g-tech eS or Drobo for backup?

lukx

lukx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2003
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WHat would you recommend? G-Tech eS in Raid 1 (http://g-technology.com/Products/G-SPEED-eS.cfm) or Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/)

With g-tech I'm buying extra drive already in safe enclosures and have system in Raid one so drives even when out are readable from all the pcs. Drobo is using it's own system so when it fail sI won't be able to read the drive by itself. But I read that when Raid controller fails I'm toasted and so are all my drives. I'm not sure what to get. I don't want huge things that take a lot of space like Netgear or Tehcus. I was also thinking about E-Safe but it has only 2 drives comapared to eS... Please help.
 
Get a WHS...automated backups and if a drive fails it not big deal and you can pull any single drive out and put it in another system and read it.
 
I thought though that with WHS, you have to "mirror" your data so unlike RAID 5 that can lose one
drive, you need double the drives if you truly want to protect your data with WHS.

I have looked at buying Drobo myself, it seems that even though the drives cannot be read from a pc if pulled out, they can still be read from ANY Drobo that you have. So with Drobo, if it dies and you replace it, just put all the drives in to the new Drobo and you will be up and running.
Never heard of G-Tech though, looks nice if you have a spare x1 PCI-e.
 
The drobo units are pretty nice little units and they have pretty decent flexibilty and have decent speed. I'm a little more partial to having a little more robust backup device like a direct attached storage array such as this array I have 1 of these units configured in 2 RAID 10 LUNs for backup and i only use the first LUN actively and replication the data to the second LUN and then I offload the incremental changes to Amazon S3 storage for archival purposes.

This can get a little bit more expensive in the end, but really if you're picking something out to secure your data.... how much would it cost you to lose that data and send your rig to Ontrack to get your data back? Thats my reasoning by putting a little extra into my backup structure
 
If you want all of your DATA protected then have to buy double the capacity like RAID1.
However you probably dont need all of your data replicated seeing as these are backups. I mean the chances of the drive(s) failing that contain your backups and your computers drive failing all simultaneously is just not very realistic.

And look at this way...if you get a drobo and a drive fails you have no chance of saving that data because you cant just plug it into a PC and run recovery tools on it.
With that Gtech thing if you choose to do RAID and the box fails your screwed because its going to be using it own software raid...not to mention you wont be getting true RIAD performance out of a box like that. Its using esata port multipliers on a software raid. theyre own benchmarks (which are probably a lil skewed) are not impressive 200mb/s on a 4 drive RAID0? Now on to the Cost 4tb for only $1700 is not a deal by any standard. I built my own server with 20 hotswap bays quad core, 4 gb ram, 6.7TB, WHS for $1700 (the same price as the gtech) and its a full blown system that I can render movies on, setup domain controllers, web server, file server, print server, TSGateway.
Im just saying you can get a lot more for a lot less then those options...If you look around in this forum most people have decided to build there own backup, media server boxes because the prebuilt RAID boxes like Drobo and Gtech are so expensive and are limited by theyre proprietary software.
 
ok but what if I also look for small size. I would prefer to have smaller box on the desk than another pc size thing like netgear or something. Aren't there any small solution but also reliable and that doesn't require huge knowledge to make it work?
 
Well HP makes a WHS box and its about the size of the Gtech. And all you have to do is turn it on it makes things like automated backup just stupid simple.

heres a link

That one has just 1x 500gb drive...you can add three more drives(1.5tb are $180) so for ~$1100 you get a powerful computer that does backups, tsgateway, webserver, etc. with 5TB of storage. Now thats cool.
 
Grate! this is what I was looking for!!! I', getting this HP WHS! Thank you all for help !
 
Oh I just read that this HP doesn't support x64 OS? Is it true? I'm using WIndows xp x64 and other pc has vista x64
 
I know it supports Vista x64 for sure because thats what I run on all my computers...as for XP im not sure haven run it in a long time.
 
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