I posted last summer that my storage solution for the home media server was in need of an update. With about 2.25TBs of video (movies and TV) and a couple hundred gigabytes of music, the number of externals and backups for the externals that I had to keep track of was a zoo.
Drobo sounded like the simplest and most useful solution. If you aren’t familiar, drobo is the “first data robot” for storage. The basic model comes with 4 drive bays, but they go all the way up to 8. I knew there would be some trade-offs for the idiot proof nature of the drobo. Basically you plug in any drives you want. Any size, and any order. If you only have 2 drives you can leave the others open. The drobo does all the work of turning your drives into a RAID like drive (they call it beyond RAID because it works differently than typical RAID). Need more room? Just add a drive into one of the empty slots, or replace the smallest drive with a bigger one. No need to pony up big money for the biggest drives on the market, just upgrade when needed. Also, the drobo automatically carves out a certain amount of your drive space to serve as data protection. Unlike a typical RAID, where you basically cut the space in half to do the protecting, drobo’s method only takes about 1/4 to 1/3 of your space for protection.
Anyway, I finally decided to take the plunge last fall. The drobo was on sale at Amazon, and the 1.5TB drives had come down far enough to make the total cost of unit and drives seem more reasonable. I started off with three 1.5TB drives, and a 320GB drive that I was no longer using. Plenty of space for all of my media to sit on one drive. No need to repeatedly switch my iTunes music folder to point to different drives (depending on which type of media I was adding to the library). It was an amazing experience. So much easier!
When I started approaching the space cap the drobo let me know that it was time to upgrade one of the drives. It even told me which slot, so I wouldn’t have to guess. I popped in a new 1.5TB to replace the 320GB, and then waited what seemed like an eternity for it to rebuild. My data was available during the process, but it didn’t really make me feel any safer. I even had to wait a week because I knew that PG&E was going to be doing some work on our complex and I was afraid of losing power mid rebuild. Despite all of that I still felt really good about the drobo experience.
Until about a month ago. After upgrading my Mac Mini to a newer, quad core, iMac, I began to notice some slowness in response when using iTunes. Nothing huge, but just found that it wasn’t registering clicks that quickly. Then it began throwing the rainbow beachball at me (actually it’s a pinwheel, but I think of it as a beachball). It was several weeks after upgrading to the iMac, so I have a hard time believing it was that.
I also tried backing up all of the media to my older externals (which was a lot of fun) and then running iTunes off of those drives instead. Everything worked fine. Reformatted the drobo and added just the music back on. Still found iTunes was slow, even with the drobo almost empty.
Drobo support has been pretty responsive, but I don’t know that I’m really any closer to figuring out what is wrong. I read some of the drobo horror stories on the web, and I always thought they were rubbish….but now I’m beginning to worry.
But by far the biggest hassle was that each test required me to delete and re-copy massive amounts of data to/from the drobo. I would have to clear the drobo, delete my entire iTunes library, copy terabytes worth of data back to the drobo, and then observe behaviors during the copies and when adding files back to iTunes. That makes each test a several day process.