Drobo 5D

[The Monkey]

Anyone have experience with the Drobo 5D--good or bad?

[oogabooga]

A little off topic, but I had the regular Drobo. It worked fine about 98% of the time, but the 2% that it gave me grief (needlessly rebuilding an array) was annoying. I used it with my HTPC and found it slow to 'spin up' from idle (much slower than a regular HD, and about as slow as my WD Mybook dual RAID0 array).

[Nebby]

Just join us on the Synology bandwagon

[The Monkey]

I was thinking about that but I want Thunderbolt.

[aardvark baguette]

i've been thinking about it.  

 

on my old drobos i never did get the email notifications when I had hard drive failures though.

im sure I set it up wrong, but then again its supposed to be idiot proof.

 

i guess they will always build a better idiot.

 

the drives that haven't failed are getting pretty old at this point and I should really do something about it.

 

i do have 2 of the la cie ssd thunderbolt drives and they absolutely smoke anything else i've ever had.  

too bad they are too small to put a music library on.  they are annoyingly loud though.  its stupid loud.

[The Monkey]

i've been thinking about it.  

 

on my old drobos i never did get the email notifications when I had hard drive failures though.

im sure I set it up wrong, but then again its supposed to be idiot proof.

 

i guess they will always build a better idiot.

 

the drives that haven't failed are getting pretty old at this point and I should really do something about it.

 

i do have 2 of the la cie ssd thunderbolt drives and they absolutely smoke anything else i've ever had.  

too bad they are too small to put a music library on.  they are annoyingly loud though.  its stupid loud.

 

Agree re the SSDs.  I am looking forward to prices falling enough so that I can use them for my music library. 

 

What was loud, the SSD or the Drobo?

[Nebby]

I was going to say no way to SSD's being loud, but checking the reviews on it there are a few mentions of a tiny but loud fan on the LaCie. Rather perplexing since SSD's generate very little heat, maybe the thunderbolt circuitry runs hot?

[aardvark baguette]

Yeah, the case fans have a really high pitched whine.  Like too many rpms.  Think of the motorcycle thing in the last few Batman movies.

 

The drobos were fairly quiet for the most part, but when you exit the computer out of sleep you would hear the disks ramp up and/or click on.

 

For the La Cie, if you have a compartment out of the way it would probably conceal most of the noise.  Like a closet or something.

Edited March 7, 2013 by aardvark baguette

[The Monkey]

Ugh, the noise is a dealbreaker for me.  The other day I ordered one of those Monster power filters (i.e., fancypants ripoff power strip) and returned it immediately because it emitted a low, but audible buzz constantly.  Reviews noted it, too.  Great characteristic in an A/V product.

 

I guess one other thing I'd need to be concerned about with the Drobo is backup.  I don't want to get another Drobo box to backup Drobo box (WHERE DOES IT END?!) but I would need something.  All of which brings me back to maybe I'm better off just sticking with one external HD for content and one for backup.

[grawk]

how much data are you looking to store?  A usb connected mirrored pair/raid1 of 4tb drives is reasonably cheap, and could back up a faster array of smaller drives in a tb case pretty easily

[The Monkey]

That sounds like it would work, Dan.  So you mean the mirrored array would back up the Drobo (and I guess the HD on the 'puter, too)?

[grawk]

right.  You'd have 4tb of reliable but slow storage that just backs up the data on the computer and the array.

[Voltron]

There are at least a few TB raid boxes, even some smallish ones with SSD drives, lIke from Pegasus and maybe LaCie. The announcement of TB two years ago was done with a big SDD raid array, which is what I have been dreaming about ever since. Maybe the drives are not cheap enough yet to be commercial but it seems crazy they aren't around but expensive.

[aardvark baguette]

If you aren't already using it, I heartily recommend Backblaze.  

 

Its basically my favorite thing about the internet.  

[aardvark baguette]

IIRC you can put SSDs in the drobo  5d.  It would be expensive to use large capacity SSDs, of course.

[The Monkey]

I think that's right.  And the 5D also has a dedicated slot for an extra SSD I guess to essentially cache stuff but from what I've read its effectiveness is debatable.

[The Monkey]

Update:

 

I have the Drobo up and running with 5 WD Red 2 TB Drives in it plus a 64GB msata SSD.  So far I have only my music on it, but it's working very well for that.  Drives are truly hot-swappable and size doesn't matter (have fun with that, peanut gallery).  It was a little finicky during setup and I was a little impatient, which resulted in me losing a lot of movies that someone had kindly shared with me, but I guess that was part of the learning process.

 

The box itself is smaller than I expected, well made, and easy to use.  Lots of bright LEDs, which can be helpful AND annoying.  The Drobo Dashboard software is decent but not great, but at least easy to use.  One thing I don't like is that in Mountain Lion (or Chupacabra or whatever the fuck we're on now in OSX), it reports the size of the volume, not the actual storage size as configured.  So you are basically wedded to the mediocre Drobo software to monitor capacity and usage.  Relatively minor annoyance.

 

I am slightly regretting not getting the 5N (NAS), but this setup in my apartment is really pretty much sufficient as I use my iMac to which it is attached as the Mothership.  I am backing up the Drobo and my iMac with using Time Machine with a WD 4TB external drive.  I may need a more robust backup solution at some point.   

[Dusty Chalk]

I'm not sure why you need to backup a raid if there's true duplication and hot-swappable.  I mean, other than most computer administrator's need to have backup systems truly independent of the things they are backing up.

[luvdunhill]

Multidrive failures?

[aardvark baguette]

i really cant stress this enough:  put the drobo on backblaze if you haven't already.

 

dont even look into other online backup vendors.

 

backblaze.

 

 

 

 

ive had so many shitty green drives fail on me.  im amazed the ones i have left are still working.

plus if the house ever burns down...

Edited March 19, 2013 by aardvark baguette

[The Monkey]

@ Dusty, yeah, multidrive failures and failure of the box itself, right?

 

Backblaze, yes, thanks very much for the reminder.  I have been meaning to do that and will get on it.

[Grahame]

You do want an offsite backup to avoid local geographic points of failure, 

House Fires, Zombie Outbreak Quarantine, small asteroid strikes, those sort of things. 

[cutestory]

Don't forget accidental file deletion. 

 

And remember: backing up? Not important. Restoring? That's the important bit.

 

I'm a Crashplan fan, just to provide an alternative to Backblaze.

[morphsci]

I am going to start using Crashplan with my Synology NAS because RAID IS NOT A BACKUP. Backblaze is not an option as they do not have a Linux version.

[Dusty Chalk]

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

It is if it's a straight-up (non-striping) mirror.  And you actually (non-hot[swap]) pull the disks.  And take them offsite.  And if by mirror that means you can actually put them into another enclosure and be able to access the files (I.E. they are not using some sort of proprietary filesystem)

 

But yeah yeah, I get it already.