Nearly bought a Drobo… but didn’t

Was looking for a way to get a large amount of protected storage, would hate to loose anything valuable like iTunes, iPhoto library due to a hard disk failure. At the moment everything is stored on a couple of 500Gb USB drives & the Iomega one (with a really bright blue LED) is a bit old. So I though it might be a good idea to get a Drobo, Tb drive  to migrate the data over. Then it’s just a case of putting the 500Gb drives in (USB enclosure could be useful to keep) & enjoying the protection.

So a Drobo is around £375, although Play.com had the old USB-only version for £320. 1Tb drive ~ £80. Putting this configuration into the Drobolator, the 1Tb drive gives 464Gb free, so I can copy over the data from the first 500Gb drive OK. When that’s inserted I’d have 464Gb of space. And if I somehow manage to get the data off the other, insert the disk then I’d have a total of 929Gb which is just enough. So £400 to protect the capacity I’ve already got, I can’t see the wife approving that. If I put an extra 500Gb or 1Tb then I gain something, for another £45-£80.

At work we’d purchased a couple of WD My Book Mirror Edition 2TB drives to use in RAID 0 mode to give us lots of quick space. As the name suggests, they do RAID 1 & come in that configuration (although formatted NTFS). £208 from Scan = 1Tb extra protected storage, a lot more affordable. Works out ~£50 for the enclosure, which isn’t bad value.

OK it’s only 2 drives, you can’t hot-swap them, both drives must be the same size & only WD are supported. On the plus side there’s a 3 year warranty, you don’t have to pay for software updates (you have to purchase Drobocare to get non-critical firmware after the first year) & if there are any warranty issues they’ll courier a new drive/chassis to you within a couple of days. Plus I can buy another one, have 2Tb of protected storage & still save a few £s. Also I have a couple of spare 500Gb drives, so one can go into my Buffalo NAS & the other be dedicated for Time Machine.