Done moving, but at a terrible loss!

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

My Drobo
2008-2013
Rest in pieces, sweet keeper of files!

The good news is that I was able to resurrect it long enough to get 5 years-worth of digital photography, resumes, and my iTunes library off of it. It's actually impressive that it still worked despite the amount of damage it received (something shifted while moving and it rolled out of the back of my vehicle when I opened the door and onto the asphalt).

[Goobler Profile]

Whew, I thought a case of "adult beverages" fell out :p. Itshall join Sir Pigsington III, esquire so that he may listen to tunes in the sky.

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

LOL Thankfully, the 4 beers I was transporting plus my collection of pint glasses survived the move.

Yes, I collect pint glasses. Shut it! ;p

[thesillychicken Profile]

I don't like the carpet.

[DragonofHalo Profile]

I don't like the carpet.

At least it isn't blue like mine.

[Warriorbox Profile]

What were you thinking? loose? in the back?

Sorry for your loss

[SWfan85 Profile]

My systems get buckled into the passenger seats.

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

TSC: When you start living on your own in apartments, you tend to lower your standards when it comes to carpeting. As long as there aren't any stains and it doesn't smell like pee, you're usually OK with it. In the case of this apartment, the carpeting is fairly new if not new which is nice.

DH: Hmm... Depends on the shade of blue. Of course, blue and green are my favorite colors...

WB: It actually wasn't loose! Something bumped it in-transit and knocked it out of the little cubbyhole I had made for it in my piles of crap. :/

SW: You lost something too? That sucks! I was mainly posting pics because I'm very impressed that the Drobo is functioning at all - It's a testament to their engineering I suppose.

I've pretty much moved in and as of now. Once I get the remainder of my data off of my Drobo, I'll be free to use my PC. At the moment I'm relying on gravity a bit too much for me to want to risk messing around while it's copying. I forgot a video folder the other evening, so last night I copied the rest of my iTunes library (130GB of videos I've ripped/converted - Don't worry, I own every DVD/Blu-ray I rip!). This morning before work I started copying the final folder that contains a complete backup of almost every physical DVD/Blu-ray I own (2.5 TB total), so I should be free either late tonight or tomorrow.

[asim0v Profile]

Sorry to see your Drobo in such a sorry state, but yay that it actually works!

I have a question about the Drobo itself. I've been thinking of getting one for my parents since they currently have no backup solution at all (I'm all cloud-based) and was wondering if it would be fine for them. My dad is a manager in IT and has a background in computers, but he's pretty rusty when it comes to the technical aspect. I can get it all setup for them no problem, but is the actual operation of the Drobo easy and intuitive enough that they could use it?

[thesillychicken Profile]

Poster I know. I'm just a Hard Wood Floor person.

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

TSC: I had hardwood floors in my last place and I agree that they look nicer. Unfortunately, they also kill my feet. They're also a pain to clean - You have to sweep everything and random dirt blows through the entire apartment because there's nothing to trap it. I much prefer the ability to just run the vacuum over the carpet.

asim0v: If you have the money, a Drobo is the most easy to use RAID device I've ever played with. You pop the drives in, install the software on your Windows/Mac/Linux/Whatever PC, connect it to your PC, and then tell the software how you want to set it up. The pictured unit is the 4 bay 2nd Gen device with a max size limit of 16 TB (it's no longer in production, but you can find them used easily enough). The main limitations of this version was the slow access speeds and the lack of any real high-speed data connections (It had USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 only - The newer models have Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, iSCSI, etc. depending upon the model you choose).

I set the software up to make it appear to the OS as one massive 16 TB disk. In the future I could have kept popping in larger drives until the capacity finally hit 16 TB. The device itself has blue indicator lights on the bottom (note the picture above) that progressively light up in 10% increments as you fill up the space, so you don't have to monitor My Computer and remember how much actual space you have. The setup that I had, with single-disk redundancy, was at 4.53 TB available. I was using 2x Seagate Barracuda 3 TB, 1x Western Digital Green 1 TB, and 1x Hitachi 1 TB hard drives. As you can see, Drobos easily allow you to mix and match capacities and even manufacturers. I was buying random drives as they went on sale and throwing them in on the fly. Your data is accessible as the Drobo rebuilds the RAID - You simply hit the eject lever on the side of the hard drive, pull it out, and pop in the new one. The Drobo automatically expands your capacity and rebuilds the RAID for you. No user input required. All of the current Drobo models have significantly improved access times (this was a major complaint about the older models) and most allow you to install a mSATA SSD for even faster read/writes if you need/want it (the Drobo uses it as a cache basically).

Of the current models available, you'd probably want to get either the Mini or the 5N. The Mini uses 4 laptop hard drives and allows for a single hard drive failure. It has 2x Thunderbolt and 1x USB 3.0 data connectors and the added benefit of being slightly easier to transport (it's one of the few Thunderbolt devices that actually packs a Thunderbolt cable in the box). The 5N allows for dual-disk redundancy and is Ethernet-only. It does come with its own built-in file server, however, and has a Plex app you can download from Drobo. Drobo also has another app you can install that makes files stored on the 5N available remotely - Even on your smartphone or tablet. I'm not sure if the Mini has this or not, but the 5N also has a built-in battery so if you lose power mid-write the device will finish the writing operation and safely shut itself down.

The 5N without any drives averages $600 online. The Mini averages $630. Painful, but soooooo worth it in the long run. There was nothing mechanically wrong with this unit and it's amazing that it is still functioning after the fall it took.

[asim0v Profile]

Thanks for the info Poster!

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

NP - I updated it a little, but you get the idea.

To illustrate the "slowness" a bit: I swung by my apartment during lunch (~12pm) to check up on the file transfer. The total amount of data being transferred is actually 2.36 TB and, after starting the transfer around 8am this morning, I had copied .3 TB off the Drobo using the Drobo's USB 2.0 connection and copying the data to an internally-connected SATA III 4 TB hard drive.

[DragonofHalo Profile]

DH: Hmm... Depends on the shade of blue. Of course, blue and green are my favorite colors...

Dyed blue. And trust me, the pastel green walls don't look good with it :p

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

Heh - Again, depends on the shade. Baby blue wouldn't be too appealing, but a navy blue might not be too bad. Probably would need a hunter green or another darker shade of green on the walls to look right.

[Timberwolf1777]

I thought I would add my 2 cents to this topic for the sake of a more complete Drobo discussion. In addition to being a Lighting Designer, I have had a healthy dose of IT and data management, living as close to silicon valley as I do. (There is a good that reason I get along well at TWiT!) I was put in charge of IT and data management by a couple of the photographers that I work with and in those roles I have dealt with a variety of data storage systems and problems. Photographers generate a LOT of Data. They sometimes need to store more data than videographers because they will shoot more often (less time editing) and their final products are very high res images that could be printed in an incredibly large format with little pixelation. They often (as a part of their service) store their clients images indefinitely. Right now, one of the photographers I am working with has about 60TB worth of data that has to be managed with multiple redundancy. Being budget conscious, storage capacity has been increased by simply creating a new raid tower for each year's worth of images. This has led to the purchase of 2 drobos (a 5 bay and an 8 bay) and, from my experience dealing with those, more recently, 4 stardom towers in a raid 1+0 setup.

The Drobo's, due to their very specific issues, have lost a bit of our faith and are being phased into the "Backup" role for the studios. I want to love Drobo. I really do. The idea behind their system is inspired and in theory prevents headaches by being so amazingly flexible with drive make/model. And when they are working great, they are amazing. They are nicely designed rugged little enclosures. The issue is that when they have a problem, it is a BIG problem.

Before you buy a Drobo, consider these things (which Drobo isn't great at telling you before you buy):

1. Their advertised "beyond raid" tech allows for the loved drive flexibility, but with several unmentioned costs. Drobos are VERY expensive enclosures and they are the only enclosures that can read their raid setup. When a Drobo first failed on me, I took the drives to my data recovery guy, and he basically told me that neither he nor anyone he knows will touch drobo drives to try to recover data. Only drobo will be able to access their own patented raid system easily. So when your drobo kicks it, you either spend another $600+ on a new enclosure to maybe try to see if you can recover your data by swapping in your old drives or you attempt to deal with drobo's customer support. One Drobo failure took us 3 months of back and forth to finally get the data again. The customer support is sometimes good, sometimes a nightmare.

2. Corruption. The first rule of Drobo is: Dont work on files that have their home on the drobo. The second rule of drobo is: Dont work on files that have their home on the drobo. ... You get the point. After a month of working on (via photoshop) images that lived on the drobo, using its firewire connection, hundreds of files on the drobo started going corrupt. Their raid system tends to propagate corruption easily. Thankfully there was always a backup of the drobo. After the corruption was removed and files were replaced, the drobo was then "storage only."

3. Do NOT let them get close to full. The drive that your computer sees is a virtual one. (i.e. that 16TB drive that PA has .... but not really) The normal data handling that your OS will do when dealing with a drive that is close to full wont apply to your drobo. Your computer will happily fill up every available byte on your drobo because it will think it is much larger than it is. The Drobo dashboard will give you warnings but if you use your drobo as a network drive, there is no dashboard and you will get no warnings. It will just fill up and fail. When it fails like this, it can possible take all the drives and data with it ... forever (thankfully this didnt happen to us). From what I have read, Drobos can "brick" themselves and all their drives even without being completely full. They need a healthy amount of space to operate. I wouldn't fill one above 80%, personally. At 70% is when I usually do a drive add/upgrade.

For my own sanity, I have moved on to other products. They are a little more difficult to set up (but not much) and cost much less. We do spend a lot more on the drives now as we use all identical enterprise class drives for the Raid 1+0 enclosures I assemble. I use enterprise class drives for the raid syncing speed benefits. All the other enterprise class extras are frankly unnecessary. Also as there is no room for expandability, I have to get all the drives I will forever use with each enclosure immediately upon purchase. These costs/challenges are very worth it for me after the headaches I have had with Drobos. However, if a drobo is never allowed to be over 80% full without an upgrade, only used for data storage (not working files), and attached via USB or something (not on the network) so that the dashboard is in constant use, I can see that it would be a great data management solution for a long time with lots of room for growth.

Thats it. Thanks

[asim0v Profile]

Thanks for the info Timber. The purchase wouldn't be for me, it would be for my parents. And it would be used as a backup for at least 3 systems (probably adding a 4th soon), all of which are macs. My primary concern is stability, though ease of use is a very close second. It certainly wouldn't be used for working on photo or video files, just a nice backup solution and fault tolerance so all the dvds my dad ripped and family photos he scanned won't disappear if the hard drive in that system dies.

[thesillychicken Profile]

I love how I point out the carpet while timber explains drobo.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[Timberwolf1777]

Although I dont use macs, my photographer clients do. All the data solutions I have used work well on anything. As for ease of use, thats relative. The initial setup of any of these systems is pretty similar and relatively easy (buy drives, insert drives, turn on, plug in, use menus/software to select setup options, format, ready) The drobo requires installation of a dashboard to do initial setup and monitoring which will require a bit more "paying attention" during its use over the long term. A simple raid 5 or raid1+0 doesnt need software and the size that the computer sees is the real drive size. As for reliability, some bays are crappy, which is why I like the stardom products (decent rep so far) but drives are an equally important decision. I prefer seagate to WD but thats an old old bias and I have no idea if im just being silly these days . Enterprise drives are made for raid so they dont do that 'deep recovery' cycle when they find a data glitch. They just catalog it and move on. Desktop drives will stop what they are doing and attempt to repair the glitch in a 'deep recovery' cycle. Raid controllers dont have patience for this so a desktop drive will get dropped from the raid even when it is fine, because of this, possibly leading to annoying and time consuming repetetive raid rebuilds. The drobo has more patience for desktop drives than a normal raid controller but I have even seen drobos drop drives and rebuild for unknown reasons. If you want a network drive to make backing up 4 computers easier, I would not use a drobo but I think any network drive solution will be expensive. Do you roughly know how big each computer's HD is? And are planning on using backup management software? It might be more cost effictive to use a single 2bay raid 1enclosure for each each computer and use time machine to auto backup files rather than trying to centralize the data solution.

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

For heavy video/photo editors, I would definitely not recommend a Drobo for normal daily storage. asim0v asked about backup storage for his parents, hence my glowing recommendation. My first Drobo was D.O.A. before I placed a KB of data on it. Hardware failures happen some times. Almost every motherboard I've bought for homebrew PC builds was D.O.A. (Twice I have had TWO dead mobos - I have bad luck, what can I say?) My second one has survived more than one fall, including the catastrophic one described here. In addition to more than one drop, this device has been on 24/7 for at least 3 of the 5 years I owned it (I would hazard to guess that the actual up-time is closer to 4.5 because I rarely turn it off). They have my cash for those reasons alone. As Leo loves to say, however, a single backup method is NOT the best solution. If I had money to throw around and bandwidth to spare, I'd have all 2.5 TBs sitting in the cloud somewhere as well. Unfortunately, hooch ain't cheap and I have priorities.

I decided to buy the same model (2nd Gen) off of eBay for $150. I won't have the $600 for a 5N any time soon and I'm not comfortable leaving all of this data on a single 4 TB drive.