I lost a hard drive over the weekend.
The hard drive contained all my music and videos. More importantly it contained all my photographs since I got a digital camera. That’s about 27283 pictures.
Now the music would have been recoverable. Mostly. But would have been a major pain in the arse and would have taken a long time to do. The photographs would have been irreplaceable. I may have had a backup somewhere but I’m not entirely sure.
Yet, there is no screaming. No rending of hair. No mad twitter updates using a word that rhymes with puntting. In face when I came home from the wedding I was at and found the drive dead I was really quite calm.
And that was because of my new love. The Drobo
I saw the lights where flashing and fired up the Drobo dashboard. It kindly informed me that one of the drives had gone to the great spindle in the sky. I ejected it (without powering anything down), and was informed that my data was no longer protected, but “give it 15 hours or so and it would be”
And 15 hours later it was.
No pain. No suffering. And more importantly no Data loss. And had a had a spare drive to hand, I think it would have been instantly protected (although not sure about this, it may just have sped things up).
I have been debating the Drobo for a while now, and boy am I glad I got it. I got it for two reasons,
- Having 5 separate external drives was a real hassle both physically and administratively
- I thought it was just too risky to lose data with a failed drive these days. I’ve gone beyond having a little bit of data. My Drobo has over 1TB used on it. Risking losing things like near on 30000 pictures or my little videos I have made was just not worth the hassle.
And even though the initial outlay isn’t the same as a el-cheapo external from PC World, the long term ease in upgrading should be worth it. Plus you don’t lose capacity at the boundaries (i.e. can’t move a 100GBs of videos onto 4 drives that each have 30GBs free)
But really thinking about it, I’m not sure it’s worth not buying protected storage anymore. it’s like storing your photo albums in an oven. Sure it’s ok for a while, but too risky for the long term.
I’m not going to say much on the Drobo itself expect it’s utterly entirely fantastic and brilliant. If Apple made drive bays this is what they would make. Or Carlsberg. It’s easy to use. Fairly idiot proof. And looks slick.
If you want a better review, read Andy Ihnatko’s review which really says it all.
Then go buy yourself one. Because you really should. Friends don’t let friends store on non redundant systems.
1. Matt
Did you get the DroboShare NAS box or are you just running it from your Mini?
Looks like a great piece of kit, something every home will have in about ten years.
2. Adrian
It plugs into my Mac Mini so I didn’t really need the NAS box as that’s essentially what the mini is doing.
Although at some point I’ll ditch the mini (it’s a G4 after all) and replace it with an Apple TV and a Drobo NAS.
3. Pete
Holy crap it’s £400 and that doesn’t even include the hard drives!
I’m sure that it’s working very well for you, but for the vast majority of people it is overkill.
4. Adrian
That’s mostly true. But I don’t think most people could afford to lose their photo collection these days either.
Everyone’s storing a lot of data even normal people, and I no longer trust a £90 external drive from PC world as far as I can kick it.
5. Marc
I eschew backups. Hard drive failures are technology’s way of saying you have too much shit.
/Sheepishly scurries off to back everything up after tempting fate.
6. Andrew
Was it a drobo drive that failed?
7. Adrian
There are no drobo drives. The drobo is a drive bay.
When I got it I bought two new Western Digital Caviar 1TB Green Power drives. I put these in the Drobo and then copied all my data across from my array of external drives.
Once I had done this I dismantled two of the external drives, and put these (a 500GB and a 750GB) into the drobo. It was the 500 (which was the older of the two) that failed.
8. Andrew
Yes, I understand what drobo’s are, I was refering to the drives that are being “hosted” by drobo.
Perhaps the drobo puts drives under undue stress due to multiple read/writes, and in fact the 500 wouldn’t have failed if it wasn’t in the drobo bay. I haven’t read the details on how they actually different (better?) than RAID (RAID5 I believe), however as it is slower than RAID5 I wonder if they are performing more actions (therefore higher wear) to access data.
When are you setting up your DR site? I have a great infrastructure design based on sychronous writes across multiple sites which we could go through at the pub if you bring your whiteboard.
9. Danzor
All my photos are on flickr. All my docs are on google docs. My music is on an external hard drive and two separate iPods. I can’t think of anything else on my computer that couldn’t be (and has been) replaced relatively quickly. Certainly overkill for most users.
10. Adrian
@Andrew (8)
Well the drobo is designed for consumer grade drives so I think that’s probably unlikely, (although possible). Better is always relative. It’s better than RAID in that it can take different drive types and capacities. It’s worse than raid in that it’s slower. It depends what your needs are. For a typical consumer/SMB this is probably an advantage. For a server in a big rack, this is probably a disadvantage.
It’s got a virtualised version of RAID, which works at the block level. So conceptually does striping and mirroring, but in it’s own way. This allows it to work with three drives that are say a 500, 750 and 1000 GBs and which you couldn’t do in RAID. Good consumer/small office product. Bad server product.
I think they would have to perform a significant (in the scientific meaning) amount of more actions for it to wear the drive out, and hard drives these days can take a healthy load. Also considering that I don’t access these drives continually, I don’t think this could be the case.
BUT
The other cannibalised hard drive went last night too.
So this means 1. The Drobo does batter drives 2. The hard drives in cheap externals are pretty low quality 3. My opening up the chassis of to cannibalise the drives damaged them 4. Bad luck and they were on their way out anyway
DR site? What? Huh?
I’d be interested in your design. Although if this is net based cloud storage, a lot of people are doing this already. Including Amazon with S3. Google and Yahoo also getting into the game. You’d have to have something pretty revolution and a lot of VC to get into this game now.
@Danzor (9)
Trying getting your photos down from Flickr quickly or easily. Flickr (or an equivalent) for me would be a display area not a storage area. Plus what about the raw source. I like to keep those, so the only think that would land up online is the edited set. And I have about 10000 photos I haven’t even got round to editing yet.
Documents .. again google docs is a useful interface to documents I want net accessible or shared. but not a place I would store doc I work on daily or have archived over the years.
Music wise, my iTunes library is the primary source and bits of those sync onto various other devices. Losing the primary would be a disaster.
I run a command and control type approach. You run a “cell network” distributed approach.
You’re approach wouldn’t work for me, and mine might be overkill for you.
But everyone’s data needs are growing and I suspect over time these cheap external drives from PC World are going to be a risk.
That said, if the DROBO itself goes, then I need to buy another one to slot the drives into. of course you can get ridiculous and have two DROBO’s mirroring each other if you need to. It’s about the level of risk you want on your data. Yours is adequate for you and mine for me. For a business I suspect neither would be adequate,
11. Andrew
DR as in disaster recovery (I am sure you knew this).
NGDC - next generation data centre is where it is at, cloud computing, infrastructure virtualisation, grid computing, utility computing, we have plans for it all. Make sure you bring a very big whiteboard.
12. Adrian
DR (first time I have heard this acronym)
NGDC is big. As a commoditized resource there are a lot of big players in this game already. As a resource for web companies likewise.
As a internal system black box for existing companies who don’t want to source this out, well … I suspect that’s still big business what will be interesting is how much big co’s start outsourcing data center opps.
Anyway this is going off topic. Can we carry this on in the pub instead.
13. Matt
Flickr is actually a perfectly good place to store your photos, as these days there are loads of utilities for downloading your entire photo collection from Flickr’s servers.
Also, you’re not a professional photographer, and you don’t even have an SLR, so why would you want to have RAW files? Does your camera even take RAW files? You mean unedited jpegs?
And besides, you only bought a Drobo because Mr. Daring Fireball has a hard-on for it, and you have a hard-on for him. So there.
Either way, you’d be better off with a Time Capsule or something similar, with offsite backup of your essential stuff. No matter how many drives and redundancies there are in the Drobo box, if it goes on fire you’re still fucked.
14. Adrian
For me flickr isn’t a storage solution. It re-numbers photos too. I need to get round to installing Aperture and setting up some proper photo workflow.
I don’t have RAW photos as a format. I meant raw source as in unedited (so taking 200 photos of an event and reducing it to the 20 photos I want to display). Plus photos from everyone else who was at the event.
I’ve been looking at the Drobo for years and comparing it with things like the Ready Nas NV+. This has nothing to do with Daring Fireball. He’s barley mentioned it. They have sponsored his feed for two months, but he’s barely commented on it.
A Time Capsule is not the right solution, as it backs up images. I would need double the storage or more for a time capsule. I already have a TB of data so I would need like 3-4 TB of storage for a time capsule to be be effective. The only effective way from me to use Time Capsule would be with another Drobo.
I use Time Machine to back up my Mac Mini and my Laptop. But no real data sits on those.
And a fire would have friend my other drives too. Like I said it’s all about mitigating risk. Before I was susceptible to a drive failure. Now I’m not.
Jeez, write a blog on how a device is working for you and have everyone say “it’s not”. It’s the perfect solution for me, and is fantastic. Also less friking wires and power cords behind the TV.
15. Andrew
I would write to drobo, two disks down in two days seems odd (given that I have never lost a hard drive in 20 years). I am off to back up now as well.
16. Roger
This may be of interest: Google did a study last year on over 100,000 HDs in its data centres… amongst other findings is ‘…failure rates did not correspond to drive usage…’.
Summary here: http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/
Full Report (in pdf): http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
17. Andrew
That is interesting.
The only time I saw a few disks fail at the same time was when the disk array we set up was filled with disks that all came from a single manufacturers batch. Now I check.
18. Adrian
@Andrew (15)
You’re right two drives in two weeks is odd.
However I did butcher the chassis to get them open, and one could say the problem started there. I now have three 1TB drives in all from the same place, all new, all of the same type.
If one of those goes you have a point. If the don’t I guess the issue was me / cheap sources.
19. Andrew
I would check whether the three disks you have came from the same batch. If there is a manufacturers fault with that batch you may find they all fail within weeks of each other.
20. Andrew
Find out if they come from the same batch, chances are if the fail, they will fail together :)
21. Chz
The Drobo would be cool (and I’d buy one) if, at the same price, I got gigabit ethernet and disks that would be recoverable when the Drobo dies. This is its greatest failing - if your Drobo dies, only another Drobo can read the disks. I can live with the speed sacrifice - it is good enough for most purposes. (Or they could make it cheaper - they claim it’s all off-the-shelf components and some secret sauce in the firmware)
Personally, a two drive enclosure with RAID-1 is just a cheaper option even if you are “wasting” half the space. The enclosure and two 1.5TB drives will run you the same as an empty Drobo. Slightly more for a NAS, but that’s quite a bit more useful than USB2/Firewire. It’s a nice boutique product though.
22. cian
got my drobo from amazon.com from 320bucks and the giant box was smuggled by buddy flying Upper. It’s a nice piece of kit.