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I've been looking at Drobo units lately, and the ability to just add in a drive of any size and have the useable size of the array grow seems really nice to me. What doesn't seem nice to me is that if the Drobo unit itself dies you lose access to all of the data on the drives and have to send it back to Drobo to get the data off apparently. That is a non-starter for me since it is a single point of failure, just moved from the drives to the Drobo, which should fail less often than drives but it is a piece of electronics so it will fail.
I was wondering if any other NAS units provide the ability to mix and match drive size and still have one growing pool size. Unlike the drobo however it would be nice that if the device fails I could shove the drives in a replacement to get the data back.
Also are there custom solutions which give me what I'm looking for? I've looked into unRAID and that seems to offer what I am looking for but I want to know what my other options are since I'm sure there are a few things that I'm missing.
Thanks in advance
HumanTarget
Posted 2014-07-14T10:10:35.337
Reputation: 13
not sure if I understand you completely but if you take the drives out of the Drobo and put them in a new Drobo (with no other disks) you should get your files back (unless the error occurred while meta data was being changed...) – DrorCohen – 2014-07-14T11:36:06.160
Oh really? I had read that if your drobo unit itself died even putting the disk into another new Drobo unit wouldn't let you access the data. Perhaps I will contact them directly and see what they have to say about it. Thanks a lot – HumanTarget – 2014-07-14T13:08:03.973
My recollection is different than yours, although I didn't need to test this method (Yet...). Please update with the answer you get from support. – DrorCohen – 2014-07-14T15:12:01.030
Seems like you were right. Found this on their support pages. Now i guess it's really up to just weighing Drobo vs a custom solution. Custom will cost a bit more up front but will be much more customizable, and also most likely cheper to replace when something dies as I can just replace the part that died (unless the PSU fries everything) but the drobo will be far simpler and that might be all that I need. Thanks for your help
– HumanTarget – 2014-07-16T08:09:52.023glad I could help. I've put my remark as an answer so if you deem it correct please mark it so – DrorCohen – 2014-07-16T08:31:15.033