Product Review – Drobo
You’ve got a lot of data. Pictures, movies, music, the works. And chances are, more and more of that data is on magnetic hard drives instead of shiny plastic optical discs. My problem was, making all that data manageable, and keeping it backed up.
Welcome to the world of worry-free RAID. OK, not really — but very, very close. It’s called Drobo, and it’s a toaster-sized black box full of hard drives.
About a year ago, I started ripping all of our DVDs onto hard drives, for wirelessly streaming to the various computers and Apple TV devices throughout the house. We buy a lot of DVDs, and even in a bigger house, rack after rack of movies and TV shows is bulky at best and hideous at… also best. Much better to rip each DVD once, then stick it in storage under the basement stairs.
Problem: Three terabytes is a lot of bytes. And a lot of hard drives. And impossible to back up easily. And a total pain in the butt. Picture this: Next to my desktop monitor is a aged iMac, dragooned into acting as a media server, with four external Firewire drives daisy chained in back. Did I mention that’s a year’s worth of work with no backups? And that it’s ugly?
I looked into getting a big, cheap RAID box, but RAID’s not for dilettantes. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and expansion basically means having to start from scratch, with a second rig and bigger (or more) drives. No thanks.
Data Robotic’s Drobo uses proprietary “BeyondRAID” technology to go, uh, beyond RAID. You can mix and match drives speeds and sizes, and expansion is easy. Just plug a new drive into an empty slot, or pull out an old drive (no need to even power down), and swap it for a bigger one.
I bought the bottom-of-the-line Drobo for $310 on Amazon. And shoved three, two-terabyte hard drives in it. Total storage: 3.6 terabytes — fully backed up, in case a drive fails. (That’s 5.5TB or real drive space, minus 1.84TB for data protection and 6.52GB in “overhead.”) You can even protect yourself against two drives failing simultaneously, but you’ll take a bigger storage hit. Total investment: $730. I still have a free slot left over for expansion. When bigger drives become available, don’t fret — a single Drobo partition can be as large as 16TB. At about 2GB a pop, that’s a lot of ripped movies.
Set-up was easy, although I’m glad I checked something first. The newest drives (like the ones I just bought) use larger sectors, which on incompatible equipment will result (I think I have this right) in less storage and slower performance. Drobo can handle the new drives, but only after installing the latest firmware. And the instructions tell you to put your drives in first, before even checking for firmware upgrades.
Wrong!
Check your firmware first, or at least make sure your HDs aren’t the new Advanced Format.
So, firmware upgraded, I powered down, shoved in the hard drives and powered back up. Drobo Dashboard recognized everything properly, formatted the drives to Apple’s HFS+, and was ready to go. Next step: Tell iTunes that the Drobo is where to keep files, and then to go on and reorganize everything from the four little drives onto the one big one.
And then wait three days.
Using my antiquated Mac’s Firewire 400, a terabyte takes about 22 hours to copy over. Three terabytes, nearly three days. Meanwhile, iTunes streaming continues to function just fine.
Drobo has a fully-modern Firewire 800 interface, but the old Mac doesn’t. Pricier Drobo units have eSATA or gigabit ethernet outputs. And more drive bays, too. Since it’s going to be at least another year or two before I fill up all four bays with 2TB drives, and it can theoretically handle 4TB drives, the extra money just didn’t seem worth it. Even then, my storage needs are pretty extreme for a consumer, so I doubt many homes would need anything bigger. (Question: We’ve been stuck with 2TB-max drives for a while now. Has magnetic storage hit a wall?)
Maintenance is easy. The shiny black plastic cover on the front is just translucent enough for the status lights to shine through. If they’re green, ignore them. Yellow means add more storage soon, red means add more storage right the heck now. Flashing red means a drive has failed, and you’d better swap it out. The Dashboard front end gives you all the same info, in the exact same manner, so you don’t need to keep it in plain sight.
The only real con I’ve noticed (other than the lousy instructions regarding the firmware), is the noise. At least during the initial copy, the fan runs almost continuously, and there’s precious little sound insulation. If you’re used to the whisper-quiet of an iMac (even my Nehalem-powered Mac Pro barely murmurs, even under duress), you’ll want to think about putting the Drobo somewhere else. Since my desk backs up on the mechanicals room, I’m planning on drilling a couple holes in the wall and buying some longer cables.
Drobo generally has higher up-front costs than RAID, but should prove to have a much lower TCO. And while it’s not quite plug-and-play easy, it’s very, very close.
Don’t confuse RAID with backup. Redundancy is fine for protecting against a HD failure; but, all sorts of additional things can go wrong with file systems that render the data unreadable. A good idea to consider what is on this drive that can not be recreated and back it up elsewhere as well. The movie library can at least be recreated from source material. Photos, etc. likely don’t have a replacement source.
Yeah, I’m also looking at off-site backup solutions. So far, the easiest (and cheapest) solution I’ve come up with, is to keep my video on those Firewire drives — but keep those drives at the in-laws’ place.
The other thing to worry about with ANY RAID-5 or RAID-6 setup is failure of the device itself. If the RAID controller (or in this case the Drobo) fails, it is highly unlikey you are going to be able to pull any data off of the drives even though they are undamaged. Going with a RAID-1 (aka Mirrored Drives) costs you more “unused” drive space, but in the event of device failure the drives can be popped into another case and the data recovered.
It’s worth noting that the primary reason it takes so long to transfer that much data isn’t the bus speed of FireWire 400. The bus can sustain 40-odd MB/sec. The transfer speed is impacted much more by the speed of the host system, and the hard drives themselves.
FW400 can move 1TB in about 6-7 hours, assuming everything else can keep up.
RAID is actually pretty easy to set up. But, as KSS said that it is the off site solution you are needing. House burns down, power spike or flood will pretty much screw you if you don’t have good backups. I keep photos on two older 70GB drives, one at each Grandparent’s house. For your risk cost analysis, it might just be cheaper to let the movies burn and let insurance replace them and rip them all again. That is a crap load of data. Keep what you can’t replace backed up and be prepared to lose the rest in case of something really bad happening.
This seems like such a fab idea for my family – we have two kids, two viewing locations, and about a gazillion DVDs that always wind up at the wrong end of the house, scratched, or separated from their cases. One question, though – what software do you use to rip the DVD content, and is it available for Windows?
Bob –
I use a program called Handbrake, and it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest version is fairly easy to use, but you’ll want to do some experimenting. Then I use another program called MetaX (not sure about availability on that one) to tag the file with all the metadata I like to have. But I’m more anal than most — you can probably get away with just the title and cover art.
Danke schoen muchly! I’m thinking this will be totally cool.
Be warned: There’s a serious time investment. On a screamin’ Quad Core Nehalem Mac Pro, a typical 90 minute movie takes 25 minutes to rip. My four-year-old iMac (Core 1 Duo) took nearly three hours to do the same job.
Remember the fighter pilot motto: Speed is life!
Just what does rip entail in this case? Are you copying the entire DVD disc image & file structure to a hard drive, just the .VOB movies files, or to another format?
DVDdecrypter (Windows) will rip a DVD to an .ISO, or copy the entire structure to a hard drive folder, which is then playable. If memory serves I get about the same time (c. 25 minutes), but I’m running an older Athlon XP 2.08Gz chip under WinXP. If it’s an older movie with the 4.77Gb format,
Of course, if you’re talking about re-coding, that’s different. I can take a ripped movie (the .VOB files) and convert them to a 1.4Gb .divx file, but it takes a couple hours; pretty much as long as the movie is. I expect your Mac Pro would eat my old system for breakfast.
Me, I’m waiting for the solid-state drives to catch up with the platters. BTW, I expect the reason we’ve hit a plateau on capacity is that there’s only so much data you can fit on a single 3-1/2″ platter, and the usual next step is to increase the number of platters. IIRC some of the new terabyte drive have 4 platters. I don’t think you do more than that in the now-standard half-height size drive.
We saw something similar a while back with cpu speeds; let’s take a look at the replay:
From 1979 (4.77Mz 8088) to 1985 (16Mz ’386) speed was tripled. 1985 to 1989 (33Mz ’386, then ’486), speed doubled. Three years later (1992, 66Mz ’486) speed doubled again. Four years later (1996, 200Mz Pentium) another tripling. Four years after that (2000, 450Mz Pentium III) clock rate more than doubled again. Two years later (2001, 1000Mz or 1Gz PIII) doubled again. 2002 => 2Gz, 2003 => 3Gz, 2004 => 4gz! Uh, oh, it’s a hockey stick graph!!
The fastest clock rate mentioned in the Wiki entry for a modern Intel Core is … 2.33Gz. So in the past six years the high-end clock rate … dropped 40%, compared to the previous six years (1998 – 2004) where clock speed increased 1000%. Of course, these days we have 4-core designs which can be more efficient than an older, high-speed, single-core design, and Apple deserves some credit for pioneering that route. They’ve been at the forefront of more-efficient & quieter designs for a while now.
Point being that designers dropped the brute force approach, and adapted more elegant solutions. So where does that point us for storage? Thumb drives and SD cards are the obvious first choice. While they lag behind platter drives in capacity, they require far less electricity,and are more transportable. Another possiblity would be the venerable static ram. From Wiki: “SRAM is more expensive, but faster and significantly less power hungry (especially idle) than DRAM.” There are other issues, but this is a not-unreasonable avenue. People are willing to pay more for a quieter, less power-consumptive machine (i.e. an Apple), so this might be a useful pursuit for that company.
If someone had told me fifteen years ago that I would be now be able to burn 4.77Gb (IIRC had a 4Gb Seagate back then for my C: drive) of data in 15 minutes or so, I would have asked them if they were high. Then I would have asked them if they had any to spare.
Obviously I’m speaking here of the typical user, not Stephen and his “burn every movie known to Hollywood” requirements. That’s more in the “I need a Peterbilt” category. Heh. Still, I suspect that’s where we’re heading, at least for portable devices. As for “desktops,” why not a generic system which can be booted from a (say) 30Gb thumb-drive which contains all the necessary drivers for a known platform, as well as personal data & preferences for an individual? Let’s take Apple for an example again. Their systems are far more “locked down” (if you’ll excuse the expression) than Wintel systems generally are, so the configuration should be fairly predictable. Take modern iMacs for example. The biggest differences are relatively minor, such as screen resolution & display chipset. Just include all possible (few) drivers, and dynamically load the appropriate driver according to the current machine.
Ok. Sorry about the thread-jack. I’ll shut up now.
I don’t need no stinkin’ special features. I just rip the movie itself, using Handbrake’s default settings for Apple TV. Very high quality, 5.1 sound, m4v file type. The Pro crunches 70-100 frames per second, or a bit slower if I have to run the decomb filter on interlaced DVDs. (There are more of those around than you think.)
On that other question: Are people willing to pay more for a quieter device that uses less power? Well, Apple charges as much as $829 for an iPad, before accessorizing. So, yeah, I think people are willing.
So you do a recode as well. Yep, that would leave my system in the dust.
Hmmm. Does Drobo have some sort of “clone” feature, so you can back one unit up onto another? That way you could put the copy somewhere safe, maybe even another building if you’re concerned about a fire.
Of course, you would have to buy two, but I expect the money might be worth it, to avoid re-building everything.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this, but then Blu-Ray came along and jacked up the storage requirements considerably. Still thinking…