Affordable Drobo alternative?

Steedie

Steedie

Steedie

Man of Honour
Joined
29 Jun 2004
Posts
21,639
Location
Oxfordshire
Hey all,

I've been running my trusty Seagate external drive for about 4-5 years now, it's 750GB and it's nearly full, but I'll need nearly double the storage soon.

I've recently got into photography since my son was born so need to store all those and make sure they are safe, and I'm now transferring all my DVDs to my hard drive so I have access to them via my Apple TV. I also have the usual stuff to backup (receipts, downloads etc).

Now I've always liked the sound of the Drobo and how brilliantly reliable it sounds. One drive fails, just take it out and replace and carry on as normal with no data loss, but obviously the price makes your eyes water, especially the new Thunderbolt models. What is the best and most affordable alternative? I want the same features in terms of reliability and drive swapping etc.

I'm not too fussed in terms of being able to access everything online, nor do I need a media server built in like I see a lot of them have.

Budget wise, £200 max before the drives, but if there's a good solution for less than I'm obviously happy to spend less :)

Thanks guys
 
wouldnt touch drobo with a bargepole anyway to be honest. did some reading up on them a while ago when researching some "cheap" storage for non-essential data for work and plenty of stories of poor reliability, bad support and propriety file systems.

for that budget there isnt going to be much around. assuming you want a DAS rather than a NAS? DAS ive had good dealings with startech if you have USB3 or eSATA. otherwise if you want network attached theres always the Microserver route.
 
The other major NAS providers will probably all fit the bill for what you want. RAID 1 for 2 disk, RAID 10 or 5 for 4+ disk.

Seconding the post above, Drobo use a proprietary file system so if something were to go wrong, you're dead in the water with regards to recovery. I know that Synology use standard Linux file systems so I could just remove the disks from my Synology and plug them in to a linux system if something went wrong. Had my Syno for 4 years now? and it's great.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom