Drobo Followup

Well, my Drobo unit arrived today and I ran into two problems.

First, Drobo uses SATA drives, not ATA drives. This is clearly mentioned on the Drobo website, but somehow I overlooked this important information. What's the difference? Basically, ATA is the old standard computer hard drive, while SATA is the new one. You can find a quick "ATA versus SATA" tutorial posted here. Since I had planned to pull the drives out of four external drives, now I needed to know which external drives contained ATA drives and which ones contained SATA drives. So I used the net to track down the specs on the external drives I owned, but soon discovered that none of the manufacturers listed the ATA/SATA information. So I took my chances and cracked the cases. The two newest drives, both made by Seagate, contained SATA drives, while the two older drives, one made by Seagate and one made by Maxtor, contained ATA drives. Bummer. That meant I only had two drives that would work in Drobo. So installed those two and ordered two new 500 GB internal SATA drives via Amazon ($119.99 each). Drobo, by the way, requires two drives to work.

With the drive compatibility issue dealt with, I now realized that Drobo works a significant portion of its backup magic through redundancy. Translation: depending on the size of the hard drives you have loaded into Drobo, Drobo uses 1/2 to 1/3 of your total storage capacity for making a backup of your backup. Here's a quick chart that is included in the Drobo manual that shows you how much hard drive space is used for redundancy. The hard drives with the mark through them are the ones that are unavailable to you for backups.

Drobo, unfortunately, doesn't broadcast this fact on their website. You have to download a pdf called the "Drobo Data Sheet" to find out, or dig into the Support section of their website. If I had read the fine print more carefully, I may have decided to stick with my previous method of backups. On the other hand, now that I actually have a Drobo on my desktop, I like it! Green lights tell me my drives are working. Blue lights tell me how full the drives are. The "Drobo Dashboard" (which is a software program that comes with Drobo) gives me more details about how much space has been used and is available, and also painlessly updates its software and firmware. And -- the big thing -- I really like the idea of having an automated system that warns me of potential drive failures, lets me know when drives are getting full, lets me add larger drives as they are needed, and makes backups of backups to be sure I don't loose any data.

Now I'll put Drobo to the test of real world use and report back in a month or two as to how well it does.

Here's a quick look at what Drobo's Dashboard software looks like. Click on the image to view a larger picture.