Drobo, anyone?

my girlfriend is a cinematographer, and of course she takes a lot of pictures.
she's starting to think about a better way to look after them than the growing number of Rugged drives she has,
and i suggested a simple Drobo.

i think some of you here are using these (i know Ben King wrote a review of the Drobo PRO)
so i thought i'd just check and see what you think of them.
any feedback would be appreciated.


thanks in advance,
nick

I haven't actually used one, but when I was looking around for an archival solution, the price of a drobo couldn't match a lower end RAID-5 4 or 5 bay array, but that was when it was new in the market. The price may have dipped now, so it's worth a look. I think the data throughput may have gone up too. What is real neat about it is how easily you can add drives to the array.



www.strypesinpost.com

yes, and i like that the drives don't have to match.
so we can "upgrade" it as we go.


nick

I've got one, just as you say, for an archive. It's small right now, just two two-terabyte drives in a mirror configuration, but it's got two empty slots so I can grow it quite a bit.

It's hooked up to my Airport Extreme base station, which also hosts my Time Machine drive via a USB hub. It's basically a flawless setup for me. I can get to the data on it fast enough, given that I don't do bulk transfers to or from the drobo very frequently. And if I need the data faster, the Firewire 800 port is there. (I got about 25 MB/s when I did my initial big data copy, which was over Firewire, so the drobo is anything but fast.)

While it wasn't incredibly cheap ? I think I paid about $350 for the device itself, plus the 2 TB drives were a hundred bucks apiece, all from Amazon ? it was a reasonable cost for what it is. And the virtue of it is that it doesn't require a host. If I wanted to create the same setup with an inexpensive RAID, I'd need to throw in the cost of a Mac mini to host it, since I don't want my laptop tethered to the disk stack all the time.

As for reliability ? meh. The drobo is, as far as I'm concerned, a pretty good basket. But it's still just one basket. I wouldn't put any eggs in it that I couldn't afford to break.

Jeff --

Did the Drobo interface with your Airport Extreme OK? I presently have a Western Dig. My Book connected for archive purposes, and I'm thinking that the WD is a time bomb.

-vic

The standard Drobo (2) is great as long as you don't have to move data quickly and don't want to edit video off it. I have one, and it is great as a long term archive, but forget about doing anything quickly with it. On the positive side, it has forced me to buy another RAID which means I now have high speed editing storage, and low speed archive which isn't all bad. Also, their after sales technical support is awesome.

I have not yet used their Drobo Pro or larger systems which apparently are quite a bit quicker.