View Full Version : I need a big drive with backup features
I had a scare last night. My photo drive decided to stop working. I haven't backed it up in a couple of months, properly that is. I've got jpgs backed up online but not a real backup. The wedding I did recently, the books I'm working on, various other clients work was all inaccessible. Naturally it all came back after turning it off and on again but still, scary evening. The problem is that I'm working off a laptop and its started to be a bit annoying. I've got way way too much data for it and its spread out over random usb hd's. So its annoying to backup. I've only got a 100mb lan so its better to work over usb/firewire than it is a NAS drive. My initial thought is the Drobo (http://drobo.com/Products/drobo.html), which I heard about via another photographer. It seems perfect. Its basically a house for hd's. You can upgrade them at your will by putting in a new hd. It manages all the data, its all backed up and if one drive fails you simply put a new one in and off you go. The problem is that its like £300 for the Drobo 2 and you have to buy hd's on top. I could get a 1tb usb drive for less than that. Time Machine on OSX is great but it only backs up my internal drive. I just want a big drive with redundancy. I don't want to faf about with backup programs, weekly backups and stuff. I just want to know that my data is safe and that all I have to do is backup the jpg's to Amazon's S3 service for offsite backup.
Don't confuse RAID with a backup solution - it's an availability one and shouldn't be relied upon like backups.
If you dont have enough storage inside the Macbook for all your photos then I'd be looking at some sort of NAS storage and external backup for that as well - you just sync off what you need to the book. Tis what I do here for important stuff anyway - including Dee's photos. What she's working on is on the PC and is sync'd to the server, which is then backed up to an external array.
The problem is that NAS is only going to be 100mb/s. It'll slow down my editing process unless I invest in a faster router.
I'm probably the wrong person to speak to about this, when it comes to backup I have a work hat on and I can easily argue for money when it comes to backup :D
If you're looking for a smart solution then you'll need to centralise your data somehow (which is on separate drives right?), but that central repository shouldn't be your backup location - because when it goes pop you cant be sure you have everything, or where it is.
Yer exactly. I need a fast drive to work from and I need a backup too. Thats why the Drobo is appealing because it has that redundancy built in, just its pricey. I currently have a server, after a fashion. I guess the simplest idea would be to buy a big drive and 1gb router. Setup my Mac Mini to do all the backing up. Assuming of course that the G4 Mac Mini has 1gb ethernet. After a quick google, it doesn't. Bah.
The Drobo would only give you a reliable backup solution if you didnt RAID the disks, in which case you may as well just buy 2 other external drives, as you'd need still need to manage the files yourself anyway.
Depends how clever you want to get I guess. Could you not buy a couple of external 1TB disks, work off the one, then have a one button copy job to sync the data from your working disk to the backup one?
From the video I saw of Drobo in action it implied that it was all automatic. You just pop in disks and its all accessible and backed up. Perky upbeat hot girlie sold it well (http://drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html).
Ok, fsck. Drive just decided to stop again. Its come back but now I'm REALLY scared.
As clever as it is, it's still a single point of failure. It wont cover you for data corruption, wont cover you if you accidentally delete a file, and if this proprietary black box of software breaks or goes wobbly, you're nowhere.
Like I say, I'm probably the wrong person to talk to about this, but it wouldn't be good enough for me on it's own.
If the drive is faffing now and it's you're business we're talking about here just run to PC world and buy another disk if you haven't got anywhere to put the data.
I'm currently backing up everything on it :) I've got the space its just that its 110gb that I've left lying around.
Edit: This ReadyNAS looks good, but its £588. Ow!
LeperousDust
03-08-2008, 15:19
Can you not run time capsule, as well as a separate backup script onto a generic portable hard drive? I know its over LAN again, but it things aren't moving fast maybe you need to go giga, and look at it like paying for a hard drive...?
You know that never occured to me, and it seems that I can set Time Machine to backup my external drive. I could buy that and a new usb hd for less than the drobo or nas. Interesting...
LeperousDust
03-08-2008, 16:13
Pah, call yourself a macite :p?
Davey_Pitch
03-08-2008, 16:15
If you're worried about the speed across the network couldn't you simply script it to start the backup at night then shutdown when it's finished? It's doable on Doze but not sure whether it's possible on a Mac or not.
The speed isn't to do with backup, its do with day to day working. I could work off a network drive but it would feel sluggish, and Lightroom isn't the quickest of applications.
LeperousDust
03-08-2008, 17:24
You don't want to work off a network drive do you? I think I've read this wrong... Work off your computer and backup, meaning have two physical copies at least. Don't just rely on one network storage.
Use your computer as your digital dark room and once processing is finished move them away from the hard drive if they're taking up too much space to a network drive and then back that up, but always have at least two copies (or more) for safe keeping....
If you're business relies on your computer storage you need absolute certainty things will stick around after a major accident.
The way I had it was to edit on laptop, move to usb drive when done and backup that to another drive and the exported JPGs to Amazon S3. Things have become a bit unmanagble. So ideally what I might do is get the Time Capsule 1tb and set that to backup anything I plug into the laptop. The beauty of it is that I can also get it to backup stuff on my other Mac. Then its just a case of backing up to S3 online for offsite.
I don't know how smart the time machine/time combo solution is at backing up from multiple sources. Automated solutions tend not to do so well at keeping track of what you've backed up unless they're designed for it (network backup software, for example).
Ideally for a business solution (and let's face it, your photography is your livelihood, so it's as near as), you probably want at least two levels of backup solution.
As Daz correctly says, RAID is an availability solution, not a backup solution - it won't protect you if you delete files and then realise you deleted the wrong ones (of course, that's what Time Machine does), or in the worst case, you have a power surge and it kills both drives. As a result, it may be an expensive solution that doesn't solve your problem. I'm not knocking RAID as it does give you some protection against drive failure (and believe me, I'm grateful it does).
I understand that speed is important to you but I'd argue having a good backup is far more important, especially when your livelihood is at stake.
Also, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Should whatever backup solution you choose fail, what then? For example, if you have your laptop and a NAS box plugged in and there's a lightning strike, you will most likely lose both. This also includes software - Time Machine is a good thing for recovering from foul-ups but I'm not sure it is or is intended to be a proper backup solution. If Time Machine should fail, can you still get your data back?
I'd suggest using a USB drive to backup things you're working on now. You can use a NAS box as longer-term storage (but for things you still need to keep to hand). Finally, CD/DVD for archival storage. I realise that this is pretty close to what you're doing now but it's a tried and tested solution, and one that works if you do a little planning. :)
Getting a good solution may not be cheap, but investing now will save grief later.
You're making the right move getting data off that dodgy drive pronto. :)
leowyatt
03-08-2008, 18:23
From what I've heard the Drobo is excellent for backup and storage.
Speed is only important for working on files on a daily basis, not for backup. That can take all night as I'll be asleep. Again, I'm using Amazon S3 for off site backup which is my 2nd level. The problem with dvd's is that they're too small. I can shoot 10gb a day, yesterday it was closer to 20gb.
BD-ROM then, if you really have to, though I'm not sure if longevity has been proven (to be fair, the longevity of DVDs is far shorter than predicted too - I've had them fail after a few years).
Of course, you can use redundancy in the same manner - for example, you could use three cheap hard drives in grandfather/father/son rotation (i.e. you backup to the drive that was least recently used). If one fails, the worst that will probably happen is you lose the most recent backup.
The important thing is that mechanical devices suffer wear and tear, and they will fail, so relying on one device as a backup is a bad move. Even now you're doing better than most with your offsite backup though.
I think I'll stick with a backup here and online.
Edited in another option that might work.
In the end, if the online backup is good enough to recover most of what you need then you're probably fine with what you have and there's no point over-complicating with my other solutions. If not, then you might need something else.
How much spread do you have Pete? These external disks you're using - are you using loads of them?
I think for a lot of scenarios two sets of data is enough to be comfortable with - the trick is keeping them truly separate, and keeping them complete. If your Macbook had enough internal space then it'd be relatively easy - full set of data there, mirrored/sync'd to a NAS box or the mini. You only make changes to the working set on the book, and when you're happy, sync changes to the Mini (or have it automated). You then also have a third level in Amazon - the combination of which is a pretty comfortable position imo.
Christ I must sound like a broken record :D Anyway, 2 full sets is what you should aim for imo, the where's and how's are open to whatever.
Its something I need to sit down with and look at. I have about 1.25tb over 4 usb drives at the moment and I'm nearly out of space. I have little space on my MBP's drive as thats taken up with various crap.
LeperousDust
03-08-2008, 19:35
1Tb drive costs fook all, and 1.5Tb commands a "premium" but i wouldn't say its all that big an investment though. Thought about just swapping one of the drive out of the external cases for starters, just to keep everything in one place, and work it from there?
I need the data one those drives so I can't swap them.
How much of that 1.25TB do you need regular access to? Can you reduce the volume of data you have to manage?
If it's that high then it sounds like you're 'drowning' in all that data. I have had that problem recently with my main website. The amount of data got so big I was just fighting to stand still. Yesterday I just had to bite the bullet and prune out nearly 100GB worth of data that I would have liked to keep but in truth I could make do without. This will give me enough room to sort out the rest of the data and get it manageable again - and I'll probably delete another 100GB of that.
Now, while I realise that you probably just can't go deleting data like that (I can reconstruct the essence of the missing data - something you can't do with a photo) the problem is similar. You get to a point where you have so much data that you don't know what to do with it all.
Is it worth asking on TP what other photographers do as I doubt you're on your own in having problems managing the number of photographs you have. Heck, even I have some of that problem and I don't shoot RAW, or regularly.
You wouldn't need to buy a gigabit router to move to gigabit really, just plug your existing router into a gigabit switch.
Building up a NAS box with a few Tbs of redundant storage wouldn't be costly at all, and then you could back up from that to some kind of external media nightly or whatever - again, 1Tb USB drives are less than £100 and you could keep those turned off and elsewhere so that there is no chance of them getting struck by lightning or anything like that.
Gigabit LAN is faster than your hard drive will ever be, so you shouldn't notice a speed drop at all aside from perhaps marginally longer initial load times.
How much of that 1.25TB do you need regular access to? Can you reduce the volume of data you have to manage?
Regularly, not a lot. The majority of it is either films/tv for the media server or my photography. I don't really need access to that on a daily basis. Probably 40/50gb of photography.
Is it worth asking on TP what other photographers do as I doubt you're on your own in having problems managing the number of photographs you have. Heck, even I have some of that problem and I don't shoot RAW, or regularly.
I could ask on TP but I don't think there are a number of them with storage issues like this, and its not really filled with IT types I don't think. I figured here would have the geeks I needed to provide the answer :D
You wouldn't need to buy a gigabit router to move to gigabit really, just plug your existing router into a gigabit switch.
Building up a NAS box with a few Tbs of redundant storage wouldn't be costly at all, and then you could back up from that to some kind of external media nightly or whatever - again, 1Tb USB drives are less than £100 and you could keep those turned off and elsewhere so that there is no chance of them getting struck by lightning or anything like that.
Gigabit LAN is faster than your hard drive will ever be, so you shouldn't notice a speed drop at all aside from perhaps marginally longer initial load times.
Yer I'm starting to think that Gigabit ethernet is going to be the way to go eventually. So many USB drives and hubs and cables and etc. I could clean all that up with something better. The only issue being that its all connected via the Mac Mini which doesn't support gigabit ethernet. But I think thats something to worry about another day. I'm thinking I'll just get a Time Capsule and a new HD.
LeperousDust
04-08-2008, 02:35
I know its not great, but Wireless N could also be the way forward, sans the wires, and i know you macites are also a fan of clean lines :p Invest in the airport extreme or whatever its called (i dont keep upto date on mac stuff if im honest).
He won't be needing an Airport Extreme if he's getting a Time Capsule. :p
I'm always a little sheepish about proprietary backup technologies, but for a Mac user Apple seem to have worked the wrinkles out.
To offer another view on the Time Capsule - it's crap. I have to delete my backup every month or so as the sparsebundle gets corrupted and causes the TC to reboot every time the Macbook starts to do a backup.
The problem is less common since Apple released new firmware (7.3.2 I believe) but it still happens and for me, that makes it totally useless as a backup.
So I don't use it any more! I image the Macbook drive then shove that image onto my NAS.
That's what I was worried about. No point in having a backup solution if when you come to need it you can't actually rely on the the thing. Pity if that's more than just an isolated case. :(
That's a bit of a generalisation, Burbs. In your view, it's crap but I'm sure that not everyone has the same experience. In your configuration it's not working properly but I'm pretty confident that there are many people out there for whom it is working perfectly.
Me for example, I needed to grab some old files from a couple of months ago and 'it just worked' and I was able to get them, and this is on a hackintosh ;)
I think we're talking at cross purposes slightly - I'm talking about the Time Capsule and I think you're talking about the Time Machine.
Personally I think the way that TM backups are stored is laughable and even an Apple guy I spoke to in Cupertino admitted that it was 'some way from perfect.' Have a look at the TC Apple support forums and you'll see this particular problem is extremely common.
Time Machine has the potential to be fantastic - a setup and forget backup method with very granular restore possibilities sounds amazing. Unfortunately the IT guy in me worries about using sparsebundles to store the backups.
But yeah, I'm only basing my opinion on my own experience.
Ooops yes. sorry - Confused Capsule with Machine, doh!
I read a review that confirms what Burble said, but they also said that the problems went away with a new update. Oh and I think the reason why this drive keeps failing is because the fan is dead. Its my oldest usb drive so I guess that was bound to happen.
It happens much less frequently (it was a bi-daily problem pre 7.3.2) but the fact that it still happens means that I can't trust it.
I'm always cautious of proprietary backup methods but in the case of the Time Capsule I wnated an 802.11n AP and having a bit of NAS in the same box was appealing.
Daz and I are very much singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to backup methodologies.
I guess if the worst comes to it you can switch off Time Machine and simply use it as a NAS drive? Run SuperDuper or some other backup program perhaps.
I don't think SuperDuper lets you use a TC as a target but you could image to another drive then copy over to the TC.
Personally I don't consider imaging programs as good backup methodology. They're great if you lose a hard drive but if you just want to restore a file or a bunch of files they're a total pain in the arse.
Ah thats a good point. Well another backup program that simply copies files?
It all depends on what you want from a backup really. Do you want multiple backups? Ie, a backup made today and a backup made in the past. Do you want to do incremental backups or full backups each time?
At the bare minimum just copying everything to another place is a good start.
Del Lardo
04-08-2008, 12:16
Gigabit switches are dirt cheap (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/64191?ref=ga&gclid=CObLmbyF9JQCFQ4YQgodBmtfqQ) nowadays and if an external drive is mapped then lag should be minimal, my local HDD runs out of bandwidth before my gigeth network does.
Currently have three of the Netgear NAS devices at home which are being upgraded to 1TB drives as space is required. They are rather pricey and I'm currently looking at the Drobo as a future alternative though I'll probably try and source one from the US as they are noticably cheaper (as usual).
If I was in you position I would be looking at a Drobo with 3/4 750GB HDD for data backup and availability and an external 1TB HDD for data you simply cannot afford to lose which is not stored at your house.
Drobo (http://drobo.com/Products/drobo.html)
Oh my! Why did you all have to make me want to go investigate. Now I want. I even have the cash to get, but have more important things planned for that money (like paying off debts from the last hardware purchase).
Oh well, it'll go on the list of things I'd like to get when the debts are cleared. My current storage system is all IDE based so at some point it's going to get obsolete.
Del Lardo
04-08-2008, 14:02
Me too. £289 on eBay :)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=722849
£238.51 ;)
Nice idea but I'd be baulking at forking out an extra £150 or so to get ethernet connectivity for it.
leowyatt
04-08-2008, 14:39
Haha I've been hankering after a drobo since hearing it on macbreak around 2 months ago ;D great little thing. You can get a rebate/discount using macbreak but I'm not sure if that is just for the US.
Del Lardo
04-08-2008, 14:44
Nice idea but I'd be baulking at forking out an extra £150 or so to get ethernet connectivity for it.
Thinking about buying one as I can daisy chain it onto one of the existing Netgear NASs and next time I'm in the US I can buy a Ethernet convertor for 1/2 the price.
Worth noting that the one I have linked to only has USB2, MAC users may want to pay a bit more and get the Firewire800 version.
I'd hang one off my existing fileserver so wouldn't need the Ethernet add-on anyway (though doing it that way would probably be slower).. Actually, I could utilise another to replace the five disks currently hanging off my media PC as well. :shocked:
I believe the Drobo itself doesn't understand anything about filesystems - consider it a (very) smart disk enclosure. The ethernet box does actually do useful stuff like filesystem management, but whether that's worth £150, I'm not sure.
At at guess, to be that clever it must do thin provisioning, and to support that they must only support a selection of filesystems, so to that extent it must know something about them (ie, what's on it and what particular version/revision). Would only be a problem if you aren't looking at using the usual suspects though I'd imagine.
Actually, I'd not even thought of filesystem resizing. That's a fair point then.
Thin provisioning? No idea what means, but it's easy to confirm (http://drobo.com/Products/BeyondRAID.html) support for it.
Usual suspects confirmed too - NTFS (Windows), HFS+ (Mac OS X), EXT3 (Linux) or FAT32 (Various).
Over-committing storage. If say you have a couple of 1TB disks, but you want to easily expand that in the future, the controller presents a much larger volume (or pool depending on your vendor) to the OS - say 16TB. Hot adding space to the backend doesn't require and changes on the OS - it doesn't even know the space isn't there in the first place.
It creates it's own problems and has to be managed well, but it's quite a good way of managing storage. The big sell for the enterprise is better economy on your disk usage - free space is available to anyone that wants it, rather than potentially not being used while statically configured to a host.
Del Lardo
04-08-2008, 17:30
I've been reading up on the Drobo this afternoon and it seems that the performance isn't anywhere near as good as the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ I currently run.
Over wired gigeth write speed was a mere 6MB/sec and read ~10MB/sec.
Maybe not the solution for me.
Typical, you all want Drobos now :p I want my own personal Cali Lewis to pet my Drobo when its poorly. She can also manage my data too if she likes. So anyway I ordered the 1tb Time Capsule and a 1tb usb drive. Annoyingly I just noticed that my MBP has a firewire 800 port and there is a 1tb fw800 drive by WD around but no-one outside of Play had it in stock and I don't really want to wait till the end of this week to sort this issue. Tomorrow, assuming it arrives tomorrow, is going to be a long long dull day transfering files.
Over-committing storage...
Aye. Now I've done some reading around Drobo presents 2TB storage pools to the OS by default (you can configure this). The upshot of this is the OS never knows how much free space there is (only how much used space). If you go over the pool size it creates another pool.
Pete, how do you expect to attract Cali Lewis's attentions when you're not even buying a Drobo. :p
Well, this thread will be googleable I bet. Thats a start :D How completely random (http://www.flickr.com/people/boat-drinks/contacts/). A guy on Flickr called "Boat Drinks" with Cali Lewis in his contact list.
So then, a self-confessed female Mac Geek. I can see why now. :)
I'm Female and Taken.
Apologies for shattering your dreams. :shocked: :p
There'll be another. I've found 2 recently so there must be a 3rd :D
The drives arrived.
http://www.vanilladays.com/images/n735940060_3731418_7291.jpg_%28JPEG_Image%2C_604%C 3%97453_pixels%29-20080805-101648.jpg
Over sized novetly delivery box ftw. I'm currently moving all my photography to the new 1tb Mybook and backing up my MBP over gigabit ethernet with the Time Capsule. It only just occured to me to try that and its working, damn fast too. So the initial backup I'm going to do when all the data is sorted will be done over gigabit ethernet for speed. After that I plan to move the box downstairs and do subsequent backups over 802.11n. I'm moving it downstairs so my Dad can use wireless printing to save him running up n downstairs all the time. Also it'll backup my Dad's Macbook which is handy.
I think my only worry is how Time Machine works. It'll do one big backup and then only backup changes. It deletes weekly backups when the drive is full. I'm assuming that the initial backup will remain. I mean its not likely to delete that and then just have small stuff? I'm not making myself clear there. 6 months down the line I'm going to have whatever is on my drive backed up I mean.
I would assume so, otherwise it would have no way to do a system restore, which is one of the things the Leopard install CD supports.
Ah, didn't know it can do that. Nice :) I had some crazy worry that it would start to delete anything it wanted to for space. Last week is backed up safely but files from 2 months are gone. Noooooo. :)
It looks to me as though Time Machine will remove old backups eventually.
Why do I say that?
http://www.ocukroguesgallery.com/feek/temp/tm-20080805-194945.png
This line in the Time Machine Options tends to indicate that it will.
http://www.ocukroguesgallery.com/feek/temp/tm2-20080805-195115.png
So does this. So you need to keep a beedy eye on it.
It will delete old backups but it will always have enough incremental backups to recreate a full one.
Thats the thing. Say I do a photoshoot tomorrow. I download the files onto my drive and then 1hr later Time Machine backs them up. They're safe I think to myself. I don't ever touch the files so they never get backed up again because they haven't changed. However in 5 months time Time Machine needs some space so it deletes the backup from this week. Are those files gone?
Nope, they'll still be there.
From the Apple website: (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html)
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)
Ah cool :) I was starting to panic then.
LeperousDust
05-08-2008, 23:52
Its pretty clever to be fair to it, but maybe thats why it cocks up once in a while :p
Huh. A year to the day that I got my drives. I need more. Time Capsule has worked nicely but I've now filled my 1tb drive. So now the question is where to go next, and I seriously need to future proof as I'm doing 1tb every 12-18 months. My apartment would quickly get filled with drives. I could just get another 2 drives. One for storage and one to mirror. But I already have 4 usb drives by my desk. Think of the plugs!
I am still tempted by a Drobo but I also need the backup drive. So that would be 2 drobos. I guess I could use a drobo as the backup machine and buy usb drives as I need to but still. For the price of a drobo I could upgrade my old PC as a NAS assuming I could get silent fans for it and by silent I mean Apple silent.
Oh look, Apple just released a 2Tb Time Capsule (http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB996B/A/Time-Capsule-2TB?fnode=MTY1NDA0Mg&mco=NzUxMTQ5Mw) last week!
£336 with HE discount.
Heh well theres that but I still need another usb drive or something and its back to drobo money then. But then a drobo needs hd's on top and a further backup... damn this stuff.
Heh well theres that but I still need another usb drive or something and its back to drobo money then. But then a drobo needs hd's on top and a further backup... damn this stuff.
True but you buy the enclosure once and that's it....
Just don't put big Seagate drives in it. Not after that mess at any rate. In fact, it's best suited to 5400 RPM drives like the WD GreenPower (GP) series.
leowyatt
06-08-2009, 08:53
Mr Burble bought himself a drobo :D
Mr Burble bought himself a drobo :D
He did indeed!
First impressions - don't buy the DroboShare, it's slow, slow, slow, slow! And in my case, broken, broken, broken! Mind you, I got the DroboShare free so once it has been replaced I'll be shoving it on eBay.
I've got my Drobo hooked up to my MacMini over USB (the Mini only has a Firewire 400 port and the Drobo has a Firewire 800 connection) and it's doing the job very nicely.
One small quirk which I really dislike is that you can't create a volume the size you want. I've got 4 x 2Tb drives in my Drobo and I have the option of creating either 1Tb, 2Tb, 4Tb, 8Tb or 16Tb volume. 4 x 2Tb drives in a Drobo actually gives 5.6Tb (ish) usable space so that's the volume size I want to create!
Obviously if you create an 8Tb volume (as I did) then there is only actually 5.6Tb available to use but as you get close to that the Drobo will put up some yellow lights telling you. Personally I think it's stupid that you can't create a volume the size you want, but hey, you can't.
If you create 1 Tb volume then you'll actually end up with 6 x 1Tb volumes, 2Tb volumes will give 3 x 2Tb and so on.
Performance is pretty good, not fantastic but perfectly usable.
The data redundancy is nice, I did my usual thing after setting up storage of pulling a hard drive and seeing how it reacts - it carried on working perfectly but put a right light against the bay that I'd removed the drive from.
Noise? Barely audible. The MacMini is louder with the Drobo and bare in mind that the Drobo has 4 x 2Tb drives in it. I'm very impressed with how quiet it is. It's a damn sight quieter than the 2Tb Terastation it is replacing.
If you had a brace of Drobos you can tell the Drobo Dashboard software to automatically copy stuff from one to the other but only if the Drobos are connected directly to a Mac, you couldn't do that if you had them connected to the Time Capsule.
Burble has it all pretty much spot on. The fan is temperature controlled so it will spin up if you do a big transfer (at which point it does become noticeable), but it's still very quiet. I got myself a FW800-FW400 cable, so I'm using Firewire with mine. Performance is much the same though. Didn't see any point in getting a DroboShare, so I didn't.
I don't really have a problem with the volume size. If/when 3 Tb drives come out, you just pull two of the 2 Tb drives (one at a time, obviously - pulling both together would be data loss central) and slot in two 3 Tb drives, and your 5.6 Tb volume is now 6.6 Tb. You didn't lose any data and you didn't have to do anything with the volume.
I got myself a FW800-FW400 cable, so I'm using Firewire with mine. Performance is much the same though.
I didn't know such things were available! Firewire tends to be kinder on the host CPU than USB so I'll pick up one of these cables and use that rather than USB.
9-pin to 6-pin FW800/FW400 cable is what you want. Belkin Pro series are my current favourite, but I think they've discontinued them as they're getting rare. Alternatively, you can get a FW400-FW800 adapter and use the cable supplied with the Drobo. Price is similar either way.
Obviously it'll run at FW400 speed but the reason I got mine is exactly as you stated.
I want a Drobo. :( Does it come with any HDDs to start you off at least?
:shocked: Mega money needed to make full use of it then.
I'm not sure what to do then really.
I need to back up 2TB+ on a weekly basis. 1.5TB now but will increase to 2TB by early 2010. A string of Western Digital MyBooks? :confused:
Aye, shove a bunch of large drives into a Drobo and you'll be forking out a lot of cash. I was lucky in that I got the WD 2Tb drives free so just had to pay for the Drobo.
One small quirk which I really dislike is that you can't create a volume the size you want. I've got 4 x 2Tb drives in my Drobo and I have the option of creating either 1Tb, 2Tb, 4Tb, 8Tb or 16Tb volume. 4 x 2Tb drives in a Drobo actually gives 5.6Tb (ish) usable space so that's the volume size I want to create!
8Tb worth of drives gives you 5.6Tb? :shocked:
How much space does it need for itself? Surely you don't lose 2.4Tb to the 1024/1000 byte thing?
:shocked: Mega money needed to make full use of it then.
I'm not sure what to do then really.
I need to back up 2TB+ on a weekly basis. 1.5TB now but will increase to 2TB by early 2010. A string of Western Digital MyBooks? :confused:
That's the thing, it costs twice as much as you need 1 for data, and 1 for back up + the cost of the actual unit of £400 ish. Though if you think that the data is priceless then £500 is a small price to pay for a piece of mind.
The other plus side is that you only have 1 plug and 1 cable, instead of loads of External HDs with lots of cables.
8Tb worth of drives gives you 5.6Tb? :shocked:
How much space does it need for itself? Surely you don't lose 2.4Tb to the 1024/1000 byte thing?
8 Tb = 7.4505 Tib
Drobo then takes the largest disk for redundancy. In this case, that's 2 Tb (1.8626 Tib), leaving 6 Tb (5.5879 Tib). You then lose a little more due to Drobo internal overheads.
8Tb worth of drives gives you 5.6Tb? :shocked:
How much space does it need for itself? Surely you don't lose 2.4Tb to the 1024/1000 byte thing?
Unless you're striping the drives (RAID 0) together you'll never get a usable volume equal to the sum of the size of the drives.
The Drobo can cope with a single drive failing so the total volume size will always be minus at least 1 HD. Then you need to think about how the Drobo knows what data is where and it takes space to store that information.
Ok, so the Drobo doesn't do RAID but the principle is the same - resilience will always cost your capacity.
Question - If you don't use DroboShare then what can you use to acheive the same thing?
Connect the Drobo to a machine (PC, Mac or Linux) and share the Drobo from there. That's what I'm doing using my MacMini as the host.
Connect the Drobo to a machine (PC, Mac or Linux) and share the Drobo from there. That's what I'm doing using my MacMini as the host.
So, what does Droboshare do exactly ?
The same job as Burble's MacMini (or my Linux box), except slower. It's just a box (running Linux as it happens) that takes care of the interface between the drive and the LAN.
Yep, what Mark said. In addition I get more functionality by having a full OS connected to the Drobo so I can scp stuff to it, script and schedule downloads and so on.
The DroboShare runs a lobotomized Linux variant which doesn't give me the features I need so even once my DroboShare has been replaced I'll be selling it.
The advantage if the DroboShare is that you don't have to manage that extra OS, setup shares and so on - the Drobo Dashboard software will do that for you. Connection wise the DroboShare has 2 USB ports (it can connect to 2 Drobos) and a gigabit ethernet port. The nice thing is that the DroboShare comes with a power splitter so it shares the PSU from the Drobo and doesn't need its own one.
Ok looking at my funds I can't afford a Drobo. Its great but too pricey. I'm just going to get 2x 1TB drives for now. I've got a 1TB MyBook and while it works I hate the sound it makes. Odd I know but its like sex robot licking someone in an odd place. Its just odd. I've got a Segate that seems to be ok. Not really up on my gear these days and obviously I don't wanna buy something crap.
Lack of funds have a lot to answer for.
I'm very pleased with my Drobo. If it were connected to a DroboShare then I'd be much less impressed but having it connected to a full OS makes it pretty much perfect for what I need.
Shame about the price though.
That reminds me, I must see if I can sell my old Terastation Pro.
Flibster
18-08-2009, 21:35
Went to tesco's last night and picked up a couple of external USB 1tb iomega drives for £55 each. Will do for video work at the moment.
Drobo is very tempting though for the servers.
£55?! Damn. Thats about £20 cheaper than the WD Mybook.
MarcLister
20-08-2009, 23:02
Went to tesco's last night and picked up a couple of external USB 1tb iomega drives for £55 each. Will do for video work at the moment.
Drobo is very tempting though for the servers.Sounds like a bloody good deal.
These them?
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152310
Forgot about those. Doh. Ordered 2 WD 1tb Elements. Barebones usb drives. Nice and quiet while running. Oddly they buzz when idle! Very odd. So they're my backup drives. Backup, unplug.
Flibster
26-08-2009, 16:22
Sounds like a bloody good deal.
These them?
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152310
Those are the bunnies.
They're nice and quiet and cool. Funky white light on them too. Speed is pretty good, but that was secondary to capacity and cost.
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