Thread: Drobo or RAID?

I have 2 500Gb HDD running on Raid in my PC for PP images.
The system is Intel based with 4 Gb ram
The Raid system slow the machine a tad but nothing important for my purpose.
It is 4 years old and run very well

Id go the Drobo NFS over the disk idea any day. The management and array repair facilities are awesome.

The reason I think RAID is a better solution is because you have better redundency combined with the ability to continue operating through a disk failure. With RAID level 5 for example your data is shared accross 3 disks, and with a decent controller there is no noticable impact on system performance. Any 1 of the 3 disks can fail and you can continue to run with no loss of data. With a Mirrored system you get simmilar, but the computer is virtually unusable while the mirror is being rebuilt after a disk failure. With RAID 5 there is minimal system degredation during a rebuild, the system remians very useable. Again, I would reccomend a decent RAID controller, I have always used Adaptec with great success.

You also get better disk useage with RAID. 2 100GB disks mirrored give you 100GB of space. (50% loss) With RAID 5, 3 100GB disks would give you 200GB space (30% loss)

There are of course many other RAID levels, but 5 is the best for your application.

I have a Drobo FS which replaced my old Buffalo NAS. The Drobo is brilliant and very easy to work with. Fundamentally they hare a RAID structure as the allow for failure of 1 or 2 drives depending on how you configure it (ie RAID 5 or better). It was a toss up between a ReadyNAS and the Drobo. Two things swung me in favour of the Drobo FS (1) Drive compatibility and (2) Availability of the unit. The ReadyNAS was going to be dearer but was also not readily available. Both units are good though. A friend has a ReadyNAS and it performs very well.

I would recommend either unit.