Drobo 5D Drive Array

I take a lot of digital photos and I’m always afraid of losing them to computer failure. During an upgrade of my operating system a few years ago, I lost about six months of photos including those I’d taken on a vacation in Egypt. I still had the lower-resolution copies I’d made for sharing, but all the masters were gone. At the time I had backups on an external drive, but during the upgrade I reformatted the drive thinking everything on my main drive was safe. Big mistake. The upgrade failed and I had to reformat the main drive and I lost everything. (I had backups on DVD of all my earlier photos.)

These days I store my photos on a 3TB external hard drive and back them up automatically every hour to a separate external hard drive via Apple’s Time Machine program. In addition I back up my photos to archival-quality Blu-ray discs, and Amazon.com’s standard DVD discs.

I still worry about losing my photo hard drive and the backup hard drive at the same time because those are the only “complete” sets of all my photos (I only backup to Blu-ray & DVD when I have a lot of new shots). Though unlikely, this is possible.

I’ve been aware of the Dobro line of drive arrays for a long time and finally took the plunge and bought a 5D. The 5D holds up to five hard drives in one enclosure which is seen by your computer as one big hard drive (or “volume”) up to 16TB in size. If you reach that limit, you can create another volume. You can install hard drives up to 4TB in size, so five of those gives you 20TB. You can also mix and match different-sized hard drives. If you want to replace a smaller drive with a larger one, simply pull the old drive out while the unit is running and slap the new one in, the 5D handles the rest. I’ve tested this and it works well.

The Dobro arrays have automatic data protection. Using something they call BeyondRAID technology, the array can be set up with “Single Disk Redundancy” or “Dual Disk Redundancy.” Under single disk redundancy, you could lose any one drive in your array without losing any data. That means if one of your drives completely dies, all your data is still safe. With dual disk redundancy, you could lose any two drives in your array and not lose any data. (The 5D requires a minimum of two drives under single disk redundancy, and three drives under dual disk redundancy.)

The 5D protects your data by storing it more than once on different drives. You give up some of your available space for that protection, but you gain peace of mind. Using dual disk redundancy, you end up being able to use roughly half the available drive space.

Dobro has a calculator to determine the usable space depending on the different drive capacities in the array. Let’s say you have five drives: 4TB, 4TB, 3TB, 3TB and 1TB. Sizes are always a little smaller than listed so this 15TB is actually 13.64TB. With this collection, you’d have 6.35TB of usable, protected hard drive space. Any two drives could fail and you wouldn’t lose any data. Under single disk redundancy, you’d have 9TB of usable protected space.

If you had five 4TB drives, that would be 18.19TB of space and 10.89TB of usable protected data under dual disk redundancy. Under single disk redundancy, you’d have 14.52TB of usable protected data.

This is perfect for the kind of storage, access and protection I need. With the drives I have on hand, my array will eventually contain (once everything’s set up) five drives: 4TB/4TB/4TB/3TB/2TB. That’s a total of 17TB which is actually 15.46TB. With dual disk protection, I’ll end up with a usable protected data capacity of slightly more than half that, 8.17TB. (Under single disk redundancy, it would be 11.8TB.)

I’ll keep backing photos up to Blu-ray and possibly DVD, but I’ll feel less urgency in doing it. It’s still a good idea because I could store those discs somewhere outside my apartment for added safety.

The 5D is visible to Melanie too when she’s on our network so she can copy her own pictures and anything else of value and know they’ll also be protected.

The 5D reformats the drives you insert so any data on them is blown away. That means you can’t take drives with data already on them, pop them into the 5D, and automatically have the data protected. The drives you put into the 5D must be empty or contain data you don’t mind losing. Once the drive is in the array, the 5D quickly reformats it and your total capacity increases.

I started with two fresh 4TB drives using single disk redundancy (the default setting). I transferred all my photos from an external 3TB hard drive attached to my iMac. I verified everything had been copied correctly, then reconfigured my photo editing software (Adobe Lightroom) to find the photos in the new location. After all that was good, I disconnected the external 3TB hard drive and added it to the 5D to increase the total storage. I then switched to dual disk redundancy. After that I started transferring my audio and video files from an external 2TB drive. When that’s done, I’ll add that drive to the array. The last thing I’ll do is take my external 4TB Time Machine hard drive and add that as well. I’d been using Time machine to back up everything; my iMac’s 750GB internal hard drive, and all my photo, audio, video and other files. Going forward I’ll back up only the 750GB internal drive with Time Machine to a separate external 1TB drive and let the 5D protect everything else. Over time, if I need more storage in the array, I’ll replace the smaller drives with larger ones. Likewise if drives fail, I’ll pop in replacements.

Another advantage to the 5D is instead of having five separate hard drives connected to my iMac (via USB hubs) and five different icons on my screen, I now have only one Drobo “drive” icon with the combined storage of all the drives. And the Drobo has a Thunderbolt cable which should give me faster transfer speeds than the USB cables I’d been using on the separate drives.

So far the device is working as advertised. I’m still a little leery about the long-term reliability of the system, but I think it’s a great solution. No it’s not perfect, but neither is analog photography. Negatives and prints can be lost in fires, stolen, damaged, or fade over time. Likewise digital devices can fail or become obsolete. The advantage to digital is you can make perfect copies of your data and store it redundantly and off-site to minimize your risk of disaster.

Cool device. Well designed, attractive interface, and fairly easy to use.

http://www.drobo.com/