Drobo vs JBOD or conconated Raid and Time Machine

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Drobo vs JBOD or conconated Raid and Time Machine

I fill up a lot of hard drive space with photos. Currently my main hard drive is a 1.5 TB drive with 250 GB of space remaining. I have been manually backing up my photos to a 1 TB hard drive in Bay 2. That backup drive is now full. I just purchased a 2 TB drive. I would like to use Time Machine as a backup, so I am considering using an external Raid device, like Drobo, or combining my 1 TB and 2TB drives as a conconated Raid in Mac Pro which would give me 3GB to use for Time Machine. Combining my drives in Mac Pro is obviously cheaper. Are there other reasons to use an external device? Any other advice? Thanks!!

Mac Pro 2X2.66, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Dec 9, 2009 6:19 PM

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Answer 1

noice_T

Level 3

545 points

Dec 9, 2009 9:46 PM in response to tsinsf

If you just need storage space, i don't see a problem with the drobo. It's not known for its speed, but thats not what you're after anyway. I would use your remaining internal slot for a clone of your boot drive with superduper (in addition to time machine), or scratch disk, etc.

You should partition your main drive, (or whatever drive is the fastest) into like a boot drive partition and media partition. Keep only apps on your boot. Keep other media separate.

Remember that if you go the internal raid route of raid0ing the internal 1TB and 2TB, you're gonna need a backup of that. As conconating or raid0ing the disks will increase your chance of disk failure. In which you'll probably have to buy some external solution anyway.

Same goes with the drobo, if you're planning on running a raid 0 or conconated, that would be worse for storage, as you'd have 4 striped disks, increasing the disk failure rate even more. You could run maybe a raid 5 on the drobo, (if that's even possible) but even at that, i would still back up a raid 5.

The golden rule basically is to backup everything regardless; especially if its something as important as a photo library.

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