I need a big drive with backup features

[Burble]

Sorted - thanks.

[iCraig]

I want a Drobo. Does it come with any HDDs to start you off at least?

[Mark]

Nope. It comes empty.

[iCraig]

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?

[Burble]

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.

[divine]

Originally Posted by Burble

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?

How much space does it need for itself? Surely you don't lose 2.4Tb to the 1024/1000 byte thing?

[Mondo]

Originally Posted by iCraig

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?

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.

[Mark]

Originally Posted by divine

8Tb worth of drives gives you 5.6Tb?

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.

[Burble]

Originally Posted by divine

8Tb worth of drives gives you 5.6Tb?

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.

[Mondo]

Question - If you don't use DroboShare then what can you use to acheive the same thing?