Disc/Data management systems

marks27 wrote on 9/18/2009, 12:16 AM

I was wondering many/any of you out there are using Disk/Data management systems such the offering by Drobo system?

Particularly given the slow but sure more to tapeless acquisition and the obvious archive issues that this presents.

Thanks,

marks

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/18/2009, 3:21 AM

There has been a lot of discussion about the Drobo before. It's not a removable external disk system such as you might expect, though the advertising is a bit misleading in this respect. You can't slide disks in and out like a cart system. It's a multi-disk RAID system. If you slide in a new blank disk it will be formatted and a copy of the existing data automatically written to it. So in effect, no matter how many blank hard drives you pass through it, you're only getting space for one drive's worth of data. This is fantastic if that's what you want. If not, it's a very expensive waste of time.

There are lots of external drive cart systems that let you mount external drives for a tiny fraction of the price of the Drobo.

Woodenmike wrote on 9/18/2009, 6:44 AM

I 've been looking at the Drobo system also and am looking for alternatives for mass storage that would be easily accessible. I shoot performances and need to retain old footage for various reasons (re-building old choreography, student college arts supplements, promotional projects, etc) and I'm finding individual external drives to be cumbersome as well as dangerous for loss of data because of lack of redundancy. I would be very interested in a system with tons of storage (10tb or more), built in redundancy, and the ability to replace failing drives without the loss of data (hot swappable raid 5 or 10?). What are some of the alternatives to the Drobo?