Experience with Drobo System

[stevenseelig]

End of year is coming quickly and disk space is running out so I am looking at options

Currently I buy two disks of the same size and use one as original and one as back up on FW800 chains. This requires faithful back up on

my part. I typically use Western Digital mainly because I have had good, not perfect, success with the drives and the company.

 

A 3TB system with individual drives would run (2- 2TB $600x2=$1200 and 2-1TB drives at $312x2=$624) 1824 or about $0.608 per GB with

backup.

 

A 4TB Drobo which would yield 3 TB backed up is about $1299 or about $0.433 per GB with backup. Plus the possibility of migrating the

system to more capacity just by purchasing larger drives in the future, although this would need to be done carefully. They claim a total

capacity of 16TB in a pretty small box, but that would require 4 TB individual drives.

 

Questions

1. What has people's experience been with the Drobo in terms of reliability and performance...realizing that FW800 just became available)

2. Is anyone aware of individual drives larger than 1 TB and what the technology issues are for the development of larger drives.

 

Thanks for any info....Steven

[stevenseelig]

I should have added that I am on a Mac system.

[bruce_margolis]

I have never used it but Scott Kelby swears by it. Here's his latest comment (you have to scroll down a bit) from 5/30......

 

http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/?s=Drobo

[john_oconnell14]

I've never used them (though I plan to) but Thecus drive enclosures are highly regarded and offer RAID 1 support and

eSata connections (an eSATA PCI card is bundled in case your system doesn't have one already) as well as USB2.

 

Also look at Synology gear for NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions.

[joseph_martines]

I love it. It is silent and does what it is supposed to do. I have a 2 T Drobo. I bought it when they were changing to the

Firewire supported system (which I would rather have had).

 

I have gone to the mat for this one but, most geeks stay away from it because they are into some deep mystery about

Raid systems and seem to understand what is beyond most mere mortals about backing up systems.

 

Here's what I do with my images. After a shoot I use Preview to look at the images and get rid of the obviously bad

ones. I then copy the remaining images to an external drive which I keep images only on. I then import them into

Aperture and organize them. When I have the time I burn a disc from the external drive and meanwhile Drobo has my

stuff using Time Machine.

[stevenseelig]

Joseph,

So you have a copy of your pictures on an external drive and then you use Time Machine to back up your external drive to

a Drobo. I guess that would leave you with three copies. One on your external and two on the Drobo which automatically

generates a back up on itself. Am I understanding correctly? Thanks Steven

[joseph_martines]

I have a 320 GB - WD - USB external HD which I copy my images to after I have gone through them using Preview.

 

I then import them into iPhoto which places the images on the internal hard drive of the iMac computer.

 

Drobo, using TimeMachine to co-ordinate the copying to Drobo now places the images on the Drobo drives.

 

Yes, I then have three copies.