Drobo vs NAS

[Adassus]

Anyone knows of a NAS that works like a drobo? Im looking for a NAS that works a similar way. Data redundancy against HD failure is a top priority for me. Id hate to see my collection of movies/tv shows/music gone because of 1 faulty drive. The fact that any of the 4 drives in a Drobo can be hotswapped and the whole array automatically rebuilt makes it extremely attractive to me. Of course, thats all it does so its kinda useless on a network unless you get the droboshare sold separately (for a total of 700$ without drives...ouch).

The ones im eyeing are the hp mediasmart and the new linksys media hub. I dont need more advanced features. I just need to make sure my data is safe against HD failures.

BTW, Im planning on using the NAS as my main storage device for all my media files. I'm not gonna use it as a backup device meaning data redundancy within the NAS itself is super important.

Thanks

 

[mgraves]

I'm not certain what magic Drobo actually performs. What you describe is just a matter of RAID. With four disks you can achieve RAID 1,10 or 5 depending upon your storage requirements.

In RAID5 you can have the equivalent of three drives worth of space. The remaining 25% of the space is parity data used to reconstruct the array when one of the drives fails.

If you use RAID 5 and allocate a hot spare you get 50% of the drive space for use now, 25% for parity and one drive remains ready to replace one of the other in the event of failure.

I have my LaCie 5 drive NAS set for RAID5 with no spare.

 

[thiggins]

The Infrant (now NETGEAR) ReadyNAS series with the "XRAID" feature was around before Drobo. But any RAID 1 or 5 (or 10) array will survive a single drive failure (and a RAID 6 will survive two drives failing) as long as it's a drive failure. If the power supply or main board fails, however, all bets are off as to whether your data will be recoverable.

NEVER trust your data to a single device. RAID is not backup.

 

[Adassus]

The Infrant (now NETGEAR) ReadyNAS series with the "XRAID" feature was around before Drobo. But any RAID 1 or 5 (or 10) array will survive a single drive failure (and a RAID 6 will survive two drives failing) as long as it's a drive failure. If the power supply or main board fails, however, all bets are off as to whether your data will be recoverable.

NEVER trust your data to a single device. RAID is not backup.

The thing about drobo is that its completely hassle free.

Scenario: You got a setup with 2 HDD with full redundancy (RAID1 or whatever they call it for drobo). One of the HDD fails. Drobo lets you replace the broken HDD with another one hassle free and its gonna do the rest for you (recreating the data from the HDD to the new one).

From what I understand, if that were to happen with a typical RAID1 setup, youd have to backup all existing data before replacing the broken HDD since RAID1 will wipe all data on the existing drive.

Im especially interested in the linksys mediahub, but if thats how raid1 really works, that would be pretty troublesome.

link taken from other thread
http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/linksys.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=17308&p_created=1225343365&p_sid=ulRplMnj&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NDMsNDMmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0xNzIxLDE3MjMmcF9wdj0mcF9jdj0yLjE3MjMmcF9zY2ZfMz0xJnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9bm1oNDEw&p_li=&p_topview=1

 

[thiggins]

From what I understand, if that were to happen with a typical RAID1 setup, youd have to backup all existing data before replacing the broken HDD since RAID1 will wipe all data on the existing drive.

Properly implemented RAID (any level) should allow replacing a failed drive without having to delete data.

The Linksys article contains instructions for adding a drive to the base Media Hub, which comes with one drive. That is known as RAID migration, which not all NASes support.

Here are the Media Hub RAID 1 recovery instructions.

Again, the NETGEAR ReadyNASes work similar to the Drobos (or vice versa). Check the Duo.