Ordered the Drobo...but question regarding NAS in general

Raymond Lin

Raymond Lin

Raymond Lin

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Can you buy any other product on the market or built your own NAS with ALL the features of a drobo? And i mean ALL, for the same price or less.

Forget the small enclosure and aesthetics for a second, just functions. Can you get :-

1 - True hot swap, take it out, replace it, on the fly while it is accessing data.
2 - have up to 2 drives fail and STILL keep ALL your data safe.
3 - use non uniform size disks, mix and match all your HD in a box
4 - no need for a Monitor
5 - costs, all that above for less than £500.

People keep telling me the Drobo is expensive and you can do the same for much less, but can you really?
 
I should have added point No.6 & 7:-

6 - Any idiot could use it.
7 – Could set it up in under 15 minutes from unboxing.

lol, I read that and I honestly say that went all over my head, RAIDZ this, open Solaris that, something about Oracle, and something about something and something, you might as well spoken in Russian…..

So I take it that the short answer is NO, and the cost of the Drobo is justified for people like me?
 
Did a lot of research into this, short answer No!

Drobo is the way forward, but it should not be your only backup solution as they can fail.
 
Raymond Lin said:
I should have added point No.6 & 7:-

6 - Any idiot could use it.
7 – Could set it up in under 15 minutes from unboxing.

lol, I read that and I honestly say that went all over my head, RAIDZ this, open Solaris that, something about Oracle, and something about something and something, you might as well spoken in Russian…..

So I take it that the short answer is NO, and the cost of the Drobo is justified for people like me?
Click to expand...

I expect it will do point 6 once setup. I would have probably attempted it a couple of years ago when I was experimenting with Linux but now I just want something that works. Even once setup I don't believe it is as good as a Drobo.

I think at my current rate of storage requirements growth I will buy a Drobo in a couple of years as my backup.
 
No .... however there are a lot of reports of the Drobo's system going wrong, so it's not quite as good as it sounds. All the shiny features seems a little pointless if it can't actually be depended on.

A better overall solution is to build a couple of servers running something like FreeNAS and mirror between them. This could easily be done for less than £100 per box (before drives). Of course if you need something that's simply plug and play there's no alternative to Drobo.
 
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