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[jgourd]

Watch video, drool, spend $500 and be happy about it.

http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx

[benn600]

lol.

Do you watch DL.TV?  They just talked about it on their two most recent episodes.

I'm not a fan of the Drobo because I need more space--lol.  Did you hear about my 7TB server?

It looks decent but such a proprietary system is somewhat worrying.  RAID 6 is somewhat tried and true, backed by some of the largest companies in the world.

I can't deny how neat it looks.  Go checkout the two latest DL.TV episodes on it.  I do like how robust it seems.  4 Drives seems a bit small, though.  How about a 6 or 8 drive version?  16 drive version (lol)?  I would also need RAID.  It also isn't made for the fastest speeds.

[benn600]

I bought four 320GB drives to help temporarily backup my data until I move it to the new server and I can almost imagine buying the Drobo and adding the drives.  But, it's very pricey.  And I would demand gigabit ethernet.  I would like a nice work drive.  Basically, something other than my main server to store temporary work data...especially when I transfer VHS to DVD ... when I need a lot of temporary space but don't really want to clutter up the server drives.

[Mr ChriZ]

That does look really cool! 

[ThoBar]

Sounds very similar to where Microsoft is going with it's Home Server.  MS' version can do it across multiple USB devices I think.

Just D/L'd my copy from MS, now just need time to try it 

[Mr ChriZ]

I'd like to see a NAS version.

[benn600]

I don't like how they call it bottomless storage.  It really isn't!  With only four drives, the current maximum capacity would be 4TB--which would be plenty, yes, but then it loses some for its redundancy.  Does anyone know how it handles redundancy?  I looked at their document describing it but it only showed users with varying drive sizes.  I personally am inclined to just get new, identical drives...and I currently have 4 320GB drives that need a home.  I may just throw them in my big, main server and mirror two to give me 640GB mirrored.

Does Drobo lose one drive?
Take a situation where a user has 3 500GB drives + 1 2GB drive...yes, two gigabytes.  Let it be happy and put a few hundred gigabytes of data on it.  Then pull a 500GB drive.  Either it's going to lose a SIGNIFICANT amount of space for redundancy or something strange is going to happen.  There's no way it can protect all that data with a worthless 2GB drive.

hmmm

[dcwebman]

I liked the looks of it until it said SATA drives. I know that's better but I don't have one of them and I have a bunch of EIDE drives.

[Mr ChriZ]

Does Drobo lose one drive?
Take a situation where a user has 3 500GB drives + 1 2GB drive...yes, two gigabytes.  Let it be happy and put a few hundred gigabytes of data on it.  Then pull a 500GB drive.  Either it's going to lose a SIGNIFICANT amount of space for redundancy or something strange is going to happen.  There's no way it can protect all that data with a worthless 2GB drive.

hmmm

I was thinking that, it's doesn't quite add up.

[MrHaugen]

It can't be that redundant. If you have 4 disks with 500GB and it's all filled up, it looks like you can actually crash 3 of them and still be able to get all the data back. That's a load of bull. He have to use super tiny disks as well. With the disks filling up that fast with just a few quicktime trailers and some tracks of music there's just no way.
There have to be a major warning sign with this product. A huge limitation...

If anyone finds out exactly how it works, please share your knowledge.

[benn600]

I remember them talking about how it just worries about your data.  This leads me to believe that the key is making sure you keep it well under full capacity.  Think about it, if you only have 6GB of data in the scenario I said:
500,500,500,2...then it could put the 2GB on three drives with the fourth for parity.

Yes, they're using a new technique for storing parity and protecting data, but they can't work miracles.  It's obvious that there is some requirement here we are missing.

I wonder what the industry would see if there was a way to make hard drives use 3 placements for each piece of data...instead of binary, would it be tertiary?  You could effectively store a lot more data on the same drive...or four placements?!

[ThoBar]

I'm also looking into this, but I *think* the way it works is along the following lines...

• 2x500GB ... straight mirror happening here. 500GB usable space
• 2x500GB + 1TB ... mirror each 500 onto the 1TB disk. 1 TB usable space. As redunancy and simplicity is the key, I dont think that it would be a case of striping the 500's and then mirroring that. Although I have been known to be wrong
• 3x500GB ... Each disk has 50% allocated to mirroring the data of one of the other disks. Yielding 3x250=750GB capacity

So in our example of...
 

3 500GB drives + 1 2GB drive. I am estimating that we would get 751GB of usuable space....

250+250+249+2

Code: [Select]

disk1 (500GB)   | 250a  | 249b  |1e|
disk2 (500GB)   | 250c  | 249b  |1d|
disk3 (500GB)   | 250a    |   250c | 
disk4 (2GB)     |1d|1e|


As I say, this is only what I *think* may be going on, and it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty, but this is the only model I can see working efficiently for the way they seem to suggest to works.

Also, they example they show in the video is misleading and does seem to suggest you can crash multiple drives, although I believe that it is just the fact that they are using syuch small data sets in the example, and they are quickly replicated across the unit.

Once again, if anyone actually knows how this unit works, I would like to find out to be sure.

C.

[benn600]

Yea, the video scared me a lot.  He pulled a drive, then replaced it and quickly pulled a different drive.

I like the simplicity of calculating total space with RAID.  There's no complicated guessing, lol.

With my big server I just setup, I started out having trouble with bad sectors.  It kept corrupting files and that's not okay!  So I did a full format on every drive individually and so far, after copying about 400 GB to it, I'm not noticing any issues.  So the point here is that even though I was running RAID, I ended up with corrupted data....perhaps a scandisk would have fixed it--I wasn't going to take a chance at that point when I still didn't commit all my data and delete it from the temporary backups.

[LonWar]

This is really cool...  A little pricey though...