Nice thing about Drobo is you can use mixed sizes and brands of disk - any SATA. I think my problem was disk quality. So you could start out with two 2 terabye drives and mirror and then increase by adding additional disks in smaller or larger increments.

Typo,

I have been interested in getting a Drobo, but I think I'm out of my depth in terms of asking the right questions. Do you know of any place that really explains Drobo well?

I have NAS but it's not for automated backups. I have one for my media archive. I'm actually planning to move it to a Drobo since I probably need about 10 TB for the next iteration. My backups currently are all time machine based, but I run a local time machine on each of my workstations. In league with this I save all of my standard files on my iDisk, which is in turn kept in sync with each of my computers, so it's backed up on each of them, which in turn do an hourly time machine. For the studio computer I do a local time machine backup of the main drives and all of the media drives that I use for editing. The time machine makes sure that current projects have a decent backup. Once a project is completed then it is moved to my NAS, which is a mirrored drive, so there is a redundant copy. At that point it is deleted off the local project drive in the studio. If it's a really sensitive project then each night I make a copy to the NAS while I'm working. So NAS is a piece of my backup strategy. My current NAS is a few years old so it's a roll your own enclosure. It's been workable, but the next one looks like it will be a Drobo.

Drobo is basically a proprietary variation on RAID. Unlike Raid the disks don't have to be the same size. It has the equivalent of all levels of raid. That is it can do a parity drive, which means if any one drive fails your data is there. It can do an advanced level where if any two drives fail you are still OK. Or it can do straight mirroring where all the data is written twice. (Each of these is the equivalent of some level of raid, but I forget which corresponds to which number). Unlike raid all the drives don't have to be the same size. They do all have to be SATA. Also, as I learned the hard way, avoid Fujitso.

Drobo is actually more stable than most raid. It is slightly slower too - because Drobo is really designed for backup not for primary use. (Even though I see it promoted for web and cloud applications).

Oh one gotcha for Windows 7 users. There are reported problems with incompatibility between drobo and the native Windows 7 system functions that create system images and restore disks. If you are using a Drobo on Windows 7 make sure you get restore media so you don't have to create your own. (Typical windows 7 system are sold without media).

I'm now being torn between adding network storage and backing up networked computers. The most disciplined use, obviously, would be to just use it as backup media.

Then, there's backup and streaming. Most of these devices can stream to my TV, so...very tempting.

Yeah, maybe I'll just try and stick to that. Otherwise I have to start thinking about backing up the NAS, and I don't even know.

The Drobo looks enticing, but way expensive. I think I'll just stick with 4TB of the Seagate, mirrored.

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So I got the model with two three terabyte drives. The question now its drive configuration. RAID 0 makes me nervous. 1 loses me capacity. JBOD...best bet middle ground? I don't currently expect to be storing anything unique on it.

What makes you nervous about RAID 0? If one of the disks dies you lose access to all your data, but if one of the disks in JBOD dies, won't it still be a hassle to figure out which data you lost and which you didn't?

Of course, depending on the speed of your network the speed gains of RAID 0 probably won't matter at all as the N part of NAS will be your data bottleneck, so in that case JBOD is really the same thing from your perspective and may be easier to maintain.

RAID 0 has more points of failure than JBOD. Pretty much all of my computer crashes have been hard drive failures, so I'd rather lose half my data than all of it. And I don't think I need much of a performance boost anyway.

Could you add one more 3 TB drive? Then you can do raid 5 or 6 and have all of your data survive the loss of any one drive.