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Big Computer 3 is one year old! - part 6 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2009

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Given that we have now fallen out with Drobo and LaCie were are back to building machines ourselves, at quite a cost saving but admittedly with the in-house expertise which is available to very few. The fundamental principles (and flaws), though are worthy of note: 1. We are using a computer not a detachable hard drive.
2. The connection is through a network, not USB.
3. The use of Linux- or Solaris-based operating systems means we are playing with a real operating system not a Mickey Mouse ones such as Vista, for our RAID arrays. We know from experience that when it fails, we can recover data. Even if the motherboard fails we can mount drives in another machine and get the data out. Drobo has proprietary data handling and you cannot work around a system board failure - were they to go out of business (or change the model) you might come unstuck. We are routinely opening files from magazines made almost 10 years ago - that is a long time in computing and a long time for a start-up venture to survive.
4. Our system requires expertise to use, unlike the Drobo (when it is actually working).
5. We have not had to invest much more for a computer-based storage.
6. We are paying a premium on desk space, office noise and heat generation - each new machine adds to this issue.


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Overall

To summarise then, the outlook for increased storage requirements is quite complex or risky, or both! We still favour a computer above a detachable hard drive; DVDs remain problematic in that you do need a lot of them. You may care to think about this when you are using a motor drive at a wedding! You might also give your house-keeping schedule a long hard look and be a little more ruthless, the problem is only going to get worse and you will one day be called to account!

For the average photographer the external, detachable hard drive and a bit of care are probably the best options for security and expandability. In a recent PCPro review of 15 external hard drives, the cost per GB ranged from 8p to 39.4p (the Drobo works out at about 22p/GB, the bespoke 8TB system we built at 26p/GB). Taking the median value external drive cost (20p/GB) suggests that your average wedding backup (two external drives with 36GB each) is going to cost about £15 to £20 to store. The actual sizes range from 160GB to 1TB (1024GB). The write speeds to backup our average wedding means that it would take between 2.4 minutes and 48 minutes, so you had better read the specifications carefully! If you have eSATA connections on your computer you are going to be three or four times faster (eSATA is the newest connection method for external drives and is only found on the later computers). For the external drives, the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus pushed all the right buttons (1TB; £88; 1.7s to write a 50MB file). So you are up and running for less than £250 if you include a copy of Beyond Compare. The OneTouch, by the way, stands for the backup system software that is included with the drives.

" One thing we encountered was the unstableness of the Drobo. While it must be difficult attempting to maintain multiple drives of different speeds and capacities, this is what Drobo is supposed to do. However, multiple times during our tests our computers would claim that our Drobo was unreadable and that the only options were to eject or reformat. This simply cannot happen to your storage on a regular basis which we found out the hard way, as our Drobo video review was wiped out."

Gizmodo.com 2007

" Where does this leave me? Totally at the mercy of Drobo technical support. I appreciate that Drobo tries to make things simple for people, I really do. We've all seen how successful that Apple is at enabling the layperson with power they never had before. The difference is I can still get under the hood with Apple products, whereas with the Drobo, nada. Nothing."

technicalalex.com November 2008


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1st Published 01/06/2009
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:23

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