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DROBO Storage device

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
DROBO just announced their FW800 unit today at the original price of $499 and dropped the price on the USB2 only version to $349. If you don't know about the DROBO, this is a super storage unit, featuring automatically implemented and repaired on-the-fly RAID5 drive storage. Very cool machine. I've been waiting for FW800 and now that it's here just ordered my unit.

What I see as the main advantage, or why I chose DROBO over other RAID options: The main reason is ease of maintenance and the ability to add drives of mixed size and manufacturer at the time more space or a replacement drive is actually needed. By contrast, most dedicated RAID storage boxes require you use the same size and brand of drive, and usually recommend the same model drive, AND you have to fully populate the drive bays at the time you create the RAID. Many manufacturers go a step further and recommend that all drives have the same firmware, while still others recommend using only enterprise class drives, which of course are more expensive. The biggest issue for me here was the idea (and cost) of having to store a supply of bare drives to rebuild the RAID when one of the drives fails, which it surely will.

Note that a disadvantage to DROBO over a dedicated hardware RAID enclosure is speed; by comparison to a hardware RAID box, DROBO is pretty slow. As such, it is best suited to use for reliable redundancy with a simple maintenance routine at the expense of raw speed. For example, if a drive goes down in DROBO, you would head out, purchase a new drive of any manufacturer or size, eject the bad drive and insert the new, bare drive. DROBO will immediately format the new drive and start rebuilding your RAID automatically, and it will take about 24 hours to rebuild one TB of data in this fashion. Note that this total rebuild includes a reorganization to optimize the data structure too, but the box is busy for an extended amount of time. By contrast, with a dedicated RAID unit you would grab one of your pre-purchased drives out of storage, eject the bad drive and replace it with an identical drive then tell the system to re-build that drive -- and most systems would rebuild the same 1 TB of data in probably 6 to 8 hours.

So for me, the lower overhead cost and ease of maintenance won out over speed.

find out more: http://www.drobo.com/Where_to_Buy/Index.html

~~~

EDIT: My actual review with screenshots and torture testing begins on page 3 with at around post 48 in this thread, but I decided to repeat this answer at the front so folks reading through would better understand my personal back-up strategy before getting to my actual review:

DROBO is my first tier of image back-up. I work by myself and do not need a dedicated image server. My main box is an early 2008 MacPro, 8-core 3.2, with 24G RAM.

EDIT 2-5-09: Just a brief update on my current drive configuration on my main computer. I now have 6 SATA2 drives in my Mac Pro using this device: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=158.

I have my OS residing on a striped pair of WD 640G Caviar Black drives. These drives are screaming fast for 7200 RPM drives and RAID very well, but they do have a slight amount of head seek noise, soft but audible in my Mac Pro -- and they give me a huge, fast desktop for temporary image storage. I then have 4 of the WD 640G Caviar Blue drives in RAID-0 mounted in the main bays. These are perhaps a tad slower on random I/O operation than the Blacks, but are virtually silent -- and in a 4-drive RAID-0 they are VERY fast. On that array, I have a thin outer partition (4x30G) for uber-fast CS scratch and a large 4x450G, or 1.8G partition for Image storage. I then left a small 115G partition at the very end of each drive non-RAID, and use these to store back-up and bootable copies of my OS and other miscellany.

1) WORKING IMAGES: 4 internal drives striped (RAID 0) for my current working files, giving me plenty of speed on reads and saves. I am not concerned about the lower reliability of RAID 0 here as these images are backed up per #2 below;

2) ONSITE BACK-UP: ALL images, current and historical, backed up to an onsite DROBO as current working file back-up and storage for older historical images. Note I don't regularly need to access my historical images, so the slower read speeds off the DROBO is not a concern to me (note that with three or more SATA2 drives installed, my DROBO 2 is reading and writing at around 50 MB/s sustained);

3) OFFSITE BACK-UP: ALL images backed up to single drives stored offsite, updated monthly or after any significant shoot. Note that these are mostly older drives that get checked and/or replaced periodically as I funnel newer, higher performance drives into my main system, and then migrate the offsite images onto the freed up older drives as they become available. I currently use a Voyager Q drive sled for this application: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/.

Note also that the DROBO is new to me as of this writing -- I have NOT owned the earlier model and specifically waited for the FW800 interface. (It is replacing a set of SATA2 and FW external boxes, and I chose DROBO because I had several mixed drives already.) A few of my shooting buddies do use the USB2 versions and are quite satisfied, hence my decision to try the new box. What I'm saying here is the verdict is still out for me. (EDIT - I've had it now for 6 months and am VERY happy.) Acoustics, or lack thereof, is of importance to me and this box is quiet if you fill it with quiet drives -- I have had good success with WD 1TB Greens and Seagate 1TB Barracudas. The new DROBO is very quiet with newer fans and more intelligent control of them; so should be quiet except perhaps where drives heat up and the fans kick into high gear. (It remains quiet even on the rare occasion the fans go into high.) Of course another nice option is I can buy the NAS attachment for DROBO and move the unit off to my machine closet ;).

~~~



Cheers,
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail safe.
Keep a spare copy
and keep it off-line
-bob
 
D

dlew308

Guest
copy from external to external then take external to safety deposit box?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I do Bob:

The DROBO was just a way to have local redundancy more efficiently than my current RAID 1 scheme. So here's what I do now:

1) A PAIR of 1TB drives striped (RAID 0) with a fast partition for current images and a large partition for recent historical images. The reason for RAID 0 is the increase in performance opening and saving the larger layered files was significant, especially now with the MF DB. I keep this set partitioned to allow me very fast I/O on the fast partition for my current working files and still pretty fast I/O for as many of my immediate past historical files as allowed on the large partition. While the performance increase with this pair is significant and desirable, we know RAID 0 is not particularly "safe." So,

2) I have these image currently backed up (mirrored or RAID 1) to individual drives. However, since these are onsite I still have a physical loss issue so,

3) I keep a 3rd identical back-up copy on single drives stored offsite. These get backed up manually once per month or after any important shoot. Not ideal, but adequate.
In summary, my current solution is RAID 0-1-1 OR RAID 0 performance pair > RAID 1 ONSITE > RAID 1 OFFSITE.

So the DROBO unit is going to replace the set of single drives used in step 2 above, being an even safer and more efficient "single box" solution than my current set of multiple drive boxes. My scheme will then be RAID 0-5-1 or RAID 0 performance pair > RAID 5 (DROBO) ONSITE > RAID 1 OFFSITE.

Cheers,
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
That is certainly a way to go.
Although I do raid 0 myself, only 4-way since I use the hardware raid board,
be aware that the failure-rate of a raid 0 is greater than n times the failure rate of a single drive.
Makes backup even more important.
I do something a little different, but pretty close.
1) Primary store is a 4-way raid 0
2) Time machine backup of the lot this is where a drobo looks pretty interesting too.
3) "Important stuff" gets copied to single drives once a month or when indicated.
-bob
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
copy from external to external then take external to safety deposit box?
The DROBO may seem expensive, and my stated scheme will seem like overkill to many, but for me the auto RAID 5 is a welcome plus for piece of mind as I do not have to face the issue of an older, little used drive having failed without me knowing about it until I needed a file on it... With drives having come way down in price, I don't see much downside in my scheme: The total cost for 6 1TB drives, the DROBO and the host of older smaller drives used for offsite 3rd order redundant back-up gives me very high I/O performance coupled with about 4 TB of exceptionally "safe" storage and costs well under $2,000; or less than a one week international trip...

PS: Note that costs drop by about 30% if one chooses the USB2 DROBO and 500G drives...

PPS: Note that my 1TB back-up solution is cheaper per Gig than Blue-Ray :D

Cheers,
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Bob:

I have been tempted to do a 4-drive RAID 0 too, but frankly have been too lazy to implement it. It would no doubt increase performance even further, and now with the DROBO the failure rate increase is essentially a non-issue, at most a minor inconvenience when it does happen -- and it will almost certainly happen with a 4-drive stripe ;)

Thinking...

Cheers,
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Jack,
I think you will get some benefit with a software 4-way, maybe about a 50% improvement ober a 2-way based my my past measurements.
For reference, the benefit of the hardware 4-way over a software 4-way was almost twice.
OTOH, a lot of this benefit was related to rapid write release, and would diminish for very large files.
I like the DROBO, but even with FW800, it is much slower than native raid, do I think that its reasonable use is either backup (traditional or time machine) or archive.
My biggest beef with the DROBO actually is that it is so automatic. I you can guess I prefer stick over auto.
-bob
 
Last edited:
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dlew308

Guest
$499 + drives really is cheap compared to the what we use at work. I wish I could afford the setups we do at work, NetApp filers in various raid configs that snapmirror over the network to a remote disaster recovery center. I wish there was a cheap alternative type backup storage for the common folks. Of course it's thru huge bandwidth as well. 1TB of storage costs more then a sata 1TB disk.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
I use the Drobo USB2 version with 4 7200 RPM 1TB drives and the speed is amazing ... so the FW800 has to be light speed.
 

cmb_

Subscriber & Workshop Member
The pricing is good on the Drobo.

I am using a five bay eSATA external enclosure from FirmTek with five 500GB drives in it. Four of the drives are a Raid Group (1 + 0) - Mirrored Striped so I have 1TB of storage. The fifth bay is just a contiguous drive. I download images using Photo Mechanic and it puts one copy on the Raid Group and a second (BU) copy on the fifth drive. I never touch the files on the fifth BU drive, it is storage for all the RAW files only. So I have a copy of all the RAWs on the Raid Group and all the working files, TIFF's, etc. go into folders on the Raid Group. The Raid Group gets backed up to a separate 1TB drive in another external enclosure using a program called MirrorFolder.

What I am missing is off-site storage. The plan is to get another 1TB hard drive for that. Perhaps it would be better if the on-site backup were raid as well? That is probably what I should do.

I really have no clue what I am doing so if you have any suggestions I wouldn't mind.
 

LJL

New member
I too am looking at this as another solution. Presently, I have many FW800 externals used mostly for storage and back-up. I went with a FirmTek eSata solution also, but in RAID 5 configuration. Read times are as fast as RAID 0, but write times are a bit slower, but still way faster than FW800 or others, plus having some margin of safety with redundancy. This is the "working" unit, and stores current projects. Those get backed up to external FW drives for onsite and offsite storage. My only issue with the RAID card is that it is dedicated to the machine, and not standalone, as the Drobo is. The SATA speed is great, but setting things up in a dedicated way with same size drives and stuff is more costly at the start.

The other nice feature of something like this Drobo is that it could be used in a more "portable" way, such as doing a lot more onsite work or capture and having some redundancy until it can be backed up for archiving. That makes it very useful with things like a MacBook Pro for onsite work.

What I hope is that they got the noise levels down a bit, as was mentioned by Galbraith, but not really pointed out in their press release. The older version was quite noisy.

LJ
 
D

ddk

Guest
I use the Drobo USB2 version with 4 7200 RPM 1TB drives and the speed is amazing ... so the FW800 has to be light speed.
???? Yours must be unique! I found copying large files to the USB2 version a horrendous experience, more like waiting around for grass to grow. I complained about this and I was told that the bottleneck was due to Drobo's internal processing, so I don't see how much benefit one gets from a faster port if everything else has remained the same. I like mine but only for incremental backups.

david
 

DonWeston

Subscriber Member
I had looked at a Drobo seriously until I found out that it adds a layer of proprietary coding to the files, even if you have it formatted FAT32, that prevents one from removing a drive and putting into another non Drobo enclosure or as an internal drive. This info is listed as a manufacturer response on the Newegg.com website for this unit under product reviews. I have my unit in my trunk as we speak to return. THis is a great product, do not understand why the company felt it needed to add this limitation, at least as I see it...

I guess other users might not be bothered by this, but it meant I would always be stuck with having their product case as an interface, and if something happened to it, I would be forced to buy another one, just to access these drives...jmho..

If someone knows a work around or a fix, please respond, as I will return to the local store either today or tomorrow otherwise...thanks.
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Don,
I don't think that there is a non-proprietary RAID-5 encoding. In order to achieve the reliability features of raid, a distributed CRC must be calculated and stored along with data on all of the available drives. IMO three is not yet a really well accepted standard way of doing this.
-bob
 

fotografz

Well-known member
???? Yours must be unique! I found copying large files to the USB2 version a horrendous experience, more like waiting around for grass to grow. I complained about this and I was told that the bottleneck was due to Drobo's internal processing, so I don't see how much benefit one gets from a faster port if everything else has remained the same. I like mine but only for incremental backups.

david
Odd, but then again I didn't expect much being USB2 ... but if it is the internal processing that's the bottleneck then it doesn't seem that FW800 will help much.

Mine is plenty fast when retrieving a file full of 220 meg MF tiff files ... which is all I care about ... loading them seems a tad slow, but I just do that in the background.
 
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ddk

Guest
Odd, but then again I didn't expect much being USB2 ... but if it is the internal processing that's the bottleneck then it doesn't seem that FW800 will help much.

Mine is plenty fast when retrieving a file full of 220 meg MF tiff files ... which is all I care about ... loading them seems a tad slow, but I just do that in the background.
Its the copying over which is extremely slow, USB2 isn't FW800 but not that slow either. To copy a 250 gig drive over to Drobo took over 24 hrs and when I complained they admitted that Drobo is slow under these conditions and it all has to do with its internal processing, but I find it adequate for incremental backups and accessing the backup.

david
 
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