Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2011/04/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 09:04, <afirkin at afirkin.com> wrote: > I KNOW SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT A DROBO Yet another tangent unrelated to poor Tina's problem (I bit my virtual tongue really hard to keep myself from posting an unhelpfully smug additional Mac plug), but on this side topic I think it's worth saying): there seems to be a certain Drobo mania here, and I just want to make sure all those who are considering a Drobo consider a Netgear ReadyNAS just as carefully before actually making a purchase and installing hardware. Why? Well, one thing is my personal experience of the reliability of ReadyNASsen, through a number of years, two generations of ReadyNAS hardware, failures of disk drives in the array without data loss, and at least two relatively painless migrations onto newer, bigger disks with each NAS. But the other thing is more basic. A ReadyNAS is fundamentally a NAS - Network Attached Storage. This means that the internal operating system in the ReadyNAS is responsible for the nuts and bolts of making sure the filesystem on the disks remains uncorrupted, and that filesystem is to a useful extent insulated by having to be accessed via network file-sharing protocols from whatever unstable wackiness may be going on as your client computer gets polluted or crashes. (Okay, insert your own Windows dig here.) The only downside I see to that is that network sharing can be a bit slower than a more bare-metal drive connection. http://www.readynas.com/ As I understand it, a Drobo fundamentally acts like a big disk attached directly to your computer, which your computer formats directly as some filesystem native to it, and then uses as such (and potentially corrupts as it goes down in flames). There's apparently also a NAS add-on interface for the Drobos which seems kind of like an afterthought, but... I dunno, I just don't trust the whole Drobo vibe. -Jeff