[Beer40oz]

http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro-fs.php

What do you think of it?

Or something similar can be built cheaper?

What I like from this is that it has Protection from up to Two Drive Failures...

I am a noob on NAS servers....

[grantd]

I think you must have deeper pockets than I do, I paid less for my used honda accord.

I believe dropping 2 drives is just raid....6? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RA...els#RAID_6

I have to believe that you could build a pretty kick ass system for far less, some of their proprietary stuff might be hard to compare apples to apples but when it comes down to it 2 grand is a lot of money.

[darkscout]

Yes, it's called ZFS.

"NAS" OSes:
FreeNAS
NexentaStor

Full Blown OSes:
FreeBSD
Nexenta
OpenIndiana
Solaris Express 11.

I just pulled all of my 1.5TB Western Digital Drives WHICH PERFORM HORRIBLY IN RAID OF ANY SORT DO NOT EVER BUY WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVES UNTIL THEY STOP INTENTIONALLY CRIPPLING THEIR "CONSUMER DRIVES".

And replaced them, with 2TB Seagate drives.

[DaGround]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

with 4xhttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245&cm_re=samsung_2tb-_-22-152-245-_-Product


go for raid 5 and u have enough redundancy, enough power for all streaming stuff.

[Beer40oz]

I think you must have deeper pockets than I do, I paid less for my used honda accord.

I believe dropping 2 drives is just raid....6? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RA...els#RAID_6

I have to believe that you could build a pretty kick ass system for far less, some of their proprietary stuff might be hard to compare apples to apples but when it comes down to it 2 grand is a lot of money.

No deep pockets... trying to find out what is out there that is much cheaper that will do what the Drobo does....

[darkscout]

No deep pockets... trying to find out what is out there that is much cheaper that will do what the Drobo does....

Yes. It's called ZFS.

What sized system are you looking at building? It'll help narrow the suggestions.

[voip-ninja]

I ordered a Synology DS1511+ to migrate to as my HP EX495 is getting low on space and is not reliable enough in my opinion for dedicated streaming.

The Synology I got for about $825 and it is a full blown NAS with many features including support for 3tb drives and can be expanded with two additional enclosures for up to 15 drives in a small relatively power efficient package.

I looked at drobo but it is not expandable enough for me. The Synology with SHR is about as easy to use and can tolerate one drive failure or you can manually configure it for raid-6 and it can tolerate two drive failures.

From what I can see with SHR you can add disks or swap out disks for larger ones without rebuilding the array and losing your data. It is a bit pricey but is an SMB class solution and has a 3 year warranty. We'll see how it goes when I set it up in the next week or so.

[bmcclure937]

Yes, it's called ZFS.

"NAS" OSes:
FreeNAS
NexentaStor

Full Blown OSes:
FreeBSD
Nexenta
OpenIndiana
Solaris Express 11.

I just pulled all of my 1.5TB Western Digital Drives WHICH PERFORM HORRIBLY IN RAID OF ANY SORT DO NOT EVER BUY WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVES UNTIL THEY STOP INTENTIONALLY CRIPPLING THEIR "CONSUMER DRIVES".

And replaced them, with 2TB Seagate drives.

I am looking to upgrade my FreeNAS from 4x1TB to 4x2TB and running two ZFS pools (RAIDZ1). What disks do you recommend I look into so I do not have to deal with "Advanced Format" hassle with 4k blocks?!

No deep pockets... trying to find out what is out there that is much cheaper that will do what the Drobo does....

As darkscout has mentioned, you can build a custom FreeNAS box and use ZFS to accomplish your needs for literally a fraction of the cost! Purchase your disks and configure a pool as a RAIDZ2 (same as RAID6 -- supports 2 disk failures). If you are wanting, you can even go the extra mile and purchase "hot spares" so if a disk fails the hot spare automatically replaces the failed disk!

Difference between Drobo and ZFS:

1. ZFS is much cheaper
   
2. Drobo allows for using multiple disk sizes and easily expanding your pool/array
   
3. ZFS allows snapshots
   
4. ZFS has great data integrity!
   

Other solutions include UnRAID. Many recommend this as well. I do not have experience with UnRAID but have read that is allows Drobo-like expansion... if that is important to you.

[defiler]

£1400?! Bloody hell! I grabbed a Coolermaster Elite case, AM2+ motherboard, 2GB RAM, AthlonII X3, and a bunch of Hitachi 2TB drives. Stuck Fedora 12 on the lot, and it's sorted. I added a teeny flash drive for booting, and the rest os softraid on RAID6 - can drop two drives. That can be done for half the price, and it includes the drives!

No, it's not as shiney, and it doesn't give you the hot-swap and stuff, but you'll save yourself £1000. It just means dealing with Linux.

Dont know about Unraid, ZFS, FreeNAS or whatever - I had other criteria that pushed me to Linux.

Nice box, but silly cost.

[voip-ninja]

I think that it's easy to criticize solutions like Drobo without appreciating that there is a very large target market for such devices.

I used to run my own Linux NAS, and even though I'm an IT guy that has been working with Linux for years, I still found it to be a PITA. Especially annoying was that every time I wanted to increase the storage for it I had to completely back my data up, rebuild the RAID-5 array with larger discs, and then restore the data. PITA! Not to mention that because it used traditional PC parts it was a power hog. I need my NAS to run 24x7 so a device that uses 100+ watts is not acceptable to me. In the summer time we already see power prices of .22/kwh so an extra 50 watts of power use costs $6 per month. This cost for power is only going to continue going up.

Now, admittedly, home brew technology has come a long way with things like Un-Raid, but I still think that the DIY crowd should hold off on the jeering for someone looking at something like a Drobo as it offers five minute setup, plug and play of hard drives to larger capacity models, and a set of tools that make the admin of the box a no-brainer. Time is valuable and for someone who does not do this stuff all the time it can take hours to build a box, hours to set it up completely and hours to troubleshoot it when there is a problem or it does not do what they want the way they want it done. Spending an extra $1000 for some is horrifying. For others it is a drop in the bucket... something else to keep in mind.

The biggest problem with Drobo (other than inability to expand beyond the number of discs in the enclosure) is the relatively slow transfer rate for data of 20-30MB/s... probably fast enough for streaming media, but painfully slow for big file manipulation jobs and the like.

[defiler]

I think that it's easy to criticize solutions like Drobo without appreciating that there is a very large target market for such devices.
[...]Spending an extra $1000 for some is horrifying. For others it is a drop in the bucket... something else to keep in mind.

Yep, except that (1) for me it was £1000 - that's about $1500+... And (2) people who'll regard that as a drop in the bucket are more likely to run down the Crestron route than fanny about with XBMC. I'll take a small pain in the arse for £1000, but then I use Linux at work, and it's not exactly a stretch to apply the same skills to my home kit.

If you're liking the big Drobo, and you dont mind dropping that kind of cash on it, go for it. Yes, there's a market for their smaller devices. The market for this larger box is very limited, I'd suggest.

Linux nowadays will allow you to add spindles to a RAID set or to replace drives with larger ones without reinitialising the array. Webmin takes a lot of the hassle out of admin work. Don't know about the other options.

With that slow a transfer rate, I expect it's a Linux device running on an ARM core. But that's a guess.

[voip-ninja]

As I said in an earlier response, I had considered the Drobo but ultimately picked the Synology DS1511+. It can be expanded to 15 bays, uses about 40 watts in operation, and sports some serious horsepower (if you have a link aggregating gigabit switch it can hit almost 200MB/s to a host that is likewise configured with dual NICs).

From what I see, Synology and QNAP both offer more value for dollar than Drobo, while offering many of the same ease of use setup features.

[bmcclure937]

I agree that pre-built NAS solutions offer quicker setup and configuration. Basically plug in, add disks, and go! They are also intended to serve their one purpose as a NAS, usually have nicer form factor, lower power consumption, and it is easier to expand.

I personally chose to use FreeNAS because of cost. I did not have the money for pre-built solutions but had the time to tinker and play with FreeNAS. I wish my FreeNAS did some things that prebuilt solutions can do... but I would also feel restricted by a Drobo.

In the long run, I can use my FreeNAS as more than as NAS and run services on it that would be more difficult to configure on pre-built solutions. To each his own. If you can afford a pre-built NAS and are looking for convenience, then why bother tinkering with a custom build.

Sometimes custom builds can be quite overwhelming, especially when it comes time to overhaul and expand your storage. I was looking to add a 4x2TB RAIDZ to my FreeNAS to supplement my 4x1TB and then my eyes kept growing and I am now considering upgrading my CPU (from single-core AMD 45w) to be a bit beefier and handle both ZFS pools better. I then thought about upgrading RAM from 2Gb to increase performance of ZFS. While I am doing that, I might as well throw in a new motherboard to ensure it fits all of my needs of CPU/RAM. It turns into a beat and a much more expensive undertaking that originally planned... but it would greatly help with performance. I guess I will have to consider if the cost of doing the complete overhaul is worth it... or if I can get away with simply upgrading the disks.

[defiler]

As I said in an earlier response, I had considered the Drobo but ultimately picked the Synology DS1511+. It can be expanded to 15 bays, uses about 40 watts in operation, and sports some serious horsepower (if you have a link aggregating gigabit switch it can hit almost 200MB/s to a host that is likewise configured with dual NICs).

From what I see, Synology and QNAP both offer more value for dollar than Drobo, while offering many of the same ease of use setup features.

Apologies - I missed that post. The Synology looks quite nice, to be fair. Half the price of the Drobo too! The amusing thing is that I'm pretty confident it's a Linux distro that's installed anyway. It's just all hidden from you with a nice front-end

I'll be setting up Myth on my box soon, but beyond that it looks like it'll do everything I'm currently doing. Oh - aside from my SSH server and the occasional HandBrake.

As with all these things, though, very often the choice comes down to what you have more of - spare time or spare money. I reckon I tend to have more spare time! And precious little of that too!

[Beer40oz]

The Synology DS1511+ looks awesome and don't mind to spend $800 on it + HD's.... To me it's nice that I can just plug and play and forget it about it. If I built something and it does not go right I will get so frustrated for spending the money on it.

@voip-ninja please let us know how you like it when you get it up and running.

P.S. Even the Synology DS710+ it's pretty cool if you want to start small and then grow with it.