[Leica] [Leica} Drobos... If you have them what can you expect?

[Frank Filippone]

  I fear one of our community, who was maybe a non EE will feel encouraged by this type pf message.... and try to build his own NAS..... This kid of 
telling others how to do it is a big problem.  You are doing them no favors.  They will fail.  Are YOU going to bail them out?

(At this point, I calmed down)

I assume Peter, Brian, John, Richard and maybe others did the DIY NAS box because they have the skill set and could save money and have all technical 
options open to them. They achieved their individual goals. They KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING.

BUT.... As I said, the bulk (50-75% or more) of the cost of a NAS is in the HDD, not the box itself.  What Peter, et al,  has done is both cheap and 
good, but Mr. Average Photographer with a bunch of images saved on Drobo drives just is not going to be able toget this kind of solution running.  He 
does not have the skill set. (Yes, I am making a judgement call..... )

This user just does not have the specialized techie smarts to do this, or Richard's or Brian's etc, solution.  No less maintain that with upgrades to 
the OS or other software over time .... DIY NAS really is a dead end... FOR THAT SKILL LEVEL.

  It is similar to telling a user to go buy his CPU, RAM, other components and design the PCB and wire up your own computer..... It can be done, there 
is info on the WEB to do it, you would save money...WHO WOULD DO THAT?

( Blood pressure again restored to normal)

Savings at most is the complete cost of the NAS box, a savings of $250-500 or so.  About the price of a Leica camera Battery.

The downside is that you miss an Windows upgrade, something changes in your non Windows OS that runs your DIY NAS, and your box again becomes a 
brick.  Don't to it.

For those with the skill set, good for you.  For the rest of us,

Use external USB HDDs or

Spend the money, buy the finished NAS box.  The rest I can help you do.

You do have the skills for this solution.....

But get rid of the Drobo..... before it is too late.


Frank Filippone
BMWRed735i at Gmail.com

On 5/17/2024 8:22 AM, Peter Dzwig wrote:
> Another, and cheaper option, which I implemented some time ago was to build a RAID10-based NAS image server (it could store anything but I just keep 
> images there) using a Rapberry Pi and terabyte thumb drives physically connected  via a fast switch and using my local fast Wifi LAN.
>
> Instructions are online in several places.
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter
>
> On 17/05/2024 00:24, Brian Reid wrote:
>> Frank speaks the truth, and persuasively. If you use Drobo, mind his words carefully.
>>
>> For many years I used ReadyNAS LAN-connected storage devices. A Drobo competitor.
>> When I saw ReadyNAS circling the drain a few years ago, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do next.
>> With Drobo in an equally advanced state of disintegration, it seemed to me at that time that migrating to yet another vendor of storage appliances 
>> (such as Synology) would be more risk than I was willing to take, so I bought what is in the industry called a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), and 
>> set it up with ZFS RaidZ3 and a 10 GB/sec LAN connection. I have a Supermicro-based DIY with a dozen 18-TB Seagate Exos SATA-III drives, running 
>> FreeBSD 14. I've had it up and running for about a year, and I'm happy with it. If I didn't know how to build things like this, I would have moved 
>> to Synology.
>>
>> I've also been watching Synology, and it looks to be sound, stable, and long-lived. My only worry would be that the company is based in Taiwan, and 
>> China has been acting strangely about Taiwan.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>