so we're gearing up for what's going to be by far our busiest season yet (between me, ali, and now lillie studios we're in for a whole lot of storage) and i want to go into the season with larger hard drives and a more convenient system for backing stuff up. i was browsing the mac store and saw these drobo drives that looked interesting. does anyone have any experience with them and/or advice? if not what are you using and how do you like it? the whole multiple stacks of external hard drives piled on top of one another isn't cutting it anymore.

I haven't tried these, but I have heard from a couple of people that have them that they love them. Several interfaces for connecting them and hot swappable drives. Happy hunting!

G-Tech G-SPEED eS

I have heard some very good things about the drobo and I have a lot of the g-drives and they are awesome, especially their mobile ones. You can just tell by looking at the gdrive that its a superior product thats engineered a little bit better for better heat management/distribution.

so far i'm happy with LaCie drives. All things mechanical will fail at some point but I've had great luck with LaCie HD's and I'm happy with the price/value.

I've talked to some about the Drobo's though haven't used one. It's nice that the space can just keep expanding as HD's evolve larger and cheaper. I think I'm in a similar place (ramjpc) in that I'm very interested in the drobo but don't know enough or haven't been fully convinced to purchase and set a new system in place.

Thanks guys. This topic makes my head spin.

As far as hard drives failing, it used to be a problem for me. Once I put a little desk fan blowing on them, I haven't had a single failure. It's been two years, now. I had been having 2 or three a year go bad. Everything was always backed up but it was a pain and expensive to keep replacing them.

Drobo just came out with a network controller for their box. It lets you use it as a network drive. It can control two of them (up to 8 drives). And, if you need to, connect it directly to your computer for faster transfers than Gigabit Ethernet. Looks pretty cool.

The only disadvantage that i see with the drobo is the fact that it's USB. Even if you connect it to the gigabit controller it will still only be as fast as the native USB interface. The good thing i like about it is that it can make a very good secondary backup device.

If you have the money and you are looking to invest is RAID 1 or 5 you caint go wrong with G-Tech drives. Remember, RAID is NOT a backup solution. I've also read rave reviews regarding this drive as well Guardian maximus.

Now if you are really hands on you can build yourself an awesome kit from this site using sata drives

I use an Icy Dock 4 bay eSATA enclusure. I also have a single bay enclosure that does both eSATA and USB 2.0 that uses the same trays as the 4 bay enclosure. The single enclosure can go with the notebook computer anywhere I go then I can put the drive into the desktop when I get to the office.

keep it coming!

Luke, I don't use WiebeTech, but I know of some video editors who do and they're pretty happy. Video, of course, is much more resource intensive than stills so you should be fine.

I have a Western Digital My Book 1TB external drive and I love it. It escpeially works well with Leopard's new Time Machine feature.

Luke,

Depending on whether you will be using the system strictly for back up and will be accessing it every now and then here is another idea. I can't recommend a particular device, but others that may have done this could chime in. Setup a server, could be a small computer or maybe even an AirPort Extreme and connect 1 or more drives via Ethernet or even USB2 and either connect the server or the AirPort Extreme wireleslly to the different computers that will be doing the backups. If you will only be using this strictly for back up and could run those nightly at midnight or later, then USB2 should be just fine.

Take a look at this

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_d...adyNAS%20NVPlus

It features hot swappable drives the same way the drobo does but adds gigabit Ethernet.

I use a QNAP TS-209 Pro - it's a Network Attached Storage device fitted with two 500GB drives in a RAID1 configuration. Anything written to one drive is mirrored to the second so if a drive goes down, you can hot swap it and its contents are regenerated from the other drive. The downside is you only get half as much storage as you've paid for. Short of a power surge, or the thing being stolen, it's a fairly reliable way of making sure you have at least one backup at any given time. In practice, I have another backup system in place, just in case

The great thing about this approach is I can access the data from either of my computers (or even externally through the internet when neither of my computers are on). You can get units with more drives using the RAID5 system, and the redundancy is less, so for example you could have four 500GB drives, and get 75% of that space available with the security of knowing that a single drive failure wouldn't result in the loss of your data

Joel.

I posted what we use here:
http://www.opensourcephoto.net/forum/index...c=24574&hl=

~ Charles

I got tired of worrying about drive failure and finally broke down and bought the Drobo and 4 500Gb drives. Overall, it is a wonderful machine, was super easy to install. Gives me peace of mind knowing that if one of the drives fails I can swap it out and not lose any data.

I am currently using it as a primary drive. I have noticed that Lightroom and Photoshop take a lot longer to load images from the Drobo (USB). Previously, I was using LaCie FW800 drives (using them as Time Machine Backups now) and never had loading issues.

The only other issue I've read from others about the Drobo is the noise. The enclosure has a fan to keep the 4 drives cool, and it is a bit loud, but I am sort of used to it and it doesn't bother me...

This is exactly what I have and I love it. Connects via ethernet and mine is configured in RAID5. Drives are hot swappable too. Have not had a drive failure yet (knock on wood). I do not work off of these drives, they are solely for backup.

so i just ordered 2 drives from staples. being a first-year photog, with not a ton of cash to spend, yet realizing the importance of backing up my images i snagged a couple western digital 'my book' drives for a pretty killer price.

i know you get what you pay for, and as much as i'd like to invest in a bigger-faster system, its tough to beat $250 for 2 500gb drives.

does anybody have any experience with western digital hard drives?

Western Digital drives are fine. ALL hard drive brands can & do fail. I've supported thousands of PCs over the years and have seen multiple failures from all of the manufacturers. Personally, I prefer Seagate mainly because of their better wattanty (5 years -vs- 1) & an in law that works for them, but you pay a bit more for Seagate drives most places right now. As cheap as drives are these days it's probably about a wash. Most manufacturers have had quality issues with certain drive lines over the years but there is nothing to really watch out for right now. Best practices particularly with external drives is to be sure they get adequate air flow for cooling as excessive heat will kill or shorten the life of a hard drive.

ALWAYS have a backup, that's the most important insurance. The warranty is on the drive, not your data!

The more expensive systems simply take off the shelf drives like are inside the My Book you just purchased and add hardware RAID for better data redundancy & larger storage capacity. But the actual drives inside them are not any different that you have.

I backup to a lacie 500 g big disk at home, then put it on my mac at the office, which is connected to a 1TB Maxtor. I use a small Western Digital 250 gb drive to tranfer between the two.

thanks so much for the tech help. this makes me feel much better.

i think i am going to back everything up to my two externals [have them mirror each other], with another back-up burned to dvd. add that to the images i have on pictage, and i think i am just about covered.

I have 2 300 Gb My Book usb drives that are sitting on the shelf no longer being used. I was using them with a Mac and had all sorts of strange problems when they were connected. For example, when I would try to shut down the Mac, it would just sit there with the wheel spinning. After disconnecting everything and adding things back one by one, I determined that the drives were causing the problem.

With that said, it could just be an isolated incident with my specific system and may work great on a PC...

I was using mybook 500GB drives. After drive failure on one I have decided to setup a mirrored drive in my desktop and a raid. I was going to get the new time machine that Apple put out but the guys at Apple suggested against it considering my specific use. Photoshelter also has photo hosting options. This approach is a great way to backup your most precious images.Too many people have told me that Drobo drives are slow. They are trying to impress photographers with their backup resources but they simply are not faster than RAID.

I have 4 x 500 GB hard drives in an external enclosure. I only actually use two of them since the other two are mirrors. I've already had a hard drive fail on me and I wanted to kill myself. Backups are a MUST.

I just built my own. I bought the Vantec Nexstar MX. It holds TWO 3.5 Sata HD's. It also has a fan built in unlike several other external drives I've seen out there.

I have two 500G hard drives inside, and have one backup the other. At a price of $100 for 500G thats a cheap price to pay for a second backup. Every month the backup comes out and goes to a offsite location.

I've got a Drobo and I can't tell you how much I love the thing! It's AWESOME!!!

The only single complaint I would have is that the fan is kind of loud when you're transferring tons of files (which is the case initially when you first get it, obviously) but it's not as loud as a lot of people make it out to be. I always have music on at a low level in the studio and that more than drowns out the fan noise.

The other day, as an experiment, I was burning a DVD of a bunch of files, and in the middle of burning, I ejected a drive (simulating a drive failure) and the DVD completed the burn just fine! Knowing that the data is protected, without me having to mess around with ANYTHING is awesome.

I also have the DroboShare, which makes it attach to our network, so everybody has access to the files. It's sweet. Go buy two.

i have a lacie 500GB, 1TB, a maxtor 300GB and a portable USB 120GB maxtor. i settled on maxtor and especially the ever reliable lacie b/c both of my western digital drives called it quits after just two months. i'm OCD about back ups so i had the info elsewhere. i HIGHLY recommend the lacie drives. a part time photog we had working with us dropped my 1TB, of which 600GB was used, a good friend of mine bumped the drive pretty hard when we were rearranging the office and afer many disk scans and having the mac genius' look it over, the drive is still in near perfect condition. maxtor has always been a safe bet for me although their newer external hard drives are super ugly. i have an older maxtor external and the new portable. both are sleek. anyway, those are my thoughts.

-bones

I looked at the Drobo - infact I can get them at reseller pricing in Australia (and demo units) - except there was a few things I didn't really like about them.

I had to look at reviews online to get information out of how they structure their storage.

Basically they act like JBOD - (Just a bunch of Disks - where Drive A size + Drive B size + etc = total available space) except they then just about halve that space to safegaurd the data (similar to RAID 1 mirroring - except more complicated)

so if you have

500GB + 750GB + 250GB in 3 of the 4 slots you end up with a total of 1.5TB

HOWEVER

only 700GB of that is actually available for data.

(visit the drobo calculator to see how much you can access with your drives at http://www.drobo.com/drobolator/.)

Also USB doesnt excite me - id prefer Firewire 800 / e-sata connections.

my 2c

Jonathan

Using Drobo and I LOVE it. I also have 2 Laci drives for other purposes - but I love the drobo. I go between my PC and my macbook pro. Great system.

I've been using a 1 TB Apple Time Capsule for backups for a couple of weeks and it's worked out rather niceley. I have all Macs however, I've heard they can be sort of buggy with Windows machines. But for day to day storage, I use a Micronet 1TB RAID. I like the fact that if one drive fails, I don't loose any data. I've had it for over a year now and it's been flawless...knock on wood! I use it with my firewire connection, you can check them out here: http://www.micronet.com/General/praid.asp

I saw those drobos too - looks very cool.

I use a couple of external drives. One for data another for backup. Every 2 years I buy new ones and swap them out. In my experience, hard drives tend to fail somewhere between 2-4 or so (that's without every turning them off, always leave em running.) I unfortunately learned the hard way a long time ago..

This is what makes the Drobo's so great - the hardware constantly monitors the conditions of the drives and lets you know when one is in danger of failing so you can replace it before something bad happens.

The fact that I don't have to worry about a thing makes the whole setup worth every penny...

Wow that would certainly take the stress off! Thanks for the info! I'm off to read up on them some more...

I had a similar problem with my 500G My Book and my Mac. The wheel/motor engages when I'm not doing anything to interact with the drive. also, it interferes with my safari and firefox at times. weird!

I have 2 of THESE boxes from Buy.com
They're set up RAID, redundant, plus I have CD backups of everything, too.

Buy.com has the 1TB box for just under $600 right now, which is pretty good, too, but once you set it up as RAID, all of the drive space gets cut in half, so that's why we went with the 2TB.

It's been treating me well, no problems.

just as a follow up to this thread, we ended up going with wiebetech. on my editing station i went with the RTX 200 with 1 TB mirroring (two 1 TB drives that mirror one another in case of failure). i write the data to the drive and it automatically makes 2 copies on the 1 TB disks, and when it's full i just pop out both of them and keep one on site and the other in a safe deposit box at the bank.

after a ton of research and talking to other techies i just found the drobo to be not what we are looking for. first the speed alone makes it almost unusable with only usb 2.0. that was the main complaint from almost any and everyone i spoke too. its like shooting with regular sandisk compactflash cards instead of the extreme IIIs.

Don't want to threadjack, but I got an email from Apple this morning, talking about their Time Capsule drives...anyone using these?

Cool! Do I win a ham for suggesting Wiebetech?

Glad it worked out for you Luke. Let us know how it is going forward.

The Drobo will do RAID, but it is limited by the same issues all RAID arrays are. You can only efficnetly use the amount of space of the smallest drive in the array for the data parity (backup). If you want to maximize the effiency of storage capacity you need all drives to be the same size. In any RAID setup with redundancy there will be 1 drive essentially lost to the parity. In a 2 drive mirror that means you get a 50% effiency, in a 3 drive raid 5 array it is 66%, 4 Drives and the effiency goes to 75%. So if you fill all 4 slots on a Drobo with 500 Gig drives you end up with just under 1.5 TB of useable space with RAID 5 redundancy.

What Drobo does very well that no other device I am aware of does is seamlessly migrate between RAID levels and dynamically expand your storage as you upgrade drives.

In the example you gave above you basiacly have 2 mirrors with the 750 mirroring the 500 & the 250. But swap the 250, out for another 500 and you would see the total useable increase, but you are still less efficent with available capacity that having all drives the same.