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| Ray of Light trashes the Drobo (USD $499) by Fussbett 01/12/2008, 2:33am PST | ||||
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| Sanitario666: Do you care about this?
Sanitario666: http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx Ray of Light: so far I watched the first 5 seconds, and I'm going to predict it's crap! unpausing now ... Ray of Light: they have done some interesting things here, it may or may not be crap. Negatives: $125/slot, 4 slots, mandatory use of their management console, opaque technology that claims to do amazing things Ray of Light: I would not buy one, because so much depends on how good their underlying code is, and the kind of things they're claiming to do (generally) take years of development to get right Sanitario666: I'm intrigued by it for sure. It's more suited for a less tech guy like me. Ray of Light: If it works exactly like they claim, then it's an OK value and there are people I'd recommend it to Ray of Light: the tech sheet doesn't say anything about how they accomplish the 3->2->1 drive migration online Sanitario666: Maybe you haven't heard of MAGIC Ray of Light: well, the dumb way would be to start in raid-5, then silently convert to mirroring when you hit 2 drives, and this is the kind of strategy that I think will fail somewhere Ray of Light: but then they allow mixed capacities, so maybe they are doing something even cleverer than that Ray of Light: BUT if they had devised some really new strategy that removes all the old limitations, why sell it as something so unambitious as a 4-disk el cheapo consumer product? Sanitario666: They have dreams of iPod Sanitario666: And $50/share Ray of Light: it's like when these guys invent perpetual motion machines and then want to sell them as car engines. As if the best use of perpetual motion is not having to fill up anymore. Ray of Light: a $300 linux server with $150 8-port sata card gives you half the per-slot price and half as much free space lost to redundancy, and takes about an hour to set up, plus formatting time. With a modern distro you can configure all the storage and share it out from a gui Sanitario666: who's doing that?!?! Sanitario666: 5 neckbeards. Ray of Light: noooo it's becoming super common in universities and such. Because the old way of doing it was to buy an HP or EMC array @ >$1000/slot Sanitario666: Wow, universities. Sanitario666: So Linux has a lock on that market, eh? Ray of Light: well, I'd compare it to the early (pre-linksys) days of home NAT Ray of Light: there is clear demand for a box like drobo, and such a box should probably cost around $50/slot eventually. But the market hasn't woken up to that yet so linux is the stopgap Ray of Light: all the existing products that try, and drobo isn't the first (just the fanciest so far), are still expensive and only 4 slots. 6+ slots would make a lot more sense because that's where the value of raid-5 kicks into high gear Ray of Light: http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/sb/ here is a good article with a lot of graphs Sanitario666: Well there's supposedly a 6 bay Drobo on the way. Ray of Light: they're more at the high end of things but they're making boxes for $1k/TB of protected storage which is amazing Sanitario666: Hopefully it'll cost $200 like in your FANTASY Sanitario666: haha this link is exactly why Drobo is awesome. Sanitario666: Fuck this whole web page, fuck these graphs. Sanitario666: "I've never experienced such frequency in drive crashes. It seems that within 10 minutes of transfer 200+GB or more of data (which takes HOURS), the unit crashes and I have to start all over again. I HATE DROBO." (forum post) Ray of Light: well, like I say, their proposition is kind of intriguing, but reliable multi-drive storage is notoriously difficult to get right, especially on the first try and DOUBLE ESPECIALLY when all the work is done automatically and without user guidance. Ray of Light: so I would wait one year at a minimum to see if the thing even works Sanitario666: Well it's at 8 months now Sanitario666: I would suspect that it's massively inefficient in the name of compatibility. Ray of Light: well, the mandatory management software is troubling too. Because you don't know how much of the heavy lifting is being done by that. The fat guy says "it's just like a USB drive" Ray of Light: except it's not, it's just like a proprietary peripheral that needs some software to work Ray of Light: no firewire, esata, rj45 connections: again these are cheap things to add and someone who shares my understanding of the problem would automatically include these in such a sophisticated product. Ray of Light: The company who cracks this storage egg -- and someone will! -- I expect them to have a very detailed vision and not to be conducting surveys on desired interfaces and port densities like drobo is. I could be totally wrong, but this smells more like Iomega Zip drive 2.0 than like something revolutionary. Sanitario666: I agree that it's the Iomega Zip drive, but you didn't work in graphics when the Zip drive came out. Sanitario666: It was awesome! Ray of Light: I "worked" in warez at that time and I bought one the day they came out. Ray of Light: or actually like 2 weeks later because of widespread shortages, and then it took another month to get the media Ray of Light: I'm happy that this product exists because it seems like it's getting a lot of hype, and maybe that will lead to development of a clearly great product. Sanitario666: If this works as advertised, it's already truly great. Sanitario666: I'm just scared of it. Ray of Light: one post describes the hardware as a "shell", with the software doing all the raid and migration. If this is true, it's exactly the kind of weakness I'm talking about Ray of Light: "The patent-pending technology within Drobo is not RAID and was developed specifically to perform data management and configuration tasks automatically so that you don't have to. Drobo does utilize advanced storage concepts such as virtualization, but it is not a derivative of RAID." Ray of Light: this is perpetual-motion-speak Ray of Light: why not get your company to buy one and use it for something non-critical? |
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