Drobo 4-bay 50% Today Only

[metafour]

I know there have been some mixed reviews about Drobos but I figured I'd put this up in case anyone has been on the fence about getting one or something similar.

Use coupon code VALENTINE50 at http://www.drobostore.com and it lowers the price from $399 to $199.50 Ends at Midnight PST according to the email.

[Vyr1s]

Which model is this for? FS?

[metafour]

Looks like it's just for the 2nd gen. Drobo. Not the FS, S or DroboPro.

I just tried to apply it on the FS and it didn't work. Tried it on the 2nd gen. Drobo and it dropped the price in the shopping cart from $399 to $199.50. Shipping is ~$23

[Vyr1s]

Yup confirmed, looks to only apply with the "Drobo 2nd Generation - 4 Bay FW800 & USB 2.0 Storage Array"
Too bad.

This also is only 50% off the unit, does nothing for their Drobocare

[mkawa]

fyi these are dog slow. i have one, and it's a good place to archive things, but too slow to use as working store.

[dorkvader]

Ugh: I just chucked a few 1.5 TB HDD's into an old PC and put on Linux, SSH, SFTP, and Samba. cost was $0 not counting the HDD's. It'll eat up electricity (that I'm paying 1/3 of) equal to the cost of the drobo in at least 10 years, after which, I'll have replaced it, I hope.
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Still, it's a good price for a NAS.

[quickcrx702]

Ugh: I just chucked a few 1.5 TB HDD's into an old PC and put on Linux, SSH, SFTP, and Samba. cost was $0 not counting the HDD's. It'll eat up electricity (that I'm paying 1/3 of) equal to the cost of the drobo in at least 10 years, after which, I'll have replaced it, I hope.
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Still, it's a good price for a NAS.

Agreed, it isn't hard to build a good NAS or SAN from consumer hardware if you want to spend a little RTFM time.  I'm running a Solaris based SAN distro from Nexentastor.  It's a free download for the community edition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexentaStor

I went with them because of the fact that they have more features than Openfiler, FreeNAS, and other similar projects.  They also have a commercial offering.

[mkawa]

it's more about the size and zero-config zero-maintenance of it. none of the current non-commercial nas solutions are really appropriate for archival (but they're significantly better for working store).

[flyball]

it's more about the size and zero-config zero-maintenance of it. none of the current non-commercial nas solutions are really appropriate for archival (but they're significantly better for working store).

"archival" is a specific term and technically no hard drive based solution is a proper archival solution. that said, anything that uses zfs or a similar file system should be appropriate.

[mkawa]

zfs is finicky to say the least. i need one copy of my data to be sitting on something zero-config.

"archival" is almost exclusively done with very highly redundant spinning disk now and spinning disk media that's kept unplugged most of the time. tape stopped being useful a long time ago, and optical mediums have not nearly kept pace either.

[quickcrx702]

zfs is finicky to say the least. i need one copy of my data to be sitting on something zero-config.

"archival" is almost exclusively done with very highly redundant spinning disk now and spinning disk media that's kept unplugged most of the time. tape stopped being useful a long time ago, and optical mediums have not nearly kept pace either.

LOL, I've been in IT for over a decade, and I have to agree that tapes have long been junk.  Unfortunately there are many companies that still use them.  Not only do they take forever, but the media frequently goes bad.  I've had many restores where I have to go to the previous, previous backup because of media issues.  High capacity USB drives are much better than tapes.  I will agree that zfs is finnicky, and a scrub operation on terabytes of data can take FOREVER, but dollar for dollar nothing else comes even close.  Most home users aren't going to get a Netapp/Compellant/Data Domain setup, but you can get a lot of the big boy features like iscsi thin provisioning and snapshots with zfs using consumer hardware and reduced reliability.  I've worked with a couple of "zero config" consumer network storage devices, and they are great... until they take a dump - especially if they use proprietary technology that isn't well supported.  Though I don't have any experience with Drobo so maybe they are a little better.

[dorkvader]

I just find used/abandoned hard drives at work out of the recycle pile and make a new backup to that. Technically I have an "offsite backup" in the form of the one I left at work. But my data isn't that important.