{"id":3189,"date":"2014-05-07T17:52:09","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T21:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.canonpricewatch.com\/blog\/?p=3189"},"modified":"2014-05-07T17:52:09","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T21:52:09","slug":"my-drobo-story-how-our-photos-survived-three-hard-drive-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cpricewatch.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/my-drobo-story-how-our-photos-survived-three-hard-drive-failures\/","title":{"rendered":"My Drobo Story: How Our Photos Survived Three Hard Drive Failures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hard drive failure.<\/i> 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<\/a> technology.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, available at B&H<\/a>.) 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.<\/p>\n

Drobo uses a custom “BeyondRaid<\/a>” 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.<\/p>\n

And boy, are we ever glad we chose to enable double redundancy. Read on for our story.
\n<\/p>\n

First Drive Failure<\/h4>\n
\"mmm,

mmm, Toasty.<\/i><\/center><\/p><\/div>\n

In December of 2013 we experienced our first hard drive failure. “Toasty” (perhaps not the best name in retrospect) reported issues with one of the 1.5TB disks in the array, then went into “data protection mode” where it moved blocks around to ensure my photos were still protected in case another disk failed. After 20 tense hours of “relayout” it completed successfully. I pulled the drive out, sent it back to the drive manufacturer (under warranty), and a few days later, re-inserted the refurbished replacement drive. No problems, no downtime!<\/p>\n

Second and Third Drive Failures<\/h4>\n

We were literally on the other side of the world when the next drive failure happened in April. While we were traveling, Toasty e-mailed us a critical alert to let us know that one of the drives had failed — it happened to be the refurbished replacement drive — and relayout was now underway. No problem. But less than 12 hours later, during this intensive relayout process, our device e-mailed again to let us know a second drive failed. Only three working disks remained, and we worried about the safety of our images and files. We returned home to find all was safe — even though we had two drive failures, no data or precious photos were lost, thanks to double redundancy. Our little Drobo had successfully defended us against three hard drive failures out of six in the course of a few months. (Apparently, only 80% of hard drives make it successfully to their fifth birthday, so having three out of six drives fail within five years is not as rare as you’d think: about 1 in 183.)<\/p>\n

Oops and DroboCare<\/h4>\n

\"drobocare_240x368_a5756c2d-9c7f-4202-adce-aa087b62b468\" Before inserting new hard drives I made the unwise decision of trying to upgrade the never-updated four-year old firmware on our Drobo — jumping four years of updates in one go. After the upgrade, our device failed during boot up (all red lights), and my files were inaccessible. Oops. The one downside of Drobo is their system is quite “closed” — only Drobo engineers have access to the debug info and diagnostics of your system. Unlike conventional RAID systems where you can reassemble your array yourself if the original hardware fails, with Drobo you must deal with the manufacturer, Data Robotics. Problem was — my one year warranty was long expired, and I hadn’t purchased the DroboCare extended warranty<\/a>. My product was so old it wasn’t even featured on their website anymore. What to do?<\/p>\n

I called their support line on a Sunday evening — and live humans actually picked up. Impressive. Even though I was well out of warranty, Drobo was able to extend a one-time courtesy to help resolve my issue — over the next week, I was led through a few diagnostics and a reflash of the firmware. Toasty was up and running again. Drobo support staff were responsive, courteous and efficient, and overall a pleasant experience. I’m normally not one for extended warranties, but all things considered I’d buy a DroboCare extended warranty with any new Drobo given what I know now about the close-endedness of their systems and the quality of the support that they provide.<\/p>\n

The Happy Ending<\/h4>\n

We’ve now replaced all the failed drives with new WD 3TB Red drives<\/a>. Apparently it’s not just us — the 1.5TB drives have proven to be unreliable<\/a>. With the new drives we also get a nice capacity bump. As more 1.5TB drives drop out we’ll slowly replace them with larger drives.<\/p>\n

Note, a RAID or BeyondRaid system doesn’t completely remove the need for backups. You can still be affected by physical damage (fire, flood) to the entire unit, or file deletion (either accidental or malicious\/hackers). In our case we still had a offsite backup of our Drobo but it was several months out of date, and we would have permanently lost a few months of photos. I’m glad we didn’t lose anything in the end, but after this close call I’ll be sure to keep our offsite backup more up-to-date.<\/p>\n

All in all, with this experience, I am now a believer. Fancy redundant disk arrays aren’t just for the paranoid, but are now essential tools for every photographer, especially with hard drive reliability being what it is these days. Drobo very elegantly simplifies this technology and makes it much easier to use, and when it works seamlessly it is quite a marvel. We are now proud Drobo supporters, and now watch prices on Drobo products<\/a> on the accessories page<\/a> of our site.<\/p>\n