZoomfly (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Home.jsp). You can find hard drives and the NAS sytems reasonably priced if you shop around. Upgrading what I have was a piece of cake. Besides the business backups, I store a backup of my Lightroom catalog on it and can easily remove the hard drives to store off site. It also has a front USB port to plug in a backup portable drive (I use WD My Books from earlier purchases) but will probably change to a SATA Hard Drive USB Docking station in the future.

BTW, Happy Holidays!

Kind regards,
Darr

[duckarrowtypes]

I own a Drobo and I love it. I bought the Firewire 800 version and I can testify that the drive operates exactly as show in the video. I am running the machine with four 1TB western digital drives in it and I have an effective total capacity of 2.71TB.

I have even had one of the hard drives go bad in the Drobo and lived to tell the tale. One day one of the lights next to a drive went red and the software popped up to tell me what had happened. Drobo is smart enough to replicate everything out to the remaining three drives automatically so that you maintain protection from another drive failure.

The Drobo is just part of my backup strategy though so it's important to maintain backups off-site and on other media!

1. I have a 1TB drive outside my house in the workshop that sits on the wi-fi network and maintains a clone of important files that is updated three times a week.

2. I have a 1TB "Time Machine" volume attached to my mac

3. I back up everything to an online system called Mozy. The backup takes a LONG time to finish but once it is done all subsequent backups are incremental.

[bsimison]

That Netgear ReadyNAS looks pretty cool. Once I outgrow my current solution (an old Mac G4 with a cadre of SATA internal drives) I may jump on one of these.

Thanks for posting about it, Darr.

[bernal]

How can it possibly be the Drobo doesn't have eSATA interface for best speed performance? For this level of backup solution, check Sonnet's Fusion D500P (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond500p.html). You can buy it loaded or just the enclosure and add hard drives as you need.

I don't own one, so I can't speak from experience. But it looks like it is a good backup storage system.

bernal

[mrladewig]

I don't see any serious issues with DROBO, but I also like the flexibility of having the files on the network and prefer an NAS. I have a Buffalo Terrastation which I've had in service since 2004. I could swap the drives for larger ATA drives, but these days it would make more sense to get a newer system with SATA drives. So far the Terrastation has been great.

[Daniel_Buck]

I've got one, it seems to be a nice little backup storage! I've just thrown in some of my old drives, a 500gb drive, two 320gb drives, and a 100gb drive, giving me a total of just under 700gb of usable storage. Plenty for my needs, right now I have about 350gb of things that I actually *need* to keep backed up.

The Drobo isn't my only backup, but I think it's better than my current method of backing up, which is to put things on drives and then just let them sit (hoping they start up years later!) I like that eventually you'll rotate all of the drives out of service, and will have fresh drives in there. Super critical things, I keep backed up in several places, including on-line. Regular things, now I just put on the Drobo, as well as individual drives and DVD's.

Transferring to the drobo is a little slow, on large scan files I get about 30mbps, and smaller files I get about 15mbps (via the USB, since my laptop's firewire port is smaller than the provided cable, haven't picked up a new cable yet), but I won't be writing to it every day, so it's no problem. And I don't need to read/write from multiple computers, so for me the drobo seems like the perfect device :-)

[Stephen Best]

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html?ID=CreativeCow

Not exactly "new". I looked at the Drobo and decided instead to upgrade the drives in my Mac Pro (5 drives configured for both and performance and continuous backup) and use a portable Raid 0 "brick" for weekly off-site backup. The Drobo is kinda slow (I get 400MB/s from internal drives) and only semi-secure (vulnerable to theft, fire etc). I must admit that the idea of a storage unit that can grow and use any old drive is quite attractive, I just can't see a use for it personally.

[PenGun]

WD Green 1 TB is $140 ... CAN, be $100 in the USA. A straight up RAID 5 with a few is pretty cheap and I doubt any less secure.

Pretty near all motherboards come with RAID these days. I can hang 11 drives on mine with 2 RAID controllers. Why cripple your system with USB and only slightly less with Firewire when it does not even give you any more functionality?

Still if you have no computer skills and a lot of money I guess it would make sense.

I'm pretty sure that is just RAID X with a proprietor's wrapper.