05-20-2010, 04:35 AM
OWC Larry wrote:
Not sure what makes a proprietary 4 drive drobo array more convenient than a hardware raid 1 GMax that is faster even on usb2 and also plug and play. With the gmax, you can actually pull a drive out of it and direct connect it to Sata bus or via other external enclosure fw, USB, etc and fully access data.... If drobo ever craps out, need special assistance to get that Data back as totally proprietary.
We sell drobo - and most buy cause want to mix drives at will (which reduces capacity calc when all drives not same capacity) and spend more than could have double the cap in two raid 1s or even go to a raid 5.
Whatever works and does what is desired - I just can't justify. Drobo is around 25mb/s at best on usb2 and not much faster on fw800 even. 1.5tb at best about 16 hours to trans... Gmax can do the same in about 3hrs
if taking advantage of easy drive swap for capacity growth and slow sustained trans not issue (more than fast enough for most audio, video playback - photo library, gen data -- way to slow for use as edit disc, etc) then it can be a decent solution. But plenty of better options if intent is to buy to x capacity without plan to increase and that are much faster too.
As usual, thanks Larry. This makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the breakdown and the explanation.