April 9th, 2009
Better than RAID: the new DroboPro
RAID is a bad idea for home users since its management complexity and failure modes create more problems than it solves. But protection from 1 - or better yet 2 - drive failures is a very GOOD idea.
Data protection for the rest of us
Drobo is a product that protects against drive failure like RAID does without the headaches of traditional RAID arrays. Key features:
- Use drives of any capacity. Drobo will figure out how it can safely store and provide that.
- Add new drives as needed. As a corollary you can add or replace drives with new, larger drives to increase capacity or to replace flaky old drives.
- Helps the RAID 5 problem.Drobo is less prone to the growing RAID 5 problem since it only reads data blocks rebuilding after a drive failure. Normal arrays don’t know which blocks have data so a 2nd URE kills the array.
- Faster rebuild with less overhead. Traditional arrays have to read from all drives concurrently while calculating parity to rebuild data - which means the array runs slowly for hours. Drobo’s system only copies needed data to a new drive - a faster, lower overhead operation.
- Set and forget. Drobo just works: it looks like a drive to your system; when a drive fails a red light tells you which drive to replace.
Let’s roll the (virtual) tape
In this video a 3 drive DroboPro suffers a 2 drive failure - without affecting a video playback. It’s a minute long intro to an amazing product.
The Storage Bits take
The human error rate on traditional RAID arrays is shockingly high with estimates ranging from 3% to 10%. And that’s with pro admins.
Civilians don’t have a chance with standard arrays. Small businesses will find the DroboPro has all the capacity and performance they need for local storage.
For disaster recovery use a cloud backup vendor - or better yet, 2 of them. With the low-cost solutions available today no small business should ever suffer catastrophic data loss.
Comments welcome, of course. Note that the 4 slot Drobo won’t handle 2 drive failures at once. And no, I’m not on the Drobo’s payroll - I just really like the product.
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/09/09
