sanyasi Posted July 24, 2012 Share #1 Posted July 24, 2012 Advertisement (gone after registration) I just received an e-mail from the folks who make the Drobo Beyond RAID system that some photographers use for storage and backup. Drobo is in the process of rolling out thunderbolt USB 3 systems. Although I don't travel with a laptop, one of the new products strikes me as something that would interest many photographers who do. Specifically, I've given thought to a Macbook Air, but the storage has always been the constraint. The Drobo Mini may be a game changer in that department. Drobo describes it as the size of a sandwich, and the photo does show that it can be held in one hand. It doesn't use full-size drives, but 2.5" laptop drives. According to Drobo, that means 3 terabytes of storage for the Drobo Mini, but the e-mail suggests that the capacities of these drives is about to increase. If the Drobo Mini works as advertised, some photographers may be able to significantly lighten their load (both in weight) and footprint) by pairing the Mini with a MacBook Air. I would wait until the rollout is complete and others report on the experience, but this is an interesting development. The starting price is $649 US, but I don't think that includes the hard drives. Here is a link: Drobo Mini Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted July 24, 2012 Posted July 24, 2012 Hi sanyasi, Take a look here Drobo Thunderbolt Mini. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
kdriceman Posted July 25, 2012 Share #2 Posted July 25, 2012 Beware of proprietary systems like Drobo: Scott Kelby: "I’m Done with drobo" - http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/ The Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt is available for travelers now :http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549#a5 It can be configured with SSD or regular hard drives and RAID 0 or 1. And it's just fast storage, no proprietary system, which is a good thing. IMO. http://tablet.pcmag.com/?ref=292840&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcmag.com%2Farticle2%2F0%2C2817%2C2398861%2C00.asp Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanyasi Posted July 25, 2012 Author Share #3 Posted July 25, 2012 Kelby's post is a disturbing one. I have three Drobos. One that is on all the time for my music collection. A redundant Drobo that has my music collection, and one for photos. I originally put my photos on one of the new Thunderbolt devices, but it was terrible and I returned it for my current Drobo. Because I value my photos just as much as I do my photos, I was going to buy a second device to do a redundant backup for offsite storage--No device will protect you against fire, flood, or theft. I thought I would wait for more Thunderbolt devices to hit the market. I haven't had any trouble with a Drobo yet (knock on wood), but I have had one hard drive failure and the Drobo worked as advertised. I keep several spare hard drives on hand because if that red light goes on, I want to recover the data as fast as possible. Before I buy again, I will inquire into Kelby's issue with Drobo. I suspect they will address the problem. My experience with Drobo has been positive and I suspect they will address a legitimate customer concern. As for proprietary systems, I share you skepticism. I developed software using one platform and everyone in that community had problems when the company was slow with upgrades. You will find that getting entirely away from proprietary systems is hard to do if you are trying to accomplish a particular task that the system in question is best suited to handle. Many of the people who used the development platform that I was referring to switched to Flash (over ten years ago). Although Flash is still out there, you are out of luck if you want to develop with it for a mobile environment, at least on Apple mobile devices. I might add, there is a bit of irony in your statement . Although there are adapters, camera company lenses are somewhat proprietary. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
em9 Posted July 25, 2012 Share #4 Posted July 25, 2012 Hmm yeah, that story is rather off-putting. But how does this 'proprietary' software work then? Are they using a self-developed filesystem? I wasn't considering it anyway, it's still too big for my needs. If it was developed for two drives I would consider it (well, not anymore actually, I really want a system where drives can simply be swapped if their container fails - having your data locked away like in that blog post, that's too frustrating...). That Lacie solution might be better suited. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanyasi Posted July 25, 2012 Author Share #5 Posted July 25, 2012 I don't know how it works, but there basic marketing pitch is that you are getting RAID-like protection without the complexities that come with RAID. I had assumed that they had just added an overlay interface, but it would appear to be more than that based on Kelby's report. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
em9 Posted July 25, 2012 Share #6 Posted July 25, 2012 I don't know how it works, but there basic marketing pitch is that you are getting RAID-like protection without the complexities that come with RAID. I had assumed that they had just added an overlay interface, but it would appear to be more than that based on Kelby's report. I browsed through one of their PDFs, which states that you format the drives with your own choice of file system (just the usual ones, NTFS / FAT32 etc). So I guess the problem might be in the storage of the data itself. Perhaps not in 'normal' files, but maybe broken up in data chunks, or hidden in some bigger 'container' file or something. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdriceman Posted July 26, 2012 Share #7 Posted July 26, 2012 Advertisement (gone after registration) I have been using the Lacie 2Big, which is similar to the Lacie Little Big Disk, only much larger (it uses 5.25" vs 2.5" disks) and less expensive (it is not a traveler). I'm using it with my Mac Mini Server and Thunderbolt in a RAID 0 configuration. However, with both of these drives you can configure in RAID 1 which will mirror all your data on each disk, so that if you lose a disk, you simply pop it out and replace it... all the information is still on the other disk. With Thunderbolt it is still very fast. I guess I just don't see a need for a proprietary system that could lock you out of your data when there are very fast, secure, inexpensive options that do the same thing without the proprietary software. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlindstrom Posted July 27, 2012 Share #8 Posted July 27, 2012 Unfortunately Lacie is no silver bullet either. As soon as they bring out a new model of devices, firmware support is pretty much gone. This happened fex with their previous network enabled big disk. Around the same time as OS X lion came out, they brought a new model out. The existing model was supposed to support TimeMachine backups.. lo and behold, the new model was instantly updated to support OS X lion & TM, the old model was never updated. No way Lacie is seeing my money or business. Try QNAP instead, they seem to have a good track record and active community around them. -- Juha Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarlet Posted July 27, 2012 Share #9 Posted July 27, 2012 Seems pretty big and expensive to me. I'd instead bring two small externals and set up a simple cloning operation with Superduper. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdriceman Posted July 27, 2012 Share #10 Posted July 27, 2012 Unfortunately Lacie is no silver bullet either. As soon as they bring out a new model of devices, firmware support is pretty much gone. This happened fex with their previous network enabled big disk. Around the same time as OS X lion came out, they brought a new model out. The existing model was supposed to support TimeMachine backups.. lo and behold, the new model was instantly updated to support OS X lion & TM, the old model was never updated. No way Lacie is seeing my money or business. Try QNAP instead, they seem to have a good track record and active community around them. -- Juha This is true... I went through the same thing with Lacie on my network drive, however, I did send it in and they updated it. Should not have been necessary though. I won't be buying another network drive from them and I'm cautious of this thunderbolt drive, but I'm relatively confident that I can at least pull a disk out and get the data off it myself if I need to. We will see. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ceflynn Posted July 28, 2012 Share #11 Posted July 28, 2012 The Drobo has a very appealing feature that allows the user to add drives of different sizes to the RAID. It appears that the additional complexity of this features requires metadata beyond what most RAIDs have. Search for the word "metadata" at: Hard Drives: ZFS Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlindstrom Posted July 28, 2012 Share #12 Posted July 28, 2012 The Drobo has a very appealing feature that allows the user to add drives of different sizes to the RAID. It appears that the additional complexity of this features requires metadata beyond what most RAIDs have. Search for the word "metadata" at: Hard Drives: ZFS Drobo uses their own proprietory raid system. One option, though needs some effort & technical knowledge, could be Freenas or it's commercial versions. Those actually do use zfs.. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
algrove Posted July 29, 2012 Share #13 Posted July 29, 2012 I have been using the OWC SSD drives with their little case and on a three week trip with DNG + JPEG fine I do not fill up a 480 GB SSD. They are so light I now carry two so I have redundancy galore. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stunsworth Posted July 30, 2012 Share #14 Posted July 30, 2012 Beware of proprietary systems like Drobo: Scott Kelby: "I’m Done with drobo" - I’m Done with drobo | Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider But wouldn't he be in the same position with any raid enabled drive? If the hardware fails then it will need to be replaced regardless of whether it's a Drobo or a Lacie etc. His issue seems to be with the warranty period, isn't 12 months the norm for computer equipment? Do all NAS systems use the same file format? I.e. can drives be taken out of a box made by company A and put into a box made by company B? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdriceman Posted July 30, 2012 Share #15 Posted July 30, 2012 But wouldn't he be in the same position with any raid enabled drive? If the hardware fails then it will need to be replaced regardless of whether it's a Drobo or a Lacie etc. His issue seems to be with the warranty period, isn't 12 months the norm for computer equipment? Do all NAS systems use the same file format? I.e. can drives be taken out of a box made by company A and put into a box made by company B? No, his issue was that when it failed he had to pay Drobo to recover his data. With a typical RAID, if configured in a RAID 1 configuration, you just take out the wounded hard drive, replace it with a new one and all your data is restored (as it is mirrored on the adjacent drive). Drobo's proprietary software, as I understand it, prevents this. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stunsworth Posted July 30, 2012 Share #16 Posted July 30, 2012 The Drobo failed, not a hard drive. It wouldn't be much of a 'raid' system if a single drive failing took down the whole box Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdriceman Posted July 30, 2012 Share #17 Posted July 30, 2012 The Drobo failed, not a hard drive. It wouldn't be much of a 'raid' system if a single drive failing took down the whole box That's the whole point though. If another system that doesn't require proprietary software to access your data fails, you can still get you data off the hard drive without paying Drobo to do it. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stunsworth Posted July 30, 2012 Share #18 Posted July 30, 2012 As I asked earlier, do all raid controllers store the data in the same way? I have no idea if they do or don't. If they don't you'd need to buy a new controller compatible with the one that failed Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdriceman Posted July 30, 2012 Share #19 Posted July 30, 2012 As I asked earlier, do all raid controllers store the data in the same way? I have no idea if they do or don't. If they don't you'd need to buy a new controller compatible with the one that failed Different systems have different software. And there are good reasons for proprietary software for speed, security, accessibility and other reasons. For my (and I suspect most) photographic needs, a straightforward RAID system is very fast and reliable and enables me to get my data back easily in the event of a failure. Still, I back it all up with Apple Time Machine every hour... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
swamiji Posted August 2, 2012 Share #20 Posted August 2, 2012 There is several forms of raid. The two most common forms raid 0 and 1 require only two drives. They are referred as mirrored and striped. Most people choose striped because of capacity and speed, but the down side is redundancy, there is none. One drive dies and you lose it all. Mirrored is fully redundant, you can loose a drive and keep on working. But the down side is capacity, it's halved. If you want to talk raid 5 or 10 you are in a different category. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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