I have been thinking about getting a FW800 DROBO for general backup purposes--put have also started to wonder about getting two--one for image storage and one for backup. Does anyone use a DROBO for main storage?
Rocky I'm using one but not as primary storage since my computer has four internal HD and a raid card.
So far solid and no problems, will probably be my primary storage for my next computer. btw make sure to get the new unit not the original .. much faster connection.
Rocky,
I have used one USB Drobo as my main storage device for about a year without any problems. It replaced 4 external hard drives. I still back up my finished files from Drobo about once a month onto an external hard drive that I keep at my office in case of fire at home.
I considered DROBO very seriously because I like the ability to add storage as I need it. However, I went with a Guardian Maximus external Raid enclosure with two 750gb hard drives installed in RAID O (mirroring). I think it likely that, by the time I fill that, better options (maybe even next generation DROBO) will be available. I like that if the enclosure fails I can still access all of my images (unlike DROBO).
Hi Weldon Nothing is really 100% safe and redundancy is the key !!! .. I even back up the Drobo btw you probably have a raid 1 set up raid 0 uses two drives and divides the info which is fast but not safe.
I got burned once with RAID 0 and will never use it again. I now make a clone of my main drive to another internal once every few weeks. This pair holds the current year's images. This data base is backed up to an external pair that holds all y images so I have 3 copies in the house of the current images. I back up the external to another external that lives at my office, so I have 4 copies of the current images and 2 of the older ones with one off site.
The advantage of Drobo is that it would allow easy in home redundancy. However, I do not consider it a true back up as any errors on the main drive may be transmitted to all 4 if the standard RAID configuration is used. In addition to Drobo you will need something to create a copy of everything with known integrity and keep it off site.
I considered a raid system, but my needs so far at home haven't required it. Hard drives keep getting larger. I currently run a 250 GByte system disk and two 1.5 terabyte internal hard drives. I back them up onto multiple 1.5 terabyte USB drives and keep 2 copies off site.
At work I run multiple raid 5 arrays with raid 5 arrays as back up in a different building. I currently have about 45 terabytes with 180 terabytes on order. We have had raid 5 failures, e.g. a fan died over a weekend and the drives cooked themselves. So redundant backups is the key. The raid failures at work scared me off of raid at home especially when I don't really need it at home. I can't live without it at work.
I think that the DROBO for primary storage is too slow (<< 480 Mbps) Vs ~3.0 Gbps for SATA-II HDDs which are dirt cheap right now. I would go with RAID1.
While the Drobo is nice and offers expansion flexibility that no other device can match, I would ONLY use it for backup storage, NOT for primary storage. Even over FW800 it is VERY SLOW. Less than 50% as fast as using a straight 7200RPM disk.
The DroboPro when used over iSCSI is supposed to be VERY fast, according to a number of reports I have seen. However I have not been able to verify this myself.
It goes without saying that the Drobo being that slow will NOT benefit from 7200RPM disks, so save your pennies and get some 5400RPM disks instead. I can highly recommend the WD Caviar Green drives as they are VERY quiet, and energy efficient.
Thanks for the link. Mostly accurate about the DROBO. The ONLY issue with your suggested solution is lack of ability to use different capacity drives.
DROBO has its uses, but primary storage is NOT one of them and never will be in the current configuration. Most MOBOs now support raid1, there is really no reason to NOT enable it since the disk incremental cost is super cheap.