How to make a DIY Drobo?

[miles8888]

I've got an old DroboPro which refuses to mount in Mavericks. Out of warranty, and at its best Drobo tech support was not so great. Its filled with a mishmash of drives 750GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB.

I'm looking for a simple alternative. I've got an old 10bay eSATA enclosure which works fine. Would prefer not to have to invest in NAS hardware. Any solutions?

Performance/Speed is NOT an issue as I'm using it for deep backup.
Dual Disk redundancy would be great (i.e.: two drives can fail and I still don't loose data)

Thank you!

 

[gavinstubbs09]

Maybe find a cheap Mac Mini (one that has like Leopard/SL) and connect the drobo to that, then re-share the drives on the mini so you can access them on other machines.

I have a G4 MDD as a file server running Leopard and I have a external drive connected to that, in which case is shared so my MBP and Mac Pro can see it.

 

[smellalot]

I've got an old DroboPro which refuses to mount in Mavericks. Out of warranty, and at its best Drobo tech support was not so great. Its filled with a mishmash of drives 750GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB.

I'm looking for a simple alternative. I've got an old 10bay eSATA enclosure which works fine. Would prefer not to have to invest in NAS hardware. Any solutions?

Performance/Speed is NOT an issue as I'm using it for deep backup.
Dual Disk redundancy would be great (i.e.: two drives can fail and I still don't loose data)

Thank you!

I researched this topic about 4 month ago and I could not find any real alternative to Beyond-Raid, Hybrid-Raid and the likes. At least not one running on OS X.

I really liked the idea of using separate drives of different size but if you are looking for the cheapest way of storing your files one large drive (up to 4TB) and several backups of that really is the the best way to go. So I learned that RAID really is only good if one 4TB drive is too small for you or if you need high availability of your files.

 

[paulrbeers]

I've got an old DroboPro which refuses to mount in Mavericks. Out of warranty, and at its best Drobo tech support was not so great. Its filled with a mishmash of drives 750GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB.

I'm looking for a simple alternative. I've got an old 10bay eSATA enclosure which works fine. Would prefer not to have to invest in NAS hardware. Any solutions?

Performance/Speed is NOT an issue as I'm using it for deep backup.
Dual Disk redundancy would be great (i.e.: two drives can fail and I still don't loose data)

Thank you!

IF you are hooking it to a Mac with thunderbolt....

How about something like the Akitio Thunder Dock. It supports eSATA (including Port multiplying)... http://www.akitio.com/accessories/thunder-dock

Or since you stated you don't care about speed: https://www.datoptic.com/ec/

I have the first one, but haven't had time to set it up yet. I tried the second one first. It's fine for copying files, but it tends to work in bursts so for what I do it was a giant failure (I need something that does constant read/writes).

IF your eSATA enclosure does RAID already use that. If it doesn't, OSX has RAID functionality built in (only mirroring or Striped). I just use software Mirroring within OSX for all of my data drives. Best part is that you can hook the drives up in another enclosure and OSX can still use the RAID you created (unlike hardware RAID where it has to be the exact same hardware).