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Help me pick a drive for my Drobo...

tuffluffjimmy said:
What are you using the drobo for (why do you need so much storage?) and what model drobo did you get?
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I just bought the new FW800 Drobo.

It'll be used as an all purpose storage vault and easy backup. Right now I have about a half dozen externals, daisy-chained on firewire, ranging from 250-750GB. The 750GB one, which has the most important data has a duplicate 750GB drive which I sync it to often.

So the idea is to basically consolidate, forget about backing up since it'll do it for me, and have expanded storage.

Reliability is key for me here, not so much performance.
 
tuffluffjimmy said:
really any of those drives will do. Are you getting four terabyte drives?
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Yeah, four 1TB's.

I like that the Seagate's have 5-year warranties over WD's 3-year. Plus, when I called both companies today with questions, Seagate had American tech support whereas WD had Indian support.

But, NewEggers say Seagate charges $20 per drive to RMA while WD will cross-ship free.
 
goodcow said:
Yeah, four 1TB's.

I like that the Seagate's have 5-year warranties over WD's 3-year. Plus, when I called both companies today with questions, Seagate had American tech support whereas WD had Indian support.

But, NewEggers say Seagate charges $20 per drive to RMA while WD will cross-ship free.
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Then it comes down to what you personally value more. The drives, most likely, will give you the same performance.

Personally I would get two of one and two of the other. That way there is less of a chance of them all failing at the same time.
 
goodcow said:
So the idea is to basically consolidate, forget about backing up since it'll do it for me, and have expanded storage.

Reliability is key for me here, not so much performance.
Click to expand...

I would rethink that strategy. The Drobo does not backup your data. It protects against a single hard drive failure, if more than one drive is present, but does not backup anything.
 
brand said:
I would rethink that strategy. The Drobo does not backup your data. It protects against a single hard drive failure, if more than one drive is present, but does not backup anything.
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Well it protects against data loss, which most people think is backing up. Either way it'll do what he wants.
 
I would agree with Brand here. RAID != Backup

What if a file goes corrupt? That isn't recoverable on a RAID, but would be via a backup.
 
goodcow said:
Well, it is backing up.

Although I am considering using JungleDisk and Amazon S3 for some offsite storage.
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It really isn't, though. Are you saying you will have copies of the files on the drobo elsewhere, as well? Just because that data is "raid"ed for lack of a better word, doesn't mean it is redundant. A backup, or second copy would be redundant. I think you know what you want, and I don't think redundancy is on that list, correct? You just want a relatively safe means of pooled storage all in one spot?
 
This is a little off topic, but why is Drobo not considered RAID?

It seems like it fits with "Redundant Array of Independent Disks"
 
mrwizardno2 said:
It really isn't, though. Are you saying you will have copies of the files on the drobo elsewhere, as well? Just because that data is "raid"ed for lack of a better word, doesn't mean it is redundant. A backup, or second copy would be redundant. I think you know what you want, and I don't think redundancy is on that list, correct? You just want a relatively safe means of pooled storage all in one spot?
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I understand what you guys are saying and I'm aware of that.

But I'm not a corporation or business with tape drive backups that rotates them offsite on a regular basis.

For the vast majority of people who just want their data at home safe, then data redundancy (i.e. RAID) = "backed up." Especially at a volume of 2.7TB (after redundancy) where secondary optical backups are impractical and even if I had a second physical Drobo, it still wouldn't keep my data safe if there were say, a fire. But again, I don't have the resources to keep all this data in a second complete copy elsewhere like a corporation.
 
tuffluffjimmy said:
This is a little off topic, but why is Drobo not considered RAID?

It seems like it fits with "Redundant Array of Independent Disks"
Click to expand...

I think it actually is RAID. But what we're talking about is the redundancy of the data on the disk. Say we have an ISO of a dvd on a RAID - it is either striped / spanned / mirrored on the raid. It exists 1 time on the raid.

On a backup, we have 2 instances. One on the storage medium used for read / write. The other on the backup medium meant for archival / disaster purposes.

A raid really should never be considered a "backup" of anything.


EDIT: I get what you are saying. backup = good enough. 🙂
 
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