Drobo

I think I have a storage solution for you. I just installed a Drobo, which is touted as being a digital storage "robot." The marketing hype on that front is a little much, but it offers a real convenient Raid-like JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) storage system with some really impressive data safety bells and whistles.

There are some other commercial hard drive storage units out there, the Buffalo TeraStation box being the one you’ve probably seen in the Fry’s aisles. The Drogo is cheaper than that, and has a lot more capabilities.

Basically, it’s a box with four hard drive slots. You’re buying an empty box for $500, and then you have to fill it with SATA drives. But what it does is combine the storage of these four drives (as in a RAID5 striped array, so it appears as one drive), but it reserves part of that capacity for redundant back-up, and it monitors the health of the drives and lets you know when one is starting to die. When one does, you don’t lose your data. You can put different sized drives in it, and you can hot swap a new drive when you want to add a higher capacity drive. They claim it’s not RAID, that it’s a proprietary system.

What it is is easy. Yes, if you’re a computer geek you can set up your gigabit network server and make something like this for less money. But most of us aren’t. I’m about in the middle range on the geek spectrum as far as photographers go. But there’s a lot of this stuff I just don’t want to deal with, even if I sorta understand it. This device, especially if you format it for the first time with the Drobo software, is super, super easy. Subsequent hard drive additions don’t even need that degree of intervention. You pop in a new drive, the box formats it, and copies data over to it. All on its own. For me this is a brilliant solution, and for most photographers this device could really be the answer to a vexing problem.

My current system is a cobbled together confusing array of gigabit server (full), local hard drives, and several USB drives. I kinda know where things are if I’ve cataloged them in Iview, but a given file could be in any number of hard drives (oh, April’s files won’t all fit here, well, I’ll split them up and put them there, and there, and there) and it’s quickly becoming a mess. This could really fix things for me.

I think we’re beginning to see some real solutions to the data storage problem we have. Here are a couple of links for more info.

Data Robotics (makers of Drobo)

Crunchgear Review

Comments

[Alan Schrank]

Hope, this works well, since mine is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, along with 4 500 gig drives.

[Joe]

Backup CYA - I've been tempted by this product, as well, since I first saw news of it several weeks ago.

I also had an experience five years ago with a 10-drive SCSI RAID box configured as a 9-drive RAID-5 array with 1 drive reserved as a hot spare.

Two of the array drives failed over one night, and the hot spare was not able to fully rebuild parity for the array. The result was no available data/files. Swapping in two good drives and restoring from tape recovered everything the next morning. We soon added a second array box and a second tape backup drive.

Have your backup strategy rigorously in effect! Never too much CYA. Best luck.

[Greg Heins]

And please remember: one off-site backup, in case your house burns down, among the other lovely possibilities.

[TiVoBlog]

I really would like to get a Drobo however, the fact that it isn't a NAS has me discouraged. If it was a NAS I would pick it up today!