Might want to try it out just for giggles, I found a glaring RAID configuration issue one time on a server trying to test like that.
I can second their reliability, except that I have replaced two 1TB drives. No hassle, just power down, change out the drive, power up, go into the console and tell it to rebuild.
I have an unused unit with 500MB drives I bought on clearance and used little. If I pop 2 or 3TB drives in there, will it find the full capacity? I’ve heard differing stories.
That’s what I love about it. It just sits there quietly, occupying absolutely none of my time, and I can glance over right now and see six little blue lights (out of 10) on the bottom, that tells me “Starting to get a little full.”
When it starts to get tight, a yellow light will appear next to one of the two empty bays. I can hot plug a drive any time.
If there is an urgent space issue, a red light will come on next to an empty bay.
If a drive dies, a flashing red light appears next to it.
All of this is shown on a little printed legend on the inside of the front cover. Form the outside you just see the 5 drive lights, the blue capacity lights, a power light and a network activity light.
One thing which I alluded to earlier: they have their DroboApps which they added to the earlier models in an attempt to add the same flexibility other devices have. Those apps were plugins for stuff like Apache and rsync that went into their Linux framework in a fairly un-user-friendly way. Unfortunately, with the 5D and 5N they revamped their firmware substantially and took away DroboApps. Some months passed and they added two DroboApps for these drives: a thing called “Copy” and Plex Server.
I think they removed the rest in an effort to tidy up their platform and focus on what they do best: simplicity. For the folks who wanted DroboApps, the other platforms do it much better.
The Plex server that they provide is probably all many Plex users need, but it does not support transcoding, so I left my Plex server running on a separate Linux box.
Hmm, the Drobos seem to be floating to the top of the list with the Terastations a close second.
drachillix, hearing your “special” customer has called only once is a great testimony to the Drobo’s abilities, and** minor7flat5**, hearing “occupying absolutely none of my time” are music to my ears. I have enough going on in my life to have to futz with the storage device.
Tastes of Chocolate, good question. Good answer: RAID 5 gives a bit of data reliability. Should one drive die, replace it and the array rebuilds the missing data. Funny you bring up backups. I’ll be buying 2 RAID boxes for that very reason.
Yes, but it is a pain in the ass. If you just try to pull both drives out and replace with the 3TB drives it will fail to boot - they are keeping the drive firmware on the drives themselves. The correct procedure is pull one 500GB drive, and replace with one 3TB drive. Go into management and add the drive to the terastation. Pull 2nd 500gb drive and replace with 2nd 3TB drive. Go into terastation management and clean out whatever arrays are there and create a brand new one to use the full capacity. I did the same thing except upgraded a 1TB Terastation Duo to two 7200 RPM Seagate 3TB drives. Didn’t get any faster (or slower) than the 1TB WD greens that were there before, and the Seagate 3Tbs are much faster drives, so the hardware in the terastation itself is limiting the speed some.
The drive is currently empty. I ass/u/me that would speed up the process. (It’s also a 4-drive unit, nominally 2TB but about 1.25TB RAID-5 yield.)
If I don’t have any data, I can’t just pop four blank drives in there and let it rebuild from firmware? Does Buffalo have to preformat drives for installation in a new unit, then?
Thanks for all the recommendations. I just placed an order for a Drobo 5D. I’m considering getting the Drobo Mini for the backup RAID array.
You don’t have to rebuild the array with the new drive (and indeed, you can’t keep the data on smaller drives and still use all the space), but you do have to put it in there and initialize it. There was some kind of process to tftp over the firmware but it wasn’t well documented when I looked at it. With a RAID 5, not sure if you’ll need to do one drive at a time or just leave one original in and 3 new ones, and then swap in the last one after you add the news ones via the web interface. If you do it wrong your terastation will simply fail to boot, and you’ll have to put the old drive(s) back in.
Okay, thanks. This unit is too small to be much use so I will look at upgrading to 2/3TB drives when I have a spare couple of hundred.