Is a Drobo the way to go?

[Ksyder]

I was perusing Newegg last night looking at external hard drives and came across the Drobo line of products...this one jumped out at me... incidentally today it is unavailable but it was there last night for around $1600.

Just wondering if people like these things. It seems it would be nice to have a device that could add drives and increase the volume size automatically (assuming I went with one that didn't come with drives) I'm a little iffy on the connection options... 10 Tb and USB? Sounds pretty stupid. Anybody think it would be better just to build a pc and add sata drives or would something like this be the way to go? I'm just looking for lots of space for backup and movies and music.

 

[Rifter]

depends, if USB is fast enough for you then its a ok deal. If not then build a PC. To be honest i wouldnt even consider USB for a large external storage, USB isnt even fast enough for one blu ray stream.

 

[killster1]

yawn guess Esata is only way to go, or gigabit

 

[RebateMonger]

ok so im confused here, blu ray streams are faster than hard drives? i mean even a SSD is at most 200mb/s and usb is 480mb/s i dont get how its not fast enough. ya sure maybe a thumb drive is 10mb/s (seems like my micro sd cards are only 10mb/s)

You are getting your "m"s mixed up.

SSD may be 200 MegaBYTES per second.
USB 2.0 is rated at 480 MegaBITS per second. In real life, it's about 30 MegaBYTES per second.

 

[yinan]

Build a storage box. For $1600 you can build a real nice box with a real good raid controller and plenty of CPU/RAM to run a storage target.

 

[killster1]

You are getting your "m"s mixed up.

SSD may be 200 MegaBYTES per second.
USB 2.0 is rated at 480 MegaBITS per second. In real life, it's about 30 MegaBYTES per second.

Hey there is the answer i guess.. so 480/8 is 60MB/s so thats slower than most hard drives are so i guess usb is foolish. i wanted to do the same thing but i guess only solution is using Esata.

 

[Makaveli]

Yes ESATA FTW

Or get a drobo that has network support!

 

[pjkenned]

For a 5 drive NAS w/ 10TB of disk space (10TB = $600 or less these days), that is super expensive. You are basically getting into the range at $1600 where you can build a server using much better components that can expand well over 40TB with two Intel NICs + remote management at the system board level.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I've heard of a lot of reliability problems with Drobos.

 

[boomhower]

For a 5 drive NAS w/ 10TB of disk space (10TB = $600 or less these days), that is super expensive. You are basically getting into the range at $1600 where you can build a server using much better components that can expand well over 40TB with two Intel NICs + remote management at the system board level.

Darn thing isn't even a NAS, just a huge USB drive more or less.

 

[ultimatebob]

If you get one, don't be a dummy... use the eSATA port. It will be a hell of a lot faster.

For the price of that thing, though, you could custom build a Windows Home Server with just as much RAID'ed storage that would do a hell of a lot more than just store files. Hell... you could even buy an HP MediaSmart and drives yourself if you didn't feel like building a PC from scratch.

 

[pjkenned]

Darn thing isn't even a NAS, just a huge USB drive more or less.

Good point it's DAS... which makes it even worse.

 

[jimhsu]

Hey there is the answer i guess.. so 480/8 is 60MB/s so thats slower than most hard drives are so i guess usb is foolish. i wanted to do the same thing but i guess only solution is using Esata.

In real life a USB connection will never get close to 480 mb/s. Maybe the combined speed of all your USB devices is that, but for sustained transfers, you're lucky to get 200 mb/s (or 25 MB/s). Consider it this way - 1st gen Firewire (400 mb/s) is usually substantially faster.

 

[Emulex]

no DMA no ncq on usb.

Esata is extremely sensitive as well.

Just put them inside a box.

 

[vshah]

i was considering a drobo but due to reliability concerns and price I just went with a WHS solution. <$500 for a 3TB box, and you can add storage as you please. e5200cpu on an asus m-atx board...gives me 80-90 megabytes/second over gigabit.

 

[retnuh]

So far I like mine, just a regular Drobo 2nd gen, and over firewire800 its plenty fast enough for backups and media storage, but that's all I do with it. Having had to upgrade and move all my music/tv shows/movies twice already I really wasn't comfortable not having at least mirroring and expandability. Having to expand and rebuild raid arrays for data thats basically read only is why I ended up picking the drobo, the zero effort part was worth it.

For an actual NAS type solution, WHS or something like a synology diskstation would be a better fit.

 

[Mark R]

The new drobo's don't look bad - reasonably fast (about 35 MB/s - 50 MB/s, so better than a simple USB drive).

My main concern with them is the highly proprietary format they use on the disks. The software on the drobos is highly obfuscated, so as to protect their trade secrets in the way it works. As a result, if something terrible happens and the normal data protection doesn't work, you may be SOL.

I use a QNAP NAS. By contrast, if uses a stripped down,but pretty standard, version of linux. It uses the standard linux RAID features and linux file systems. As a result, it can add drives on the fly (supports RAID 1,1+0, 5 and 6). You can switch RAID type on the fly, etc. If it's acting up, you can SSH into a shell prompt and fiddle with it, to see what's happening. And if TSHTF, you can pull the drives out, hook them up to a PC, boot a linux live CD, and the drives/RAID/partitions should all autodetect, and provide access to your data. (I've done this for test purposes)

Of course, you could also put together a PC - but the effort needed in getting a good stable NAS up and running shouldn't be underestimated. So my personal preference would be to buy a NAS unit, unless you enjoy playing with comps for the hell of it.

 

[Ksyder]

After looking at the price of 2 TB hard drives I won't be looking at any more Drobo's. Leaning towards a WHS box.

 

[KeithP]

$1,600 for Drobo S? That was full of 2TB drives correct? An empty Drobo S on Data Robotic's site is $799 (5 bays, USB, esata, FW800). Amazon has it for $629
http://www.amazon.com/Drobo-5-Bay-Fi.../dp/B002Y40FQY

A empty Drobo (4 bays, FW800 & USB) is $399. And B&H Photo has it right now for $100 off. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...c_Storage.html

I have never used a Drobo although it does have some advantages in the way it works over a WHS box. If you get one, use either Firewire or esata.

-KeithP

 

[pjkenned]

A $400 USB/ FW800 enclosure is a bad idea. 8TB+ in an enclosure that can move data over USB at 30MB/s? When a drive starts failing, or the unit gets old and you want to get your data off... that's like three days of continuous reads. Yikes! One reason I would strongly prefer a Gigabit or eSATA port over FW800 is that decent server boards tend not to have firewire ports. If you did want to swap to a WHS box in the future you need to go Drobo -> PC with Firewire -> Gigabit network -> WHS (or other NAS).

Again, I would strongly suggest going some sort of NAS.