I recently mentioned how much I really dig my network-attached storage (NAS) hard drive and how I like to keep all of my music, photos, and videos on it so I can feed the whole house with media via Apple TV or Roku. Since I have a huge investment of both time and personal memories stored on this drive, I really need to protect it properly — and that’s why I’ve recently moved to a RAID drive. As I also noted last issue, it consists of four smaller, interconnected drives. If one fails, the others pick up the slack.
RAID drives used to be expensive and difficult to set up and use. But then I came across Drobo, which offers expandable and protected data storage. With some other units, you have to learn about RAID levels, capacity planning, and monitoring, but Drobo is a much simpler process. You insert the drives like tapes into cassette decks — remember those? — and can use any SATA-1 or SATA-2 of any capacity from any vendor. This is a major plus, since other drives may require a specific manufacturer’s memory.
I opted to use three 750-gigabyte and one 250-gigabyte drive, for a total of 2.5 terabytes. Since Drobo has a default “public share,” I was up and running in a matter of minutes. I installed the company’s own dashboard software on all the computers throughout the house. The Drobo dashboard shows its capacity in the form of a pie chart. Now everyone in my family has access to our vacation photos, music, and library of ripped DVDs.
Drobo is not only a good solution for sharing storage with all computers on your network, but it’s also good for centralized backup. It has a built-in feature to make it work with Time Machine in Mac OS X and includes Drobo PC Backup, a very easy-to-use application for Windows PCs. Drobo is quite amazing overall.
If you see 2.5 TB free space from these 4 drives, then you must be using RAID 0 (striping) which offers *NO* protection in the event of a drive failure (i.e., your data would be lost). I think you probably meant to use RAID 5, which distributes a parity bit across the drives. In the event of a crash, your data would remain intact and you would only need to replace the bad drive to access it again. You mentioned you like how Drobo shields you from learning about RAID levels, but I think in this case it's in your best interest to read more (check out Wikipedia). Incidentally I have an inexpensive Netgear NAS using RAID 1 (mirroring), and I also love it...definitely worth the small investment!
The Drobo uses a proprietary architecture that is SIMILAR to RAID. What it does is save the data redundantly across multiple drives. There is (as far as I know) no way to defeat this feature, so the protection is always there, provided failed drives are replaced with the quickness. The practical upshot is that your 2.5 TB is actually closer to 1.1 TB in actual usable storage. While I love my Drobo, it's important to remember that it does not perform miracles. You have to use its own software to maintain it, create partitions, and so forth. Using your OS' disk utility is not advised, TRUST ME. I almost lost everything, and had to do a week of nail-biting waiting for my 3 TB of data to load off onto an external, and back onto my factory-reset Drobo.