Drobo?

Jared Meyer

Jared Meyer

Veteran
Anyone used one of these?

http://www.drobo.com/Products/Index.html


Any reason this would not be a good solution for video editing?

I've been looking at them for a while but was holding off until they added Firewire.

I've always used daisy-chained firewire drives, so RAID is new to me. I like the low maintenance of the Drobo, but am curious how it compares to other cheaper enclosures.

drobo_thumb.jpg
 
Drobo is an interesting concept, but not something that would be fantastic for high bitrate HD - as the drobo is fairly low performance.
 
I Jared, i ordered the enclosure only (DR04DD10) to replace many LeCIE BIG DISKS I have (failed power supplies have made 2 of these leCIE disk total bricks over the past 9 months - I dont trust them any more - all corrupted). DROBO: I have 4 x 500GB SATA2 drives from internal MAC PRO I replaced .. these are sitting on shelf gathering dust so I thought the DROBO would be a good stop gap.

Drobo currently seems onto to take SATA1 & 2 DDMs. THese are so cheap.

I will be using the DROBO as a second instance of P2 footage and projects , discarding ALLL other external disks enclosures, but 2TB will not last long. The DROBO in FW800 should be fine for editing P2 stuff but I wont be using it for this in my workflow. INstead using internal array in MACPRO (ATTO r380 card).

I am consolidating all above stuff with a QUANTUM Ultrium4 LTO tape drive. This seems like the only long term viable option and much cheaper than disk over time and less likely to fail - especially with two instances!. Spinning disk for material you cant lose is NOT the answer for archive.

THe DROBO is not the real answer for the above but it is very cool because you can dynamically pull SATA DDM's on and out somewhat at will and this is also attractive. The new FW800 port is very attractive. Would have hoped SAS interface but alas no.
will post my experiences when it arrives from OWC in 22AUG2008.
hth
w
 
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