Data robotics Drobo....thoughts?

[David]

Thinking about getting one of these... sound amazing. Anyone had experience or have thoughts on it?

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobo.html

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-002-DO&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72

 

[Daz]

Loads of people use them.

Quite new technology tho, so some people have a few issues - on the whole though, they're pretty good.

It does it's own redundancy stuff etc. Quite expensive for just the chassis.

 

[David]

only uses 10% of storage for up to two drives to fall over, totally interchangeable sotrage, no need to match sizes etc. Just trying to firgure out if it's worth it, thought no one was using them. you know a few people who are then?

 

[Daz]

Loads of people on Apple forums use them.

forums.macrumors.com

Do a search for drobo.

 

[cava83]

nice lights.

 

[cava83]

It actually looks really, really good.

Anyone using it for backing up servers?

 

[David]

thinking about it for use at home, hd movies take up a lot of space and it's nicely expandable up to 4tb hard drives in each block (which don't even exist yet!)

 

[The Boosh!]

Thats some immense technology there! 16TB WTF!?

 

[cava83]

How about this one ? http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=104

 

[David]

yeh but that one is like a grand....without the benefits of the intermixed storage and redundancy cost.

 

[cava83]

True.

yeh but that one is like a grand....without the benefits of the intermixed storage and redundancy cost.

Might get a Drobo for work and one for home.

I am a sucker for gadgets.

 

[David]

i'm pretty sure i'm getting one with x1 1.5tb hard drive, expand as needed i rkeon.

 

[Daz]

Two 1.5TB?

 

[cava83]

You would need a minimum of two disks,

Also, that other one I posted is £580

 

[David]

nah you can use one disk you just dont get redundancy. which is fine as i don't even get it at the moment, i'll get x2 when i need them.

 

[Daz]

nah you can use one disk you just dont get redundancy. which is fine as i don't even get it at the moment, i'll get x2 when i need them.

Erm, that's the whole point of the Drobo tho... haha.

Just get two drives..

 

[cava83]

You might as well have a single external USB Hard drive...

nah you can use one disk you just dont get redundancy. which is fine as i don't even get it at the moment, i'll get x2 when i need them.

 

[Daz]

You might as well have a single external USB Hard drive...

Not 100%, as when he does get another drive, it'll just "expand" the storage, as opposed to having to transfer it manually..

 

[PinkoCommie]

only uses 10% of storage for up to two drives to fall over, totally interchangeable sotrage, no need to match sizes etc. Just trying to firgure out if it's worth it, thought no one was using them. you know a few people who are then?

Not true.

If you check out the calculator for capacities: http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html

You'll see that if you have 2 * 250GB drives, you will get 231.2GB of storage space as 232.4GB is used for "protection" (i.e. parity data), but if you add a 3rd drive, it still uses about 232GB for protection.

If you notice from there, if you use mis-matched sized drives, you won't actually get the most out of it. i.e. if you use a 250gb and a 1tb drive, you only get the usable space of 2*250 drives (i.e. 250GB) and the rest is "reserved for expansion".

I would say that it's great for home use, but you won't get as much storage out of it as you thought you might, and for business use you might as well get yourself a proper raid array to use.

i'm pretty sure i'm getting one with x1 1.5tb hard drive, expand as needed i rkeon.

Very much a waste of time. If you check out the calculator you'll see that having a single 1.5TB drive in it will actually only give you 697.2GB of storage.

I would say, if you have multiple drives knocking around and only want an external drive for a single PC then it's pretty good. If you're going to buy all of the drives at the same time and you want multiple PC's accessing it, you're probably better off going with something like the QNAP devices as they act as true NAS.

 

[David]

what r u boys on about, the whole point for me is having adjustable storage as i need. i've got 2.7 atm which is rammed, need more, 1.5 will do me till i expand again, thats the point for me as i don't want any more hdd's in my pc, my psu won't copewith it as i'm getting a new g card soon... plus i don't want the heat in there...so i'm getting this and x1 FireWire800 PCI card to move stuff onto it. i'm getting my 1.5tb hard drive so leave me alone

 

[PinkoCommie]

what r u boys on about, the whole point for me is having adjustable storage as i need. i've got 2.7 atm which is rammed, need more, 1.5 will do me till i expand again, thats the point for me as i don't want any more hdd's in my pc, my psu won't copewith it as i'm getting a new g card soon... plus i don't want the heat in there...so i'm getting this and x1 FireWire800 PCI card to move stuff onto it. i'm getting my 1.5tb hard drive so leave me alone

See my bit above, if you want 1.5TB in that device you will need to buy 2 * 1.5TB drives (and that will only actually get you 1.4TB).

So to get 1.5TB of storage you could pay £300+ for the chassis, then 2 * £100 for the drives. Or you could pay £100 for the single drive and pickup a usb/firewire external enclosure for £10, or you could splash out and buy one of the ones with a NAS interface that you can daisy chain off of each other for £40 (like this http://shenztech.com/code/ui/product/product.aspx?prdid=NAS-STR8132&subcatid=9)

 

[David]

i think you've clearly, and VASTLY misunderstood the point of having this device. i'll stick 1.5 in, fine i don't get 1.5 but i don't care because i can upgrade it when i need it...understand??

 

[PinkoCommie]

Obviously i have misunderstood then, what it seems you should have actually posted was "I'm buying this new gadget, isn't it cool" as opposed to what you asked which seemed to be "i want some expandable external storage, this looks like it might do the trick, have you any advice on this"

i was just trying to offer the advice THAT WAS ASKED FOR!

If you want to go and spend over £400 on something that you can do for less than half that go ahead, I was just giving you some options.

 

[David]

explain to me how then how to get that amount of storage (....incorporating redundancy, speed, ethernet options, hot swappability and no need to keep the same size drive for each slot into one nice tidy box), with hard drives in seperate caddies?

my post was thoughts and experience with the device. Not sure i know i could get a load of external jobbies but i wouldn't save much if i wanted redundancy would i?..

I think you're getting confused with the fact i'm buying x1 1.5tb hard drive...my point as i've said before is that i will be expanding that as i need to without the need to buy all the drives up front and risk them either coming down in price or max sizes increasing in the mean time

 

[McBunny]

we use this instead
http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody.asp

 

[cava83]

hahahahaha

http://billsmind.com/2007/08/07/who-the-hell-would-pay-500-for-a-drobo/

 

[David]

LOL!

but the first post does point out the flaw in his plans!

 

[cava83]

Active directory,

It says it does not support it in regards to authentication,

http://na3.salesforce.com/_ui/selfs...00000000000000&orgId=00D500000006kRy&t=4&ps=1

However, it doesn't say if it can back it up.

 

[David]

not using it on a network like that anyway, home use. won't be till next month till i can afford the b**ch though!

 

[KDF]

Not true.

If you check out the calculator for capacities: http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html

You'll see that if you have 2 * 250GB drives, you will get 231.2GB of storage space as 232.4GB is used for "protection" (i.e. parity data), but if you add a 3rd drive, it still uses about 232GB for protection.

LOL.. isnt that just raid 5 ? except for when its two drives in which case its raid 1 ?