Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/10/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi Tina, Since I brought it up, let me try. I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong. :)) Firstly, I classify external storage in 2 different ways. The most common one is a USB/Firewire/eSATA external disk drive or disk enclosure. This is a disk (enclosure) you connect to your computer directly probably using a USB cable or Firewire cable (and occasionally a eSATA cable). You probably have 20 of these. The multiple disks in a box version is something like Drobo which can be configured to handle single disk failures (RAID-5,...). The other less common class is network-based storage. If you only have 1 (one) computer that you use to access all the data on these external disks at a time, you don't need a more complicated setup. The main problem is a proliferation of these little boxes as you buy another one when you run out of space. I have 7 external drives on my desk at home. Some are pretty small disks (30GB @ 4200 RPM anyone? :) Drobo (and other boxes like it) allows you to put multiple disks in the same box to save some desk space and add redundancy at a price of consuming some of the disk space (with RAID-5 - 1/N space is used for redundancy where N is the number of disks in the box). Now if you have multiple computers in the house that would like to use these external storage, you could play disk-rearrangement-gopher or you could get what techies call a NAS. It just a acronym for disk storage is usable via your (home) network. Apple's TimeMachine is probably the most common example that people are aware of. Network is the keyword. If you can't access it over your home Ethernet or Wifi network, it's not a NAS (Network Addressable Storage). On Windows, you would see it as a SMB network drive. Drobo is a box that holds up to 4 disks sold by Data Robotics which is not accessible via your network. You have to plug it directly into your computer via USB or Firewire to get access to the data. There are many other examples. To turn Drobo into a NAS (so you can access it over your home network from multiple computers), requires that you buy one of these DroboShare boxes <http://www.drobo.com/Products/droboshare.html> which connects the Drobo to your network. There are many other disk enclosures which are NAS right out of the box like this one <http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509> which holds 2 disk and is network accessible out-of-the-box. What should you use? -------------------- * If you have only one computer that needs to access these disks and just a few external disks, just use the external drive you have today via USB or Firewire. * If you have one computer and are suffering from way too many external disks to keep track of AND/OR want some protection again disk failure, you can buy a Drobo (or similar) box to consolidate all your data and get some protection against (single) disk failures by using RAID-1 or RAID-5. [Note I said *some* protection! Your house can still catch fire and fry all your data]. * If you have multiple computers that needs simultaneous access to the data on the disks, that is when you should buy a NAS (eg. Drobo + DroboShare or the Dlink box I referenced or any other NAS box). From speed perspective, in order of increasing performance of the interfaces - USB2, FW400, FW800|Gbit Ethernet, eSATA. eSATA is by far the fastest (if your disk can keep up) at about 6X the speed of USB2 or 3 gigabits per second compared to about 400-500 megabits per second for USB2 and Firewire 400. If I have confused things further, apologies in advance. Regards, Spencer On Oct 16, 2008, at 10:45, Tina Manley wrote: > > Could somebody explain Drobo to me. A "Drobo for Dummies" guide > would be good ;-) I've googled but everything seems to assume that > you already know what Drobo is and why it is different from JBOD > (just a bunch of disks). I thought NAS was only for a network. Do > I need a network? I have about 20 external hard drives - only about > 5 hooked up at a time. > > Very confused!!