Disc2Day CD DVD Duplication News

Everyone knows that hard drives are not man’s best friend. They either fail without notice, or they get full pretty fast. Data Robotics, Inc. seems to have the solution. The Data Robotics drive (or simply Drobo) seems unreal and too good to be true. To make long story short, it is a little black box with 4 hard drive slots. You can throw in any 3.5" internal hard drives you have lying around and it will turn them into one big drive. So if one fails, your data is safely stored on the other drives (so pretty much like RAID). Those companies like Disc2day will certainly need hard drives like this specially for all those videos, graphic design files, audio, and many more. For more info, see the links below:

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sENCMKXBUc






(from the review of Ryan Block between RAID 5 and Drobo - engadget)

Setup
RAID 5 - Three or more same drives required. (Some arrays will accept dissimilar drives, but will function as lowest common denominator. So two 300GB drives and one 20GB drive will yield a 40GB array.)
Drobo - One to four drives supported; two drives necessary for redundancy

Installation
RAID 5 - Drives in caddies or typically somehow screwed/fastened into the enclosure. From here you may have numerous means of access, including eSATA, USB 2.0, FireWire, even NAS.
Drobo - Drives slide into and are secured by enclosure with no tools. USB 2.0 only, sorry.

Redundancy method and data awareness
RAID 5 - Block-level striping with spanning parity. Array is block-level unaware of data though, meaning nothing intelligent is done with free space.
Drobo - Virtual storage pool is redundant, but also block-level aware, meaning that it recognizes free space, and automatically uses it for multiple invisible backups should drive sectors become corrupt. (The added benefit of block-level data awareness is external storage indicators, which show how much storage is being used in its series of LEDs.)

Redundancy overhead
RAID 5 - Space cost of any one of the identical disks in the array. (So four 250GB drives yields a 750GB array, raw.)
Drobo - Space of the largest disk in the array. (So two 250GB drives and two 500GB drives yields a 1TB array, raw.)

File systems
RAID 5 - Format any file system.
Drobo - HFS or NTFS. (Limited FAT32 support, future file systems to be added.)

Failure
RAID 5 - If a drive dies your array is at risk and goes into rebuild mode when you swap out the bad disk. Depending on your RAID array, you may or may not be able to use it during rebuild. Alternately, if a drive starts writing corrupt data, that data may stay corrupt, with backup recovery being your only option of restoration.
Drobo - If a drive dies your array still goes into rebuild mode, but your data may still be protected. Depending on how much capacity you're using, if there's enough free space in the array, your Drobo may still be able to ensure full redundancy. (Again, thank that block-level aware array system.) If your Drobo doesn't have enough free space during a disk loss, your data will be at risk; after inserting a new drive it will go into rebuild mode, but will still continue to be available.

Upgrading
RAID 5 - Users must back up contents and replace their entire array of drives to increase array storage. (Read: no drive recycling.)

Drobo - Upgrade storage a drive at a time. If you have empty bays, simply insert a new drive -- that storage is instantaneously available. If you are out of bays then remove smallest drive and add its larger replacement. Once that array is rebuilt and the new storage is available, remove the next smallest, etc. until you've reached the capacity you desire. Drobo can support 4TB+, and can supposedly address an infinite amount of space as drives push past the 1TB mark.

Labels: audio, design, disc2day, drobo, graphic, video