Hard drive failure. Three words that strike fear into the heart of every photographer — the thought of losing every photo you’ve ever taken is quite sobering indeed. Over the last four months we’ve suffered a total of three failed hard drives — including two at the exact same time — yet all our photos and data is safe, thanks in big part due to Drobo technology.
Four years ago, we moved away from a tangle of external hard disk drives, and consolidated onto a 5-disk Drobo network-attached storage device. (Current models go for about $499, available at B&H.) There’s something very convenient about having all of your images accessible on a single large disk volume — no more searching for the right external hard drive to power and connect; all your images are available, indexed, and instantly available in Lightroom (or your image management software of choice). We lovingly named our device “Toasty” as it quite closely resembled an oversized five-slice toaster.
Drobo uses a custom “BeyondRaid” technology to help protect your data. In traditional RAID-5 setups, one of the disks is a ‘parity’ disk used to preserve your files even if one of your other hard drives has failed. BeyondRaid also allows seamless upgrading of your storage capacity — we really liked the idea of being able to replace our 1.5TB disks with larger drives as our storage requirements grew, and still seamlessly keep everything as a single large, logical partition. BeyondRaid also allows you to seamlessly set a “double redundancy” feature to tolerate up to two disks failing at the same time. That choice made the most sense for us as we weren’t needing the full 6TB storage array at the time.
And boy, are we ever glad we chose to enable double redundancy. Read on for our story.
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