Anybody use a RAID or Drobo system?

I'm looking to expand my storage, looking at LaCie 2big Quadra, G-Tech Gsafe or Drobo. Has anybody got any experience of these units?



Laurence J. Power

What are you aiming for by using RAID? Is it performance or ensuring the safety of files? I personally back up images to 2 different disks and have a time machine backup to a third, none of which have RAID and I believe is at least as effective as RAID if not more so.

Looking for simple security of storage. i.e. mirror image drives, hot swapable if possible

Laurence J. Power

IMO for storage single drives are better since with RAID if your PC has a problem, you get a power failure or you simply accidentally delete files you potentially end up with two corrupt drives or two drives with the files deleted.

The place for RAID is network servers to reduce the chance of a file being lost due a HDD failure before it is backed up.

Just bear in mind that RAID (the various "mirroring" options such as 1, 5, 10, etc.) should not be used as alternative to "proper" backups, it is not a panacea. Your data will be "safer", but not safe from water and fire damage, theft, RAID controller problems, all of the drives going belly up (which can happen if there's a hardware failure and/or they are from the same batch), and so on.

The main advantage to using RAID 1, etc., is less downtime. In the event that a drive should fail, the system can stay up while you swap out the faulty drive - you should not have to spend hours reinstalling everything from your backups to get up and running again.

I have heard/read some people having problems with Drobo NAS drives. I don't have one, but I think the best thing is to trawl online reviews on places like Amazon and Ebuyer.com.

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Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

quoting post from AndyM:

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I have heard/read some people having problems with Drobo NAS drives. I don't have one, but I think the best thing is to trawl online reviews on places like Amazon and Ebuyer.com.

--
Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

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Hence posting here and elsewhere asking for comments :-)

Laurence J. Power

quoting post from AndyM:

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The main advantage to using RAID 1, etc., is less downtime. In the event that a drive should fail, the system can stay up while you swap out the faulty drive - you should not have to spend hours reinstalling everything from your backups to get up and running again.

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Agreed, but this is an advantage mostly where the device is acting as a file server rather than a backup drive.

Lawrence - I'd personally suggest backing up to different single drives in the first instance, possibly using different types of backup/software and then consider RAID as a way to improve on that.

But RAID does not do this unless you have the kind of system that uses three drived. Raid is for enhanced performance

DavidL

As has already been said the primary purposes of RAID systems are availability and performance viz. the file system doesn't stop dead if a drive fails and by spreading the file system across multiple drive i.e. striped, performance can be improved.

Having said that, in real life it never quite works out that way, the 'gotcha coefficient of RAID systems is high... personally and at work I run several flavousr of RAID... HP NAS servers, HP servers, Buffalo TeraStations, 4 & 6 disk NetGear ReadNAS, MacPros and HP workstations... and have had disks fail in most of them.

What would I recommend... well, how long is a piece of string?

Your first and the $64,000 question is what happens when the disasters you'rr planning for actually happen... first if a disk fails do the systems actually keep running? Sadly, in practice, some do, some don't, although a re-boot will normally sort that ou.. second, what is performance then like? Well not very good, rebuilding a RAID is hard work and can take a long time our RAID-5 HP NASs take 24hr or more... and the killer 'gotcha... statistically the number of disk accesses required to rebuild a 4 disk RAID-5 with large (say 1TB plus) disks, challenges the inherent reliability of the disks themselves (the unrecoverable read error rate of a typical disk is between 1 & 10 in 10E15 reads!) At which point the mantra RAID is NOT a backup solution needs to be repeated yet again.

Having got through all of that what if your RAID box fails big time, but doesn't corrupt the drives on it's way out the door, what can you do with them... many times in practice very little other than put them in an identical or very similar system... especially if using a proprietary RAID system ie Drobo or RAID-X... this also applies to some seemingly benign controller based mirroring systems... do NOT assume you can simply plug one of a mirrored pair into another machine or USB drive box! without testing it.

That said the mirroring on the HP servers works well and with careful configuration you can plug a disk into a USB box if the sh1t hits the fan. The big HP NASs have a few gotcha's but have never let us down in coming up for 7 years, although we did have a second drive start failing during the re-build of the first on one occasion (see previous point but that's what backups are for!). The TeraStations have been painless but are not easy to expand/upgarde... you can change the disks but this is unsupported by Buffalo, lots of "how to" on the net, some even posted by people who have actually done it

My current favourite is the NetGear ReadyNAS, you can buy them without disks and put your own in or indeed upgrade, supported by NetGear, lots of flavours of RAID and non-RAID, the proprietary flavours are Drobo like.

Personally I have two 6x3TB disk boxes running RAID-X 2 with dual parity, one at home and one at the office... which hold backups #3 & #4 of my image library... backups #1 & #2 are non-RAID external disks and #5 is tapes in a firesafe at a third location. After 30+ years in IT and related industries... you can never have enough backups, probably best re-phrased as "customers never have enough backups".

Why so much storage... well to all of you buying D800s, welcome to the world of big sensors... compared to the cost of the shoots; equipment, petrol, locations, models, MUAs etc. etc. storage doesn't cost that much, about £10 per shoot including backups and if I threw a lot more away it would cost a even less.

Probably missed a few points and missed a few bits of explanation...

quoting post from  LJP:

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Hence posting here and elsewhere asking for comments :-)

Laurence J. Power

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I know it seem that had been stating the obvious, but the reason for that part of my post was to suggest two places that you may not already looked at for reviews from people with experience of the products you are looking at.

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Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

I'm thinking RAID 1, speed is not paramount, having two mirrored drives which I could take out and use on their own sounds better than RAID 5. Re the loss of capacity, with 2 3TB drives I should have enough.

Based on comments I am going to ditch the Drobo units since I don't want to have problems getting stuck with a proprietary system

Having said that speed was not important, I notice that both the G-tech and the LaCie have only got USB2 connections, would USB3 be of any real use? the NetGear ReadyNAS has a 3 and seems reasonably priced.

Yes I back up most RAW files onto disk, there are a load which do not merit bombproof storage, but reasonable protection would be useful. Am I correct in thinking that although I would have two or more drives, my computer would merely see one and treat it as such?

Laurence J. Power

Yes, USB-3 is well worth having, provided your current (or future computer) has it.

Yes, your computer will see the two mirrored disks as a single disk, which allows you to very conveniently write two copies of each file, one to each disk.

Yes, it will also allow you, an errant program or hardware to just as conveniently delete or corrupt both copies.

No, RAID systems are not bomb-proof, neither are they flood-proof, theft-proof nor fire-proof and certainly not hyperbole proof.

One would be merely creating a single, albeit slightly more robust backup when you could just as easily create two independent backups... think about buying two separate disks!

Bought a Synology housing and 2 x 3tb drives. set it up as RAID 1 using an ethernet connection thus I will be able to access images externally even when the coputer is off.

Laurence J. Power

I've just purchased the Synology DS212+. Up to 6Tb.

These are the features that I didn't know of until I got it running.
Able to host webpages/site
Network Print
MySQL hosting, y'know databases and all
phpMyAdmin
Cloud service
iTunes server

They are just a few features that are on this back up solution. Drobo are very expensive compared to the one I got

I know you probably don't want the extras...but being cheaper than Drobo.

I was unaware of the additional features when I bought it, and currently are not using any, but they are there and it cost me no more than the original unit I was considering.

One feature that I like, being RAID 1 if the unit fails I can unplug a drive and put it straight into my computer, also I can move the drive to another housing. Drobo are a proprietory encryption/compression system thus if the unit fails you have no choice but to buy another. and in the meantime your data is completely safe, so safe that even you can't access it!

Laurence J. Power

The only thing I don't like about it, since the filing system is .ext4, it is a Linux system that is not compatible with Windows NTFS. That would mean I would have to format the hard drive and back up again. Something I don't want to do again.