Drobo Intros New “DroboPro”
You guys know I’m really paranoid and a bit obsessive about protecting my image collection, which is why I (and a bunch of my friends) all switched our photo archiving drives to a Drobo (I’m a Drobo freak, and actually have two: one at home, and a duplicate offsite at my office).
This week, I’m talking to Terry White (another Drobo freak), and I’m talking to him about needed more storage space (this talk brought about by 45GB worth of Indy photos in one weekend), and we basically both determine that I need to “man up” and get a second Drobo. Then I get a call yesterday from DataRobotics to let me know that they are announcing the answer to my prayers today—DroboPro. This is a “Business Class” robotic storage solution that lets you have double the storage bays of the original Drobo (So with the new 2-Teyabyte pop-in hard drives, you could have 16-Terabytes of storage).
That was enough for me right there, but they also added a new iSCSI connection (which uses a standard Ethernet cable connection, which most every computer already has built-in), but it’s WAY faster than even Firewire 800. Also, the software that comes with your Drobo also lets you choose to have the drives operate individually, or if you’re really hyper-paranoid (beyond even my level of paranoia), you can simply click a checkbox and the software itself sets the drives to be dual disc redundant, so now two drives back up the same data simultaneously. I know. It’s sick. I’m ordering two of them immediately: one for home, one for the office.
Anyway, I learned yesterday that I can just pop the four 1-TB drives out of my existing Drobo and slide them into the new Drobo Pro, and they work instantly.
Anyway, that’s the highlights—I’ll give a detailed review when my units come in, but in the meantime, head over to Drobo.com and watch the video and you’ll totally get it.
What are you doing with the old units?
Mateo,
I’ll be upgrading my 2 Drobos, so if Scott’s are not available for sale mine are.
mtapes at rawworkflow dot com
Scott,
Thanks for the heads up. Been a Drobo fan for a long time.
Michael Tapes
i can buy your old units!
one thing you realize in photography – you can never have enough data storage!
Your description of the single vs dual disk is kinda lacking (confusingly written)
Basically in single disk mode you can lose one disk out of the set and still maintain data.
In two disk mode you can lose two disks at once – at the sacrifice of disk space, since you have to store the data in 3 places – kind of…
The neat thing is that you can switch between modes whenever you want. So if you have tons of spare space, leave it on 2 disk mode – then if you are getting up to that 16GB limit (with current sized drives), you can switch to 1 disk mode and gain some space back (1.4TB out of 16TB)
Great blog BTW!
Hi Scott,
I am curious why you have not mentioned using a NAS?
We have one here in NYC, and our data is automatically backed up in Baltimore in Arizona. If anything goes wrong, we are back up in no time, and no data is lost.
This is a great use of iSCSI! Every computer these days has gigabit Ethernet on it and I will not miss goofing around with firewire and USB.
And WOW! iSCSI, RAID-6 (2 disk mode), and NAS all discussed on a photo blog.
Too bad this isn’t NAS. They make that happen and i will buy one. I don’t want to have to connect it to a computer on the network. I just want to plug it right in.
Must-get-DroboPro. Too bad it’s so damn expensive. Especially for a ‘poor student’ like me!
Hi Scott,
I just thought you should look into and consider getting a Windows Home Server machine, like the HP MediaSmart or have a custom machine built for you running the same OS. I won’t even begin to describe the advantages.. especially over Drobo.
I forgot to add that yes, it is Mac compatible.
I am attending the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando this week where they announced the new droboPro. I hope to go down to the expo floor and see in in action later today. From what I gather there is no networking capabilities (yet) but as I recall there were none for the original drobo either until recently. I suspect that it will come soon.
Scott: Many times I see you wearing ballcaps of products you like, use or support and I picked up a drobo cap at the show. Drop me a note and let me know if you’re interested and I’ll figure out how to get it to you. Black with white lettering. What’s not to like?
Regards,
Dennis
Scott,
Just a quick question or two….
Lets say you took 3000+ images at the Indy race you shot this weekend. How many of those images are you actually keeping/storing? Do you delete any of them? (I know you are an amazing photog, but you gotta have misses in there too…
)
Jan
If you are selling your old Drobos let me know! I would like to buy one from you!
Hi Scott,
There is a new service CARBONITE which will back up your hard drive limitless for $54.95 a year, includes Macs and PC’s.
Does anyone use a drobo (either model) in a mixed environment with Vista and Mac OS X? My question is ho do you have the drives formatted? can you put 4 drive in and have two formatted to NTFS and two formatte as HFS?
I’m just trying to find the best way to not only backup my photos but also to be able to share them across platforms.
btw I know about macdrive and that is my plan B if I can’t find a better way.
Rich,
The short answer is yes but it depends. You can share the 4-drive drobo among multiple platforms but you have to employ the drobo share (which basically makes it a network attached device). If you go to drobo.com and look up Article ID 0267 in their knowledge base that should give you enough information to be dangerous or at least point you in the right direction. For the new one it’s a little trickier because it does not yet use the drobo share BUT it has iSCSI so you can basically attach it to a server and share it out that way. There’s a lot of good tech info on the drobo site in their Knowledge Base that may be helpful to you as well.
Hope I was helpful.
Regards,
Dennis
Thank you, yes it does help. Im not in a big hurry, but I’ve been trying to decide on which way to go between a Drobo or a Windows Home server.
I am looking for a way to use a Drobo as a remote asset management and FTP server. Am I better off using a Drobo or setting up a separate Mac mini. Essentially planning on having this accessible to 2-3 outside designers for a web / print publication. Leaning toward FM Pro mainly because I’m a little more familiar with it, but not totally locked in. (Extensis Portfolio server is WAY too expensive for my company’s budget, otherwise I’d take that)
Ok, you should _realy_ have a good look at a Windows Home Server system. The advantage over systems like Drobo, NAS and others are…. just have a look, it is in a nother league…
Im so glad to see there other Drobo freaks out there!! I love it! After replacing 4-5 HDD for 2 times I finally discover it. I was surprised to see that it works exactly as they say. Drobo is the ultimate hard disk solution whether you are a pro photographer, musician, programmer or data freak. Its been 4-5 months that I haven’t had any problem with my data. You just connect dropbo and you get to work. You dont have to care if you are doing a lot of stuff simultaneously.. Its just works and it doesn’t even slow down! Definitely worths it. I cant wait to get the new Pro version!
Sorry to let you all down but iSCSI will be slower than firewire 800 because of a little known thing called network frames. iSCSI being a pretty standard netwrk protocol uses very small frame sizes slowing the whole thing down even when comparing 1000mb/s to 80mb/s
What I think really sucks about the DroboPro is that you can’t have 2 people or more connect to it at the same time. Seriously? That alone makes me not want to buy it. I do love everything else about it but that is a huge downfall to it. That’s why I’m considering alternatives.
I’m connecting my DroboPro to a MacMini over GigE using iSCSI.
Then from the MacMini, I share the storage to any other Mac/PC on the network.
Drobo, eh? Have you seen what Lloyd Chambers says about it? He’s the data/Mac expert and he isn’t impressed.
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-Drobo.html