21–30 of 74 posts
Best advice is to do some research, like I noticed their closed support forum too, and thought it was suspicious - it's a good sign that they let their customers talk to each other, but if it's hidden then something's not right.
I've been very happy with FreeNAS running on a recycled PowerEdge 400SC. I boot it off a USB thumbdrive and it manages to spin up and down the six SATA drives I'm using with even even with a cheapie 4-port PCI SATA card. My workload is pretty light though as it hosts media and I only stream it from two devices max at a time. But it's hard to beat the price and comprehensive protocol support. FTP, Samba, NFS, AFP, Tim…
I've been planning an upgrade to 4x2TB for a 6TB RAID, but I haven't had the time or the $ for the upgrade.
I used some of the storage space as a time machine destination, but Apple has issues with Time Machine over SMB, and it got to the point where it was too slow, so I bought an USB disk and just back-up to that.
I'm not sure on how to reply, because experiences with a Drobo seem to be extremely hit or miss and it is all very anecdotal. My drobo with all WD green drives is as silent as my Mac minis and MBP are, while a friend of mine has one also with similar drives that's so loud it's very difficult to sleep in the same room with it (and yes, it rivals his Mac Pro in terms of noise). I've not had a single problem with my dro…
Well, in my case the failures are obvious and objectively present. You can't really discuss expectations if your device just lost all your data due to filesystem corruption. You don't discuss "infallibility" if your device tells you: Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 422806282 scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device SCSI error : return code = 0x70000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4533105544 H…
RAID is _not_ a backup. If you don't understand this, you'll never be satisfied with any RAIDish products.
I use a cron script which runs rsync each hour and synchronizes my / and /home/ with my /mnt/mirror/.
Ever since I've set this up, I've had a reliable backup which I don't have to think about. I've even migrated my system to it once, because I needed to swap the primary hard drive out.
What's the big deal about backing up? Why buy a dedicated unit anyway? Am I missing something fundamental?
My main beef with Drobo is the way the file system works. You specify a faux file size of the drive that Mac OS recognizes, but it doesn't relate to the actual file size of the drives. It turns out you should make this faux file size as large as you can (16TB) as the faux file size restricts the actual file size, so I made my faux file size 2TB and now actually have 2.5TB of storage, to make my drobo recognize it I h…
Not related to Drobo: I use a cron script which runs rsync each hour and synchronizes my / and /home/ with my /mnt/mirror/. Ever since I've set this up, I've had a reliable backup which I don't have to think about. I've even migrated my system to it once, because I needed to swap the primary hard drive out. What's the big deal about backing up? Why buy a dedicated unit anyway? Am I missing something fundamental?
Once you get to the Drobo/WHS point of your NAS life, HDD bays and xfer speeds quickly become the biggest issue. (4x2TB - redundancy) can quickly become not enough..and chances are that you'll always be ahead of where HDD storage is.
I've been using unraid for a while now and am really happy - especially with its flexibility. Once you get to the Drobo/WHS point of your NAS life, HDD bays and xfer speeds quickly become the biggest issue. (4x2TB - redundancy) can quickly become not enough..and chances are that you'll always be ahead of where HDD storage is.
My biggest gripes with the drobo were loudness (no really, it sounds like a jet engine), inability to recover data directly off the HD if the drobo dies, horrible transfer speeds, and horrible support.
It's one pro was simplicity.
I've been very happy with FreeNAS running on a recycled PowerEdge 400SC. I boot it off a USB thumbdrive and it manages to spin up and down the six SATA drives I'm using with even even with a cheapie 4-port PCI SATA card. My workload is pretty light though as it hosts media and I only stream it from two devices max at a time. But it's hard to beat the price and comprehensive protocol support. FTP, Samba, NFS, AFP, Tim…