DROBO just announced their FW800 unit today at the original price of $499 and dropped the price on the USB2 only version to $349. If you don't know about the DROBO, this is a super storage unit, featuring automatically implemented and repaired on-the-fly RAID5 drive storage. Very cool machine. I've been waiting for FW800 and now that it's here just ordered my unit.
What I see as the main advantage, or why I chose DROBO over other RAID options: The main reason is ease of maintenance and the ability to add drives of mixed size and manufacturer at the time more space or a replacement drive is actually needed. By contrast, most dedicated RAID storage boxes require you use the same size and brand of drive, and usually recommend the same model drive, AND you have to fully populate the drive bays at the time you create the RAID. Many manufacturers go a step further and recommend that all drives have the same firmware, while still others recommend using only enterprise class drives, which of course are more expensive. The biggest issue for me here was the idea (and cost) of having to store a supply of bare drives to rebuild the RAID when one of the drives fails, which it surely will.
Note that a disadvantage to DROBO over a dedicated hardware RAID enclosure is speed; by comparison to a hardware RAID box, DROBO is pretty slow. As such, it is best suited to use for reliable redundancy with a simple maintenance routine at the expense of raw speed. For example, if a drive goes down in DROBO, you would head out, purchase a new drive of any manufacturer or size, eject the bad drive and insert the new, bare drive. DROBO will immediately format the new drive and start rebuilding your RAID automatically, and it will take about 24 hours to rebuild one TB of data in this fashion. Note that this total rebuild includes a reorganization to optimize the data structure too, but the box is busy for an extended amount of time. By contrast, with a dedicated RAID unit you would grab one of your pre-purchased drives out of storage, eject the bad drive and replace it with an identical drive then tell the system to re-build that drive -- and most systems would rebuild the same 1 TB of data in probably 6 to 8 hours.
So for me, the lower overhead cost and ease of maintenance won out over speed.
find out more: http://www.drobo.com/Where_to_Buy/Index.html
~~~
EDIT: My actual review with screenshots and torture testing begins on page 3 with at around post 48 in this thread, but I decided to repeat this answer at the front so folks reading through would better understand my personal back-up strategy before getting to my actual review:
DROBO is my first tier of image back-up. I work by myself and do not need a dedicated image server. My main box is an early 2008 MacPro, 8-core 3.2, with 24G RAM.
EDIT 2-5-09: Just a brief update on my current drive configuration on my main computer. I now have 6 SATA2 drives in my Mac Pro using this device: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=158.
I have my OS residing on a striped pair of WD 640G Caviar Black drives. These drives are screaming fast for 7200 RPM drives and RAID very well, but they do have a slight amount of head seek noise, soft but audible in my Mac Pro -- and they give me a huge, fast desktop for temporary image storage. I then have 4 of the WD 640G Caviar Blue drives in RAID-0 mounted in the main bays. These are perhaps a tad slower on random I/O operation than the Blacks, but are virtually silent -- and in a 4-drive RAID-0 they are VERY fast. On that array, I have a thin outer partition (4x30G) for uber-fast CS scratch and a large 4x450G, or 1.8G partition for Image storage. I then left a small 115G partition at the very end of each drive non-RAID, and use these to store back-up and bootable copies of my OS and other miscellany.
1) WORKING IMAGES: 4 internal drives striped (RAID 0) for my current working files, giving me plenty of speed on reads and saves. I am not concerned about the lower reliability of RAID 0 here as these images are backed up per #2 below;
2) ONSITE BACK-UP: ALL images, current and historical, backed up to an onsite DROBO as current working file back-up and storage for older historical images. Note I don't regularly need to access my historical images, so the slower read speeds off the DROBO is not a concern to me (note that with three or more SATA2 drives installed, my DROBO 2 is reading and writing at around 50 MB/s sustained);
3) OFFSITE BACK-UP: ALL images backed up to single drives stored offsite, updated monthly or after any significant shoot. Note that these are mostly older drives that get checked and/or replaced periodically as I funnel newer, higher performance drives into my main system, and then migrate the offsite images onto the freed up older drives as they become available. I currently use a Voyager Q drive sled for this application: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/.
Note also that the DROBO is new to me as of this writing -- I have NOT owned the earlier model and specifically waited for the FW800 interface. (It is replacing a set of SATA2 and FW external boxes, and I chose DROBO because I had several mixed drives already.) A few of my shooting buddies do use the USB2 versions and are quite satisfied, hence my decision to try the new box. What I'm saying here is the verdict is still out for me. (EDIT - I've had it now for 6 months and am VERY happy.) Acoustics, or lack thereof, is of importance to me and this box is quiet if you fill it with quiet drives -- I have had good success with WD 1TB Greens and Seagate 1TB Barracudas. The new DROBO is very quiet with newer fans and more intelligent control of them; so should be quiet except perhaps where drives heat up and the fans kick into high gear. (It remains quiet even on the rare occasion the fans go into high.) Of course another nice option is I can buy the NAS attachment for DROBO and move the unit off to my machine closet .
~~~
Cheers,
What I see as the main advantage, or why I chose DROBO over other RAID options: The main reason is ease of maintenance and the ability to add drives of mixed size and manufacturer at the time more space or a replacement drive is actually needed. By contrast, most dedicated RAID storage boxes require you use the same size and brand of drive, and usually recommend the same model drive, AND you have to fully populate the drive bays at the time you create the RAID. Many manufacturers go a step further and recommend that all drives have the same firmware, while still others recommend using only enterprise class drives, which of course are more expensive. The biggest issue for me here was the idea (and cost) of having to store a supply of bare drives to rebuild the RAID when one of the drives fails, which it surely will.
Note that a disadvantage to DROBO over a dedicated hardware RAID enclosure is speed; by comparison to a hardware RAID box, DROBO is pretty slow. As such, it is best suited to use for reliable redundancy with a simple maintenance routine at the expense of raw speed. For example, if a drive goes down in DROBO, you would head out, purchase a new drive of any manufacturer or size, eject the bad drive and insert the new, bare drive. DROBO will immediately format the new drive and start rebuilding your RAID automatically, and it will take about 24 hours to rebuild one TB of data in this fashion. Note that this total rebuild includes a reorganization to optimize the data structure too, but the box is busy for an extended amount of time. By contrast, with a dedicated RAID unit you would grab one of your pre-purchased drives out of storage, eject the bad drive and replace it with an identical drive then tell the system to re-build that drive -- and most systems would rebuild the same 1 TB of data in probably 6 to 8 hours.
So for me, the lower overhead cost and ease of maintenance won out over speed.
find out more: http://www.drobo.com/Where_to_Buy/Index.html
~~~
EDIT: My actual review with screenshots and torture testing begins on page 3 with at around post 48 in this thread, but I decided to repeat this answer at the front so folks reading through would better understand my personal back-up strategy before getting to my actual review:
DROBO is my first tier of image back-up. I work by myself and do not need a dedicated image server. My main box is an early 2008 MacPro, 8-core 3.2, with 24G RAM.
EDIT 2-5-09: Just a brief update on my current drive configuration on my main computer. I now have 6 SATA2 drives in my Mac Pro using this device: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=158.
I have my OS residing on a striped pair of WD 640G Caviar Black drives. These drives are screaming fast for 7200 RPM drives and RAID very well, but they do have a slight amount of head seek noise, soft but audible in my Mac Pro -- and they give me a huge, fast desktop for temporary image storage. I then have 4 of the WD 640G Caviar Blue drives in RAID-0 mounted in the main bays. These are perhaps a tad slower on random I/O operation than the Blacks, but are virtually silent -- and in a 4-drive RAID-0 they are VERY fast. On that array, I have a thin outer partition (4x30G) for uber-fast CS scratch and a large 4x450G, or 1.8G partition for Image storage. I then left a small 115G partition at the very end of each drive non-RAID, and use these to store back-up and bootable copies of my OS and other miscellany.
1) WORKING IMAGES: 4 internal drives striped (RAID 0) for my current working files, giving me plenty of speed on reads and saves. I am not concerned about the lower reliability of RAID 0 here as these images are backed up per #2 below;
2) ONSITE BACK-UP: ALL images, current and historical, backed up to an onsite DROBO as current working file back-up and storage for older historical images. Note I don't regularly need to access my historical images, so the slower read speeds off the DROBO is not a concern to me (note that with three or more SATA2 drives installed, my DROBO 2 is reading and writing at around 50 MB/s sustained);
3) OFFSITE BACK-UP: ALL images backed up to single drives stored offsite, updated monthly or after any significant shoot. Note that these are mostly older drives that get checked and/or replaced periodically as I funnel newer, higher performance drives into my main system, and then migrate the offsite images onto the freed up older drives as they become available. I currently use a Voyager Q drive sled for this application: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/.
Note also that the DROBO is new to me as of this writing -- I have NOT owned the earlier model and specifically waited for the FW800 interface. (It is replacing a set of SATA2 and FW external boxes, and I chose DROBO because I had several mixed drives already.) A few of my shooting buddies do use the USB2 versions and are quite satisfied, hence my decision to try the new box. What I'm saying here is the verdict is still out for me. (EDIT - I've had it now for 6 months and am VERY happy.) Acoustics, or lack thereof, is of importance to me and this box is quiet if you fill it with quiet drives -- I have had good success with WD 1TB Greens and Seagate 1TB Barracudas. The new DROBO is very quiet with newer fans and more intelligent control of them; so should be quiet except perhaps where drives heat up and the fans kick into high gear. (It remains quiet even on the rare occasion the fans go into high.) Of course another nice option is I can buy the NAS attachment for DROBO and move the unit off to my machine closet .
~~~
Cheers,