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.

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