I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my two Drobo disk arrays (Drobo S and Drobo 800i). Most of the time they just work, and are faster and more reliable than the Western Digital MyBooks that they replaced. Where I have had issues is when upgrading the Drobo with higher capacity hard drives. To replace the eight 2 TB hard drives in the Drobo 800i with eight 3 TB drives, I had to replace the drives one at a time, and it took 1-2 days for the system to rewrite the data across the array before adding the next drive – almost two weeks in all. Over the last year, there have been several reports on the net of folks (including some prominent photographers) having their Drobo die. The log files are encrypted, and Drobo uses a proprietary file format. Unless you purchase an extended warranty, they charge a lot for support after the initial warranty expires – some have complained that they are holding you hostage to recover your data. I’ve always had my data backed up in triplicate (at least one set off site). Because of the concerns with Drobo, I recently acquired a Synology 1812+ system and set it up using the eight 2 TB hard drives just removed from the Drobo 800i. My only complaint so far is that it gets bogged down when transferring large amounts of data. The initial transfer is very fast (30-45 MB/sec) but then slows down (1-3 MB/sec). Right now it is taking me over a day to write ~0.9 TB (~ 3,700,000 files). Bottom line is to always have multiple copies of data using different storage technologies – and upgrade as new technologies become available. I have floppy disks, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and hard drives that have failed and/or no longer have the hardware needed to access the data.
DJM
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