Tag Archives: drobo

Storage Solutions

Long-time readers may recall that I bought at least one of these:

It’s a Drobo and it’s been a disaster. First, because it’s temperamental: move it, or power it off then on, or basically breathe anywhere in its general direction, and it will dramatically start flashing red lights, indicating total failure (and lost data). When you have suppressed the sick feeling in your stomach at that thought, you can power it off and on a few more times and, probably, it will decide to reboot in ‘green light’ mode. At which point your data is safe for as long as you don’t breathe again.

Secondly, it’s incredibly slow to re-protect your data. One of the advertised joys of the Drobo was that you could eject one of the four existing hard disks, pop in a new one of greater size and then just sit back and wait for the thing to re-distribute your data over the whole array so that it was all protected once more. Which is, indeed, what happens… except that you wait a long, long, very long time. And throughout the duration of that wait, your data isn’t protected against another hardware failure at all. When I last tried to do this with 4 2TB drives, the box spent 6.5 days thinking about it.You run with unprotected data for a week and see how you get on sleeping!

And third: the Drobo was and remains relatively noisy. Easily audible above the noise of a loud action movie it’s providing the data for, that’s for sure.

We had a council clean-up this week, so my Drobos finally met their destiny as land-fill, as should have been the case many years ago. I hated them, and I’d never buy another. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!

Let me instead introduce you to this beauty:

It’s an HP Proliant N40L Micro Tower Server. It shipped with a single 250GB hard disk, but with space for three others of any capacity. It also shipped with 2GB of ECC RAM and an AMD Turion II running at 1.5GHz.

For that lot, I paid the princely sum of AU$264, from these guys, who were the cheapest I could find. I notice that today, they’re quoting an extra $25 for the same config, so obviously I got lucky!

I added 8GB of ECC RAM -and fitting it was not fun. It requires pulling the entire motherboard out, and that can only be done by unplugging all power, SATA and other cables. Those cables fit tightly in the confined space available -and the SATA connector, in particular, seems to have been welded into place by cruel people with exceptionally fine welding skills. My previous experience of detaching soldered SATA connectors from motherboards came back to haunt me… but we got there in the end. I’ve also added a USB-3.0 expansion card to fill the available PCIx slot, but I didn’t bother adding a graphics card, so it’s strictly on-board graphics for me.

All up, including postage, I think one of these things cost me AU$370. So naturally, I got two. And that still means I’ve bought two brand new, quality servers for hardly much more than I paid for one of my original Drobos!

Of course, you only get 250GB of storage for that price: you have to fill the other three slots (non-hot-swappable) yourself. Fortunately, I had quite a few 2TB drives knocking about the place, thanks in part to me having recently destroyed Drobos en masse. So, pop those in (very easily!), and I now have 6.2TB in each server.

Time then to install a server OS… and it could have been Scientific Linux, of course. But since I have my Technet subscription, and I wouldn’t mind learning more about Windows 2008 R2 administration, on that goes instead. Turn the three 2TB drives into a single 4TB, RAID-5 array… and I now have 8TB of protected storage, humming very quietly in the background. I think each server consumes about 50W, which seems economical enough. Plus, the big bonus: I can barely hear them, even though they sit just behind my triple-monitor setup, precisely at ear-height.

A 1.5GHz CPU doesn’t sound like much: I’ve seen people slagging the Turion IIs off as though they were barely in the Intel Atom class. But Windows 2008 is certainly responsive when I remote desktop to it, and both boxes are running virtual machines (one each) without seeming to struggle. I’ve no complaints about them, anyway: fast enough for this old-timer.

Essentially, all I’ve ever wanted is for near-silent, RAID-protected storage for my music and other multimedia collections. The Drobos failed to provide that on so many levels, it wasn’t funny. These new HP boxes, in contrast, do the job just fine… and give me a capable, stable platform to run permanently two large-ish (6GB RAM and 200GB HDD) virtual machines at the same time, which is a nice bonus. At AU$264, I’d recommend them to anyone, though at AU$289, I find even my enthusiasm waning a bit.

But I still like them a lot, and they have cheered me up no end, allowing me to dump the damn Drobos. That’s worth almost any price, come to think of it.

Phew.

Drobo No-No

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I wrote a few days ago that I’d had trouble getting a second Drobo storage device that actually worked. Well, it was eventually replaced and now works fine (except that one of its LEDs is blown, but at least the storage side of things seems functional at last).

I also mentioned back then that I’ve owned my original Drobo for getting on for a year, and that it’s never put a foot wrong -which is absolutely true, and is the reason the malfunctioning second one was such a disappointment.

I would like to take this opportunity, then, to mention that even that original Drobo is behaving really badly when it comes to a disk re-organization. On Monday, I swapped out one of my 1TB drives for a 2TB one. This causes the Drobo to shuffle the 2.3TB of data currently stored there around until it’s all protected once more. No problems with that: it’s an online affair (i.e., the data stays accessible throughout) and is precisely what the Drobo is supposed to be good at.

It’s just a little disturbing that it’s now Wednesday night and the thing is still re-organizing itself. What’s more, the Dashboard application that tells you where it’s up to is showing 0% progress and warning me that it expects to have finished in about 98 hours’ time. If that’s true (and quite frankly, I have no idea if it is or isn’t), it will mean the thing has spent the best part of a week shuffling around, internally, just 2TB of data. Asthmatic snails have been known to move faster, I fear. My friend Google has drawn to my attention the fact that this sort of behaviour isn’t new, either!

Again, I stress (as do the Drobo website articles that mention it might take “a few” hours to reorganize!) that my data is accessible while all this is going on. But to have one’s data unprotected for that length of time (it’s only fully protected once the thing has finished its reorganization) is, I think, unacceptable.One hard disk failure now, and I lose everything.

Worse, the Drobo website emphasizes that you should not power down the Drobo during a reorganization… and we have a giant thunderstorm predicted to come our way tomorrow evening. They quite often knock out the power, so you can imagine the amount of nervousness here at the moment!

Couple this technical deficiency (as I see it) with their mostly-hopeless technical support and I would have to say that, despite a year’s unproblematic storage duties, I would never touch a Drobo again. It’s lovely at just sitting there storing stuff, true enough. But when it comes to doing the one thing you actually need it to do without drama (i.e., deal with a disk failure or upgrade), it doesn’t cope at all elegantly or efficiently.

Since Drobo Number 2 was purchased for a friend of ours and has thus left the building, I am still in the market for a storage device that can handle 4TB and up, extensibly and dynamically, because I want a backup for my Drobo, dumb as that might sound given that the Drobo itself was purchased to be our secure and safe storage device! Such a storage device needs to dynamically extend its storage ‘pool’, but hopefully without days of unprotection whilst doing so.

I have thought about building my own PC and sticking ZFS on it (which does all of that sort of thing very nicely), but it’s a little too ‘low level’ for my tastes! So now I’m looking at this. The Thecus has all the right specs (for me at least) and an attractive price (about AU$390… compared to the Drobo’s AU$550 and up). It, of course, doesn’t have the looks (Drobo is to Mac as Thecus is to mid-1990s beige PCs, I think!), but it looks like it might have the functionality I require. And, best news of all, it’s nearly Christmas, so I don’t have to put up a watertight business case to get one… I just have to ask!

Should Santa do the honours this year, I’ll be sure to document how I get on with it.

Quickie NAS

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I never actually used Windows Home Server (WHS), but I thought about doing so often enough. It’s killer feature (for me)? The ability to plug in different disks, of different sizes, from different vendors (and even using different interfaces -I have a lot of old PATA drives kicking around!), and have them appear to the rest of the world as one large storage ‘pool’, with in-built redundancy. This was called ‘Driver Extender’… and has just been removed as a feature from the new Version 2 Home Server product. It seems a bit of a weird decision on Microsoft’s part, removing one of the two key product differentiators that made Home Server special. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the entire thing killed off, to be honest.

Anyway, the reason I no longer care too much about WHS is that I have my own way of doing networkable, extensible bulk storage: a Drobo with a WDTV Live media player.

My particular “first generation” Drobo only takes 4 hard disks -newer and more expensive ones can take up to 8. But using 2GB drives, that still means 6TB of usable storage (4 x 2TB, minus 2TB used for data protection), which is enough to be going on with. If 3TB and 4TB drives ever make an appearance, I’ll probably be a firmware update away from being able to increase my protected, usable storage space accordingly. Regardless, you can stick any combination of SATA drives into the Drobo you happen to have handy, and swap out smaller drives for bigger ones as your storage needs grow (and as your wallet finds it can cope). There’s no networking capability (you’ll need to pay stupid money for the Drobo Share, or the Drobo FS to get that), but you do get extensible, protected, set-and-forget storage that more-or-less just works (see below for the ‘more-or-less’ bit!).

The WDTV Live is a good media player. I had a plain old WDTV before the ‘Live’ version came out, and the upgrade gets you a networked media player. Set it up with an IP address, plug in an ethernet cable and it immediately makes itself visible as a Windows (well, Samba, anyway!) Share on the local network. Other than that capability and a slightly slicker front-end, there’s not a lot of difference: the thing is still capable of playing just about any media format you throw at it, has no problem with High Definition content, has a lovely “ten foot interface’ that anyone can drive within seconds… and just works, beautifully.

Stick these two products together, then, and what do you have? Basically, the Drobo just plugs into the WDTV Live via USB, is then seen as a single giant volume full of multimedia files… and the contents of that volume are then shared around the rest of the network, thanks to the Samba-sharing nature of the WDTV. When I rip a new CD on my PC in the study, therefore, it’s trivial to copy the output to the Drobo sitting under the TV on the other side of the house, despite the Drobo not having ‘intrinsic’ networking of its own. So what you actually end up with is a NAS that does excellent duty as a media server and player. Someone should design a product that includes both bits of functionality in the one box!

The networked Drobo FS costs about AU$850. The standalone Drobo Share costs AU$300. Neither would be able to play a bean on my TV! My non-networked Drobo cost AU$599, and the WDTV Live cost a further AU$189… so I end up with viewable, networked, extensible, protected storage for AU$788 instead of non-viewable, etc, etc for AU$850 – AU$900. (Hard disks cost extra, of course).

I’d thoroughly recommend the WDTV Live… it’s really plain sailing to use, and you couldn’t get a more capable, simpler media player. We ditched the original WDTV player a year or so ago for the joys of Windows Media Center running on a spare PC… but the usual Windows problems meant that experiment turned into something of a disaster (crashes, driver problems, forever updating etc etc). We were so pleased to be able to junk the complexities of Windows for the highly-functional simplicities of the WDTV once more!

I wish I could recommend Drobo quite so unreservedly. If you’d asked me three months ago, I would have done. But since then, I made the mistake of purchasing a new one for an elderly friend. I mention the ‘elderly’ bit because his requirements, above all, are for something that simply works, without fuss, bother or the need for constant fiddling and tweaking. He is a very non-technical person, and his movie collection needs to be safe without having to think about it. A pity, then, that the Drobo unit I purchased for him turned out to be defective: it didn’t work at first, it then worked long enough to copy a couple of terabytes onto, and then it decided not to work again once it had been plugged into a different PC. It would hang during its boot sequence; it would declare it couldn’t find some disks, then decide it could see those after all but now couldn’t see the ones it had no problems seeing before; it would not be detected by Windows 7 at all, and then it would be detected without a problem, until you rebooted the PC -after which it would revert to being undetectable. It was bonkers, frankly. Precisely what you don’t want when you buy ‘safe, protected, reliable storage’!

Naturally, you get the odd lemon turning up whenever you take the hardware-purchasing plunge, but I can tell you: getting one lemon makes you have second thoughts about the earlier purchase that has never put a foot wrong! It just undermines your confidence in the product as a whole, in short. And it doesn’t help that their “support desk” has the same senseless, robotic and dumbed-down attitude that all support desks seem to go for these days. All I wanted was a returns authorisation number. Instead, I get asked to produce a diagnostic log. Fair enough: I try to do that, and I can’t because the unit is completely unrepsonsive. I tell them this. They reply not with a ‘Jeez, it’s screwed then!’ but with a ‘well, can you try using the Firewire port instead of the USB one’! I don’t even have a Firewire port, I point out. Well, I’ll need to escalate this to the next level of support, I am told. No you won’t, I say… either authorise the return right now, or I start consulting lawyers. At which point, the return was authorised without further comment!

I don’t like the fact that I had to wrestle with them like that. The second I couldn’t produce a diagnostic log because the unit had hung, they should have authorised the return. The suggestion to plug it into a Firewire port reflects the fact, I think, that Drobos are very popular in Apple Mac circles… and I imagine the dumbed-down, treat-you-like-a-moron, have-you-tried-turning-it-back-off-and-on style of support is designed to cater to that particualr type of audience. It didn’t do anything to endear me to them or their product, though! (Can you tell??!)

Anyway, I’d like to say that the guy who actually sold me the thing couldn’t have been nicer or more solicitous: he’s gone out of his way (literally: he turned up at the office today to pick the defective unit up personally) to see me right with a new Drobo that works properly. Time will tell on that score, I guess, but I can’t really fault his efforts thus far. Meanwhile, my own, original Drobo sits there quietly under the telly doing sterling service without the slightest issue. So yes, on balance, I would still recommend it. Just make sure you get an excellent vendor -and don’t waste too much time with their useless technical “support”. My vendor, by the way, who comes highly recommended, is Ross at Ineedstorage.