For one, where are the 2TB drives? We've had 1.5TB drives out now for quite a while. I'm wondering if one of two things isn't about to happen: A major leapfrog, like to a 3TB or 4TB drive, or they've hit a real problem with scaling out bigger storage.
I received my Drobo the other night. Amazon had an amazing price, along with a $50 rebate. I also picked up 3 1.5TB Seagate drives, so I have 4.5TB Raw and 3TB net, but of course we all know how we've been defrauded by the drive makers who decided that a kilobyte wasn't 1024 bytes, and a megabyte not 1024^2 bytes, etc. So instead of a terabyte being 1024^3 bytes, it's 1000^3 bytes. A difference of 73,741,824 bytes, or 70.325 Meg. So instead of 3TB RAID, I have 2.79TB according to the operating system (actually less for some overhead). No matter, it's plenty for now, and one more disk will give me another 1.4TB and the Drobo will magically acknowledge it.
I hope. It didn't like when I put drives in starting at the bottom; so I started with 2 at the top, then added a third, and things seem OK for now.
Of course the net of all this is that I want to reconfigure how my Mac drives are set up in the first place. I have one 340, and 3 750's, and didn't like my original config of one boot drive, one Boot Camp (NTFS) disk for Windows, one Data disk, and one Time Machine disk.
I'm thinking of taking my 3 750's and setting up a RAID configuration, but have to research if I can boot into this. I'm also insanely paranoid about my photographs, and almost want them on two separate RAID volumes, in addition to being backed up with Mozy. I'm sure that's overkill, but even moving them to the Drobo is giving me a little angst.
So next steps are to figure out internal RAID on the Mac, including the boot drive. Once I get a plan there, then probably use the Mac configuration for my Photographs (backed up with Mozy) and Virtual Machines, and use the Drobo for all Videos so that I can serve them throughout the house. Music I'll probably keep local as well. I'll stick all of my old other hard drives and PC files onto the Drobo for safe keeping, then do some major dupe detection with them. I think I can probably shut down my PC and/or put it somewhere for the kids (although they also have a MacMini)...
OK, I'm rambling for now. Next steps are to:
Move my Photos to the Drobo temporarily
Convert my Boot Camp VM to a non-boot-camp VM, stick it on the Drobo.
Convert my 3 disks into a single RAID array.
Then figure out if I can copy my boot disk onto that array and boot from it?
Alternative is to get an external time machine volume for my boot disk and just time machine that.
Reminds me, I need a time machine volume for my wife :)
OK, I'll do the Drobo Photo and Boot Camp migration now; that'll take time
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4 comments:
David P - You are the clone of PATRICK BERTINELLI (or maybe he is the clone of you). He has been geeking out all weekend over his new 1.5TB drive - and he actually did see a 2TB drive at Fry's today (which he calls the Wal-Mart of computer stores - using the same level of derision that I reserve for the real Wal-Mart). He's doing all of our photos and all of our media on this new machine. I have no idea what it means, except to say that YOU AND MY HUSBAND ARE LONG LOST TWINS!!! Give my best to Lisa and the kiddos!
The early bird captures the early worm, but sometimes those late worms are meatier...
New, improved Drobo
Or, you could sell the first on Craigslist and buy the new version?
Did you do the RAID array yet?
What did you spend on the whole package? DROBO plus drives?
My DROBO from Amazon was $419, minus $50 gift card (which reminds me, it is still in my wallet), so $369. Each drive was $129. If you already have some drives at home it's a slam-dunk. It is too slow to use for any primary storage. I know Drobo disagrees, but they're wrong. It's only for backup/secondary (movies, photos are OK when rendered through something else). Don't put a VM or any apps or swap on it.
I have a two-drive RAID, but not my primary boot. My current plan is to buy a big (2TB) drive for time-machine internal, then take my 340G boot out and put it in my second popcorn hour (love those things), and then have a 3-drive 750G striped boot volume with my OS, apps, VMs and SWAP. Back that up to time machine in case of hardware failure (which will happen).
I really want a MacPro RAID card which has RAID-5, but those are major coinage right now. I'll check again in case one goes on sale...
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