Unraid vs Drobo 5n

[bdee1]

SO I just saw that drobo is about to release their new Drobo 5N device.  Just like their other devices except it connects to yoru network via gigabit ethernet instead of connecting to a PC via USB.

 

so I am wondering if anyone here has ad any experience with drobo.  It looks really slick, but I wonder if ti is as reliable as unraid.

 

Currently I have a giant 12 bay unraid box that I put together several years ago runnign the latest stable release (4.7) and I have had great luck with it.  I have never lost data.  I have lost drives and sometimes I have had to come to the forums to get help on how to recover some data but the forum has been extremely helpful and I have always recovered my data.

 

The biggest faults I see with unraid are:

1) the web gui is dated and pretty plain.

2) the hardware I am using is very loud and power hungry - I knwo this is because its old hardware (the big cooler master case with 2 power supplys.

3) I recently switched to a Mac and it is a little finicky about accessing my SMB shares.

 

I don't know a ton about drobo but I LOVE the ease of use... the ability to hot swap drives without powering down at all.  the lights on the front indicating problems and usage.  all sounds great but I am wondering if it is too good to be true...  I am wondering if it is less reliable than unraid.  Or if it is more difficult to recover data in the event of hardware failure.  and I also wonder if they have awesome forum support like unraid...

 

If anyone with experience with drobo could comment I would appreciate it.

[prostuff1]

Version 5 of unRAID allows for the array to be stopped, a drive added, the web page refreshed, and the new drive put into use.

 

 

As for unRAID vs Drobo:

There are a number of threads about this.  Doing a search should bring them up.  Personally I do not like closed nature of the hardware as it would be much more difficult to fix a problem should the hardware fail.

[bdee1]

I figured there must be threads about this but I was not able to find them with a search...

[BLKMGK]

Ive known more than one person that's had Drobo hardware fail on them in spectacular fashion. I'll grant that this is new hardware from them but I'm betting it won't support 24 data drives yet cost a ton.

 

Must all the drives in their system match? Do their drives spin down when not being used? Can you pull a drive for data recovery elsewhere using standard tools? How much usable space do you get for drives invested?

 

All questions to ask and examine, we know the answers for unRAID...

[mexicanmike]

For the price of the 5N. Get a HP N40L and add two drives to the optical bay area. Still under the price of a 5N. The only feature that is nice on the drobo is the dual disk redundancy. Bad part on that is though, if 3 drives fail, your are completely hosed. VS unraid, you just lose the data on the failed drives. Although, if you let 3 drives fail on the drobo, you deserve it.

 

Drobo would also be a lot harder if the enclosure dies. In the past, if the firmware version on your failed one was old, and they sent you a replacement with new firmware, your data was hosed.

 

I owned one of the older ones, USB/Firewire model, and it was complete trash. I am curious to try the mini though, as it looks interesting. No doubt the addition of thunderbolt and the Msata made it faster.

[tr0910]

and what is data aware tiering??

 

 Drobo's "data-aware tiering" feature, which gives applications like Adobe Lightroom and iTunes faster access to your NAS-stored files. 

 

I know it's SSD based, but does it work well enough to be interesting?