multi TB storage

Alan Pope alan at popey.com
Fri Mar 26 16:41:24 GMT 2010


Hi Michael,

On 26 March 2010 16:23, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> Drobo should work with Ubuntu also, since they work for a Mac easily
> enough.

Slightly flawed logic in that working on/with a Mac doesn't imply
working on Linux - iPhone anyone? They do 'work' with Ubuntu in that
you can format one as NTFS and access it, or be unsupported and format
it ext3. I have one formatted ext3 shared over a droboshare on my
network. I wouldn't recommend them if you're an Ubuntu user. Instead
I'd recommend something like a qnap device or an enclosure from a
company such as Edge10.

>  Three are RAIDed, and the other three are for
> redundant backup.

Not quite. None have RAID, and none take 6 drives.

Drobo takes 4 drives
Drobo S takes 5 drives
Drobo Pro and Elite take 8 drives.

It's not RAID in that the firmware 'knows' about the underlying
filesystem (be it NTFS/HFS+/ext3) and does the data redundancy at a
block level unlike RAID. They're also not quick devices. I have had
numerous occasions where copying a file to the Drobo causes other
machines accessing it to hang in IO wait for it to become available
again.

> You can pull a drive without taking the rest
> off-line and one of the other drives will immediately come on-line to
> replace the one you look out with all of the data intact.

There's absolutely _nothing_ "instant" about the Drobo. Indeed the
videos you see on their website are faked to make it look like drive
rebuilds happen almost instantly when they don't (I have this first
hand from a Drobo employee at a trade show last year).

If I take a drive out of my Drobo right now (for example if it fails
or I want more space) it will rebuild for approximately 12 hours (I
have timed it) and putting a new drive in will trigger another 12 hour
rebuild.

You also don't get firmware updates when you stop paying for support.
Nice huh? Granted the times I have used their support (twice iirc) via
email it's been pretty quick and accurate (although mostly just
copy/pasted replies from a knowledgebase) but most decent vendors keep
firmware/bios/driver downloads publicly available. Not Data Robotics.

>  Replace the
> removed drive the enclosure automatically formats the new drive and
> restore the data.  If I had the money I'd get one in a heartbeat.
>

Save your money and get a decent proper RAID solution or use Linux
software RAID.

> Leo Laporte and friends at TWiT.tv swear by them
>

They use them with Macs and Windows and are supported by Data Robotics
Inc. Linux is poorly supported by Drobo. There is no official
management app for Linux (there is a community maintained one that
doesn't have full functionality), and as mentioned they don't support
ext3, and they absolutely don't support any other 'exotic' filesystem
like xfs, reiser, ext4 and so on.

When time/finance permits I will replace my Drobo with something else.

Just my 2p.

Cheers,
Al.



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