Drobo Suggestions

[MrHood22]

You are going to have an issue migrating this data to whatever solution you choose though. You have 4 1TB drives say full of data now.
To put the drives in a Drobo, QNAP, (any NAS), internal Raid-5 (any raid) you are going to wipe all the data on the drives. You will need to either buy new disks (so you have something to copy the data to), or beg/borrow drives from your friends to temporarily hold the data.

Re Cards - the requirement to run 5 drives is going to punt you into the 8 connector range (your options are typically 1,2,4,8, and 16 connectors). My suggestion would probably be something like this
LSI 9240-8i (comes with cables that turn each of the connectors in the card into 4 Sata ports).
The cheapest option I see on newegg is HighPoint RocketRaid 2680

Edit: Saw all the new discussion while I was typing this. IMO go with one of the various 2TB drives floating around there. The NAS will be slightly more expensive in the end than going internal, but I'm thinking it will be a simpler workflow for you.

As far as migrating the data, i'm not worried. I have some spare HD's laying around plus my roommate has a few TB's in his Drobo he lend to me.

Go with the 2TB drives I linked, they are only $10 more per drive. Also you might not need that PCI network adapter if your mainboard already has gigabit ethernet on it.

My mainboard might have gigabit on it. I'm not sure. It's a DFI Bloodiron P35-R2L I think. I was looking at my board last night and it has RAID functionality but i'm not sure what degree. I may end up getting 4 x 2tb. That would be 6TB of usable space, right?

You don't have a spare PCI-E x1 slot?
$32 - Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 10/100/1000Mbps PRO/1000 GT PCI-E x1 NIC OEM w/ 1 x RJ45

I might. I'll have to check. I have another GPU in the mail (PCI) but last I remembered i'd have 3 PCI and 2 PCI-E x1. I think i'm using up 2 PCI, the other slots should be free once i remove the USB port covers.

 

[Archer75]

I think the biggest thing about a drobo and the major thing people overlook is the ability to use drives of any size. This is absolutely HUGE for me. It's the number one reason i'm currently using a WHS box with 16 drives.
Otherwise i'd have to throw drives away every time i'd want to upgrade storage as i'd have to get matching drives.
It really does boggle my mind that this isn't more important to most people.

 

[MikeTrike]

I think the biggest thing about a drobo and the major thing people overlook is the ability to use drives of any size. This is absolutely HUGE for me. It's the number one reason i'm currently using a WHS box with 16 drives.
Otherwise i'd have to throw drives away every time i'd want to upgrade storage as i'd have to get matching drives.
It really does boggle my mind that this isn't more important to most people.

It depends on how much you value performance and not having wasted space.

 

[SirMaster]

I think the biggest thing about a drobo and the major thing people overlook is the ability to use drives of any size. This is absolutely HUGE for me. It's the number one reason i'm currently using a WHS box with 16 drives.
Otherwise i'd have to throw drives away every time i'd want to upgrade storage as i'd have to get matching drives.
It really does boggle my mind that this isn't more important to most people.

This isn't an exclusive feature. You can do this on any Synology NAS as well.

http://www.synology.com/us/products/features/RAID.php

"Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an intelligent volume type that optimizes volume size when combining hard disks of varying sizes into an array. When set as the Standard volume type in DSM (Disk Station Manager), SHR provides 1 to 2 hard disks fault-tolerance of data protection. It can be expanded to an optimal volume space when a lager or additional hard disks are inserted into the array."

They also achieve it by still using standard RAID levels as well so you can hope to recover your data if the NAS itself dies. Something you can't do with Drobo's implementation.

Drobo's implementation of this is also one of its biggest shortcomings for me. I posted this earlier:

The biggest problem with Drobo is that you have to format the volume to a larger size than you have drives for if you ever want to expand the volume. So it will never report the correct free space unless you are using their proprietary software which only works if it's connected via USB/Firewire/SATA and not via normal LAN like Samba.

The big problem this causes is that when you cross about 75% actual capacity, writes to the Drobo slow down to a crawl, and we are talking less than 3MB/s, because the poor little micro-controller in the Drobo needs to find places to put more data because it doesn't know how much ffree space is actually available if you formated the volume larger than the space you actually have.

 

[Archer75]

This isn't an exclusive feature. You can do this on any Synology NAS as well.

http://www.synology.com/us/products/features/RAID.php

"Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is an intelligent volume type that optimizes volume size when combining hard disks of varying sizes into an array. When set as the Standard volume type in DSM (Disk Station Manager), SHR provides 1 to 2 hard disks fault-tolerance of data protection. It can be expanded to an optimal volume space when a lager or additional hard disks are inserted into the array."

Amahi and flexraid can do it as well. As can unraid. All can be installed on your own machines.

 

[SirMaster]

Amahi and flexraid can do it as well. As can unraid. All can be installed on your own machines.

Yeah, unraid is pretty cool indeed. I would consider using that if i need a new server. Or perhaps I might go with ZFS. I like that ZFS knows when sectors go bad even if you wouldn't normally have tried to read from them.

 

[Archer75]

Yeah, unraid is pretty cool indeed. I would consider using that if i need a new server. Or perhaps I might go with ZFS. I like that ZFS knows when sectors go bad even if you wouldn't normally have tried to read from them.

Yeah, i'd like to use ZFS as well. Do you know if any of these systems or others work with ZFS? Meaning the ability to use any size drive but also be able to build your own server as opposed to buying a NAS or similar device?

 

[danswartz]

FreeNAS is starting to support ZFS. Installing opensolaris with napp-it (napp-it.org) on top fully supports it. A (very) new and rough zfsguru based on freebsd also does zfs.

 

[ChrisBenn]

My mainboard might have gigabit on it. I'm not sure. It's a DFI Bloodiron P35-R2L I think. I was looking at my board last night and it has RAID functionality but i'm not sure what degree. I may end up getting 4 x 2tb. That would be 6TB of usable space, right?

This is your board I think? If so you already have a Gig port so no need for the NIC. Your board supports raid5 onboard, no idea how reliable it would be though. (Nice thing about using an external controller is if the controller dies you can always replace it with another one and be back up - if the mobo dies there is no guaraunte you can get the same mobo and/or that a new one would support raid-5 in the same format. But theoretically that would be the cheapest as it would only require you to add a new drive.