Re: [Hampshire] Drobo

2009/3/7 Rob Malpass <lug@???>:
> I saw a review of this [1] sort of black box RAID array on Click [2] last
> week and in truth it's just what I'm looking for as a NAS - currently have
> several drives via a NSLU2 but making a backup of 100Gb+ takes ages.
> However at £430 odd quid for the array and another £190 for the ability to
> use it as a NAS - it's very pricey particularly considering the hard drives
> required would be extra....
>

It is indeed a pricey device. I have a drobo v1 and droboshare on my
LAN which gets shared out over SMB to various machines around the
house. I like it. I don't love it.

> So it got me thinking about an equivalent DIY solution.   I already have a
> few hard drives I could use but I have a few requirements:

Ok, there's one thing to note about making a DIY drobo, you can
probably achieve pretty much everything the drobo does, except one
thing (easily). The ability to hot swap drives of random sizes and it
all just work. Whilst you can easily make a machine that can auto
expand an array as the user slaps more storage in the box, one key
thing the drobo does well is shrinking again. I can yank a disk out
(or it fail) and the system automagically rebuilds a _resilient_
solution on the remaining disks. If another disk goes pop and there's
enough space left to store all my data then that's viable too. Again
the rebuild/reorg happens and you're magically left with a resilient
system, ready for more disks.

It's this "magic sauce" that nobody else does.

> Overall - is this a feasible DIY project of should I just save my pennies
> and buy it whenever I can afford it?
>

Depends what you want to achieve. If you want a box that can be
plugged into a LAN and provide networked storage, and you want to do
it cheaply and without the "advanced" RAID-like (but not RAID)
features the drobo has then sure, you can do it. If you want to be
able to take the disks out of your LAN device and put them in another
machine and still read them (in the event of hardware failure for
example) you could do that with Linux software RAID.

If you want the technology the drobo provides then get a drobo.

Personally I wanted a box that sits there and stores my data, and when
I run out of room, I just want to be able to yank out a disk and chuck
in a new bigger one. The drobo does this, and nothing (I know of) does
the same thing. Each to their own.

Cheers,
Al.