Drobo Help?

[mtomalty]

Can a drive that is installed and running in a Drobo be removed, if need be, and be readable if installed in another brand of housing.

I am under the impression that I had heard that Drobo formats the drives in a unique way that renders them unreadable in other systems.
Is  this correct or am I recalling inaccurate information?

Mark


www.marktomalty.com

[Doug Peterson]

One more question:  When you setup the Drobo for a Max Volume of 16 TB, then it shows in the Finder as having that amount of space available, even though I only have 5.5TB installed.  Do you have to depend on the Drobo Dashboard to check your actual free space?

Are we supposed to just not think about that a let the Drobo worry about it?

Either the drobo dashboard or the LED lights on the unit itself (the green lights going from left to right on the unit indicate the amount of capacity taken vs. available).

Doug Peterson
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[Doug Peterson]

Can a drive that is installed and running in a Drobo be removed, if need be, and be readable if installed in another brand of housing.

I am under the impression that I had heard that Drobo formats the drives in a unique way that renders them unreadable in other systems.
Is  this correct or am I recalling inaccurate information?

Mark


www.marktomalty.com

Like most RAIDs (other than Raid 1) a single drive from a RAID set cannot be (meaningfully/reliably/fully/easily) read in any other computer outside of the rest of the RAID.

The system employed by Drobo is similar to RAID5, but is in fact proprietary. This is in theory a very minor disadvantage since, amongst the many things that can "fail" it is possible for the RAID controller itself to fail. However, I'd say this is a relatively minor disadvantage compared to the other advantages of the Drobo system.

Doug Peterson
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Head of Technical Services, Capture Integration
Phase One, Leaf, Cambo, Canon, Apple, Profoto, Eizo & More
National: 877.217.9870  |  Cell: 740.707.2183
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[mtomalty]

Thanks for the clarification,Doug


Mark

[inthesouthofireland]

Like most RAIDs (other than Raid 1) a single drive from a RAID set cannot be (meaningfully/reliably/fully/easily) read in any other computer outside of the rest of the RAID.

So if the controller of a Drobo fails, the information on the disks inside the Drobo will be lost - is that correct?
Would it not be possible to take the disks out and insert them into an identical Drobo (before powering it up)?

[feppe]

So if the controller of a Drobo fails, the information on the disks inside the Drobo will be lost - is that correct?
Would it not be possible to take the disks out and insert them into an identical Drobo (before powering it up)?

That's correct. You can insert the drives into an identical Drobo and it might be possible to recover your data - but that might not be the case due to different firmware versions and (silent) hardware updates.

I keep repeating this: RAID is not backup.

By the way, above is not unique to Drobo, but a risk with all RAID-based systems.

[Carsten W]

Not so, a basic mirrored RAID 1 is simple to setup, to use and to get data if the raid box itself fails to operate. Pull a slice, mount it in a drive dock and you get access to all the information. Not sure why it's desirable to do things so difficult. There is nothing that seems simple about a Drobo, and it's still not as fast as a SATA connected RAID box. Doug's comment above makes a Drobo appear to be the scariest product for data storage.

Right, but RAID-1 is just mirroring, the least interesting of all RAID types. No additional performance, and the worst possible space usage. When people look for a RAID solution, it is generally RAID-0 for performance or RAID-5 or some variant thereof, like the Drobo, for a combination of performance and redundancy.

[mtomalty]

Right, but RAID-1 is just mirroring, the least interesting of all RAID types. No additional performance, and the worst possible space usage. When people look for a RAID solution, it is generally RAID-0 for performance or RAID-5 or some variant thereof, like the Drobo, for a combination of performance and redundancy.

Fair enough, but optimum performance and disk usage concerns would plummet to the bottom of my list of concerns should a drive set or RAID die on me.


What would you suggest, then,  would be the most secure solution should archive stability,and expandability, be the PRIMARY concern.
I need to access files,periodically, but not daily and am willing to tolerate slower performance if stability is enhanced.

Personally, I am so deep into using manually mirrored external drives that I can't imagine the time/labor involved in migrating terabytes of info to a newer, more logical,more cost effective system of digital archiving.

I have lost numerous drives over the years (principally LaCie) but have yet to lose any files.


Mark

[Carsten W]

Fair enough, but optimum performance and disk usage concerns would plummet to the bottom of my list of concerns should a drive set or RAID die on me.


What would you suggest, then,  would be the most secure solution should archive stability,and expandability, be the PRIMARY concern.
I need to access files,periodically, but not daily and am willing to tolerate slower performance if stability is enhanced.

Personally, I am so deep into using manually mirrored external drives that I can't imagine the time/labor involved in migrating terabytes of info to a newer, more logical,more cost effective system of digital archiving.

I personally think that the lowest-maintenance and easiest *complete* strategy is a fast drive, possibly RAID-0, for work-in-progress, a Drobo on FW800 for completed work and Time Machine backups (or the Windows equivalent), and rotating backups of the Drobo (one on-site, one or two off-site). This is what I intend to move to, as soon as a get my a$$ in gear on the off-site backups  I am no pro, however, so my motivation is less than someone whose livelihood depends on it.

Note that in this strategy, the Drobo does not need to be reliable. Any reliability it has only increases convenience and reduces maintenance time, and that is exactly my intention by using it (and why I buy the RAID Edition WD drives)...

[titusbear]

Thinking about data storage - Drobo makes sense for actual - 'production'/high access uses - but is it indeed a valid option for long term - (aka archival) storage?  Would the additional step of backing up images to something like an Iosafe  make sense (given both the option of 5 year manufacturers warranty /data recovery by DriveSavers - not a shabby organization in its own right).  Having lots of redundancy is one thing - having the ability to deal with fire/water/  with data recovery options is another.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOiBzCgAPfE

https://iosafe.com/

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

Still searching for an ideal /fool-proof archival storage means for digital art.

e/tb
contemplativeeye.com

[Hywel]

I'd like to give Drobo service a big thumbs-up.

Just before Xmas I took delivery of a second Drobo Pro. This failed almost immediately- on the reboot to update to the latest firmware.

I posted a support request on Drobo's website. Within hours, a tech support person from Drobo called me (transatlantic) at their own expense, and went through a troubleshooting and diagnostic routine with me.

Having failed to bring the unit back to life, they arranged delivery of a new unit which arrived very promptly. The new unit works fine. I sent the defective unit back to them... job done. It was an example of exemplary customer service- I was impressed.

I should add that the small amount of data I'd already written to the disk set was preserved - so plugging the drives into the new unit (in any old order, I hadn't kept track) resulted in restored access to the data. Although this might not be 100% reliable I guess, it does give some confidence that a failure of the controller will not prevent access to your data- you *can* plug the disk set into another Drobo.


  Cheers, Hywel.