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Drobo storage?

eclipse525

eclipse525

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 5, 2003
854
4
USA, New York
Hey everyone... I'm looking to upgrade my current back up solution. I've been looking at the "Drobo's" and they look great but someone also mentioned the "Firmtek - SeriTek/5PM". Does anybody have any experience with either of these solutions? I'm totally up for other brands within this "no-brainer" raid backups. Any opinions are welcomed. Thanks!


~e
 
i was thinking of buying a drobo so i can just have storage for 1080p movies .. music and among other things .. and i can also use it for sending movies to my popcorn hour
 
I think I'm going with the Drobo. Once I get that in and get all my files copied over, my other thought is do I need a back up for my Drobo? I know some people use offsite storage places like "BackBlaze" and "Carbonite". Anybody use these services as well?
 
eclipse525 said:
I think I'm going with the Drobo. Once I get that in and get all my files copied over, my other thought is do I need a back up for my Drobo? I know some people use offsite storage places like "BackBlaze" and "Carbonite". Anybody use these services as well?
Click to expand...

Never used those services and probably never will....my concerns with them are 1) the recurring fees, and more importantly 2) one day they just shut down operations with little or no warning - you're scrambling to find space to copy all your stuff to, or worse yet, it's just gone.
 
I've never used any of those services either...

On a side note, last night, I decided to experiment with my new Drobo a bit. While I've had my first Drobo for about two months now, I never tried swapping out a drive with it. So, I decided to give it a shot with the new one. I had two 1TB drives in the top two slots and two 500GB drives in the bottom two slots. Then, I loaded it up with about 1.3TB worth of data. Then, I pulled one of the 500GB drives and replaced it with a 1TB drive. Everything worked out fine. It took about 9 hours to rebuild itself and all the data is fine.

One thing to note is that when you first pull out a drive, the Drobo and the Drobo Dashboard software needed about 2 minutes to pop an alert on the screen. Then, pop in your new drive. Just be patient and let it do its thing.
 
It is a good idea to back up your drobo, but that can get expensive. Right now I have a drobo with 4 1.5TB drives in it, to back that up I would need another very expensive solution....

Is it worth the money to risk losing your data?
 
true, i guess it depends on your usage of the drobo itself. i would never have data on it that isnt somewhere else. ie itunes db, movies, etc. . . these are typically on my computer too making the drobo the actual backup. i guess this is why the time capsule works so well for me. as much as i drool over a drobo, i just cant justify it.
 
Drobo is a great solution but the fact that I need a back up for my drobo itself is hard to swallow when you can [hypothetically] get (2) 1 terabyte drives. Use one for all your data and the other as a daily back up that drive. It comes out to half the price of a Drobo. Even if you get a third drive as an off-site drive it's around the price of a Drobo with (2) 1 terabyte drives. Here you have three drives, two a backups and one of those backups is off-site.

Am I missing something? I'm sure I am but i can't see it. ;-)


~e
 
eclipse525 said:
Drobo is a great solution but the fact that I need a back up for my drobo itself is hard to swallow when you can [hypothetically] get (2) 1 terabyte drives. Use one for all your data and the other as a daily back up that drive. It comes out to half the price of a Drobo. Even if you get a third drive as an off-site drive it's around the price of a Drobo with (2) 1 terabyte drives.

Am I missing something? I'm sure I am but i can't see it. ;-)


~e
Click to expand...

Drobo is probably not the best solution for you to get to 2TB, but when you start talking about larger amounts of storage, it's hard to beat it. Also, it's easily upgradable.
 
eclipse525 said:
Drobo is a great solution but the fact that I need a back up for my drobo itself is hard to swallow when you can [hypothetically] get (2) 1 terabyte drives. Use one for all your data and the other as a daily back up that drive. It comes out to half the price of a Drobo. Even if you get a third drive as an off-site drive it's around the price of a Drobo with (2) 1 terabyte drives. Here you have three drives, two a backups and one of those backups is off-site.

Am I missing something? I'm sure I am but i can't see it. ;-)


~e
Click to expand...

As thegoldenmackid said, think beyond the 2TBs. The upgradability aspect of the Drobo is fantastic.

Also, I feel very comfortable with the redundancy of the Drobo. Is it possible that more than one of the four drives in the Drobo can die at the same time? Yes, but it's also fairly unlikely. Personally, I do not have additional backups of my two Drobos.
 
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