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Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

jan.rychter.com

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Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#41

Post by DannoHung »

illumin8 wrote: post #38

I think his problems with the Drobo are mainly the way he's using it. I've had a Drobo for a couple years now and have not had problems with it, but I have noticed a few strange things: 1. Regarding the fan noise - I used to keep my Drobo in a warm house with no air conditioning. Temperatures in my office would regularly reach 78-80 degrees, and anything in the high 70s would cause my Drobo fan to go into "vacuum cle…

Pretty sure that MacFUSE has NTFS support. Or, no, wait... didn't Apple add NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard? Yeah, they did. It requires editing fstab though.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#42

Post by redrobot5050 »

DannoHung wrote: post #41
illumin8 wrote: post #38

I think his problems with the Drobo are mainly the way he's using it. I've had a Drobo for a couple years now and have not had problems with it, but I have noticed a few strange things: 1. Regarding the fan noise - I used to keep my Drobo in a warm house with no air conditioning. Temperatures in my office would regularly reach 78-80 degrees, and anything in the high 70s would cause my Drobo fan to go into "vacuum cle…

Pretty sure that MacFUSE has NTFS support. Or, no, wait... didn't Apple add NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard? Yeah, they did. It requires editing fstab though.

I think if you install Bootcamp, apple does that. I have a Win7 Partition on my 2009 MBP and I can see the partition from inside Snow Leopard.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#43

Post by redrobot5050 »

jmount wrote: post #36
ff0066mote wrote: post #24

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?

Unless such a backup is versioned it seems all you have is a system that automatically erases your backup one to two hours after a soft failure.

This.

If your primary drive beings to silently corrupt data due to bad sectors (I've had this happen once. Your system starts to hang, applications start to unexpectedly quit, you start hearing static/clicks in your music, photos seem jaggy even if they were taken with a 10MP DSLR.) you will back up bad/corrupt data over your backed up good data.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#45

Post by cynicalkane »

barrkel wrote: post #7

I'm running Nexenta / Solaris zfs with samba, but it supports accented characters just fine. Perhaps this is a limitation of Mac smb support. zfs also doesn't have a repairing fsck as far as I know, but I have more faith in its monitoring and scrubbing features. It also bulk reads and writes at about 100mbytes a second, approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet.

ZFS doesn't have a repairing fsck because it doesn't need one. The on-disk format uses a transactional design such that its always consistent, even if it fails in the middle of a write.

AFIAK the only way to damage a zpool is if some snafu (one more serious than a mere write failure) wiped out a bunch of metadata together with the backup metadata all at the same time, but such an event would do very serious damage to any filesystem, which is why all important data should have an off-site backup.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#47

Post by amh »

jmount wrote: post #36
ff0066mote wrote: post #24

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?

Unless such a backup is versioned it seems all you have is a system that automatically erases your backup one to two hours after a soft failure.

rsync won't delete extra files at the destination unless you tell it to. Although, there's still the problem of syncing corrupted stuff to the mirror. Keeping multiple versions is certainly more robust, in any case.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#48

Post by mason55 »

bradleyland wrote: post #40
Dirt_McGirt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it's OK to use a Drobo if you get another one as backup for the first one — but then, what's the point? RAID is _not_ a backup. If you don't understand this, you'll never be satisfied with any RAIDish products.

It's true that RAID is not a backup, but backup strategies are rarely any good if they back up data "instantly", which is what redundancy provides. So you're stuck with a catch 22. If you back up instantly (without versioning), you may backup bad data. Boooo! If you backup, say, daily, you still stand to lose a days work when your array fails. Boooo! RAID should increase reliability, not decrease it. Any RAID solutio…

This is why I love Time Machine

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#49

Post by jmount »

amh wrote: post #47
jmount wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless such a backup is versioned it seems all you have is a system that automatically erases your backup one to two hours after a soft failure.

rsync won't delete extra files at the destination unless you tell it to. Although, there's still the problem of syncing corrupted stuff to the mirror. Keeping multiple versions is certainly more robust, in any case.

I was using "erase" figuratively.

Re: Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

#50

Post by baddox »

First off, I never trust reviews saying that something is extremely loud. Just look at every single fan or video card on newegg and you'll see people complaining that they are the loudest thing they've ever heard and other people claiming they are virtually silent.

Secondly, what does the author (or you guys) recommend as an alternative to the Drobo? Just creating your own file server/NAS? Do you need a hardware RAID card, or are mobo-integrated ones or cheaper software cards sufficient?

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