Comments on: [Editorial] Hard Drives: What, When, and Where to Buy in a Marked Up Industry

By: SPG

SPG — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Always remember that it’s not a question of “if” a hard drive will fail, but “when”. On a long enough timeline they will all fail. Redundancy and separation should be your mantra.
That said, and take this with the appropriate grains of salt, all the hard drives that I’ve ever had fail (about 6 in fifteen years) were all Western Digital. After the second one we stopped buying them and only bought Seagates and Hitachis. YMMV.

By: BrianCarlson

BrianCarlson — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:59:00 +0000

Agreed. I just buy drives and put them in a Wiebe Tech inclosure. When Thunderbolt becomes more available I’ll move to a RAID.

By: Jonathan Dear

Jonathan Dear — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:02:00 +0000

+1 to drobo sucking big harddrive balls. I have 2 – 4bay + 5 bay and been nothing but problems. Actually just pulling the pin and buying the promise 8TB thunderbolt raid now. Heloooooo speed. (my drobos only work as usb2 on my systems, even though the droboS has triple interface and the drobo 2nd gen has 2).

and if you ever get to filling a drobo up it slows down impossibly its not really usable.

By: amanduca

amanduca — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:17:00 +0000

Agreed as former IT professional, I can vouch that no photographer should ever consider a drobo as a reasonable back-up solution. Same thing goes for Time machine, but that’s due to its limited capacity and capabilities.

NASs are also kinda silly, some work as advertised, others have no real recovery plan and can be a real pain to recover lost data. Seriously just build a server. It’s easy, affordable, expandable, and more reliable than any other solutions. Trust me.

Also as far as external drives go, stay far far away from drives with their own enclosures, especially the seagate/maxtor/wd/etc branded enclosures. Also I know Lacie drives are super popular with photogs (mostly for their looks I believe) but they friggin suck. Believe I see return/rma stats for several very large electronics retailers..

Im all about G-drives… good stuff. Super pricey, but worth every penny..

By: Matthew Saville

Matthew Saville — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:59:00 +0000

The main problem with Drobo is that you are SOL if the entire unit goes down, or even if you just want to recover data off a single hard drive. Unlike a simple RAID 1 system, you never know where ALL your data is on a Drobo. Drobo forfeits a considerable safety option (HDD recover-ability) in favor of greater capacity and beginner-friendliness. Bottom line- Even Drobo themselves acknowledge that it is EXTREMELY difficult to recover data off of a failed Drobo.

Whereas oppositely, a RAID 1 system always stores ALL your data on each drive, and in a format that can be easily read by any other docking station or external enclosure.

So while Drobo users are adding more and more capacity to their singular on-site device, putting a greater and greater amount of data at loss-risk caused by ANYTHING other than a single HDD failure, …a RAID 1 user simply fills up their drives, then when the drives are full you just pull them out, pop them into cheap external enclosures for long-term access, …and pop in two new HDD’s. Because honestly, do you really need to have 8-16 TB of data at you fingertips? I can’t remember the last time I said “dang, if only I didn’t have to spend an extra 60 seconds to plug in my HDD with my 2004 photos, that’d be great!”

RAID 1 systems even offer you an on-going off-site backup option, again because of their identical mirroring function. Simply put- Buy a third drive, and any time your RAID 1 device is at idle, pull out one of the drives and presto, you have your off-site backup! Pop in the third drive, let it do it’s duplication thing overnight, and you’re good to go.

That’s just my opinion. I wish I could highly recommend the Drobo as it is a brilliant concept, however the hardcore professional in me can’t get past those shortcomings and risks. I prefer to recommend simple RAID 1 solutions. They may not be as sexy and as popular as the Drobo, but they’re a proven workhorse for both on-site backup, off-site backup, and long-term safety.

Just two cents from a highly opinionated camera geek!

By: David Lara

David Lara — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:24:00 +0000

Great setup you have there. I will try out the sync program you have, may solve the issues I’m having with mine. Thanks.

By: David Lara

David Lara — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:21:00 +0000

I have Drobo 4bay, and i tend to have problems from time to time with the autobackups not running and not letting me edit or even delete them to recreate them.

By: Lennar Kivistik

Lennar Kivistik — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:37:00 +0000

The lacie I had a few years ago was the worse buy ive ever made… they get super hot, came with maxtor drives (that failed 3 times) had to send them back to maxtor to get new ones and yeah they worked for a few weeks but then failed again..

Instead of Drobo I would use Netgear Readynas Ultra 4+ or Ultra6+
Much cheaper and has all the bells and whistles the drobo has..
Its network interfaced and with the right ie(gigabit ethernet/jumbo packet on) setup you can have atleast 80Mb/s throughput.

It has all the raid capabilites + Netgears very own Xraid2 which makes drives even hot-swappable if they fail during on hours, just change the drive and voila the thing is till access-able while it re-raids the new drive.
http://www.readynas.com/

By: Henry Orth

Henry Orth — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:40:00 +0000

Great job – I’m constantly running out of space and really need to develop a large – long time solution. Currently 19.5 TB (not counting drives for OS and apps 3TB) and not enough but holding for now. Thanks for the article!!

By: Nathan Hamler

Nathan Hamler — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:15:00 +0000

it took me forever to figure out my hard drives and how i wanted to store stuff, etc…basically i settled on this:

2 Glyph 1tb FW 800 drives

Drive A is the one i work on daily, store photos on, libraries, business related stuff…

Drive B is cloned daily from drive A, so it’s a complete duplicate in case Drive A goes down…

I run a USB 1.5 tb segate drive as a time machine drive, that backs up the system drive, Glyph drive A…..so i have a real time, dated backup, as well as a scheduled clone every night…

I used to run the glyphs in raid 1 (mirrored), but i decided to do a daily clone instead, b/c with a RAID mirror array, all the drives are always being written to…where as, if my Glyph drive B is only seeing a FRACTION of the use of drive A, so (in theory) it should out last drive A….

Glyphs are amazing btw….no wall wart, USB, FW 800, 400, and eSATA connections, and they’re bullet proof…their warranty is sick…1 year advance replacement, 2 years replacement, and 3 years data recovery….