A robot is guarding my photos
Sorry, that’s me talking in marketing jargon. Above is a Drobo, which is sold as “the world’s first data storage robot” or some nonsense like that. It’s not a freaking robot. It’s a 4-bay hard drive enclosure that has a particularly clever RAID-like data striping/mirroring implementation built in. As far as I can tell it’s something like RAID 5, but it’s smart enough to be able to handle non-identical (in size, spec or brand) hard drives and changes its strategy based on the number and size of the drives it has to work with. Right now I have two 1.5 terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green drives installed in my Drobo, so basically all it’s doing (as far as I can tell) is a simple RAID 1 mirroring strategy. If I were to add a third or fourth drive, its strategy would change to something more sophisticated. The real amazing thing is that drives are hot-swappable while you work - as long as you have more than one drive installed, you can literally pull one out and still be able to access all your data with no interruption.
Installing and uninstalling drives is a snap, too - no cables to play with, just take a 3.5″ SATA hard drive and slide it into a slot. Bingo. The ease of use of this thing is amazing, and it’s nice to know that my photos are backed up on a secure device that can withstand the failure of a hard drive (but not two at once). I was running out of space for all my photos, and this seemed like a much easier, and ultimately cheaper, solution than building a file server or an external RAID array. What’s more, it’s easily expandable, as I still have two open bays and I can always swap out older, smaller drives with newer, larger ones. But I should be good to go for a year or so.
This thing is apparently very, very, very, very, very, very popular among photographers.
Tags: Drobo