Drobo or G-Safe ?? other options ??

[imr]

Hi to all,

I am using an external drive iomega (5'' Gb with Firewire 8'') for the raw files and my lightroom catalogue is stored on my local drive (iMAC).

I am thinking to change my external drive for: G-SAFE or Drobo
I would like to have an automatic back-up in a secondary drive this the reason to change... I have doubts betwen both.

If somebody has experience with these units or with others units... please tell me... thanks in advance.

Regards
Ignacio.

 

[rebop]

Drobo or G-Safe ?? others options ??

Check ou tthe ReadyNas Duo. I think its abetter product and very pleased with mine. I have the front button BACKUP set to back all of my images as well as scheduled full system backups and they are all on Raid X so more than one copy kept. Their support is excellent as ell.

Did I mention it is less expensive as well if you shop for deals?

Worth looking at.

~Bob

 

[rlhess]

Drobo or G-Safe ?? others options ??

Hello, Ignacio,

I'm new to this forum. I do audio tape restoration for a business and about a year ago bought a pair of Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x5'' GB drives each. I'm running them as RAID-5 and one backs up the other. One is in my neighbour's home, connected via a fibre optic link. The available capacity is about 135' GiB (binary counting).

I started my slide scanning project and needed to replace older NAS boxes (going back to 2''3--LaCie Ethernet Disks) and chose a pair of Thecus N52''Pro units with five slots. I populated them with four 1 TB drives for an available capacity of about 27'' GiB. Again, one is off-site.

Here is a discussion on my blog of what I'm doing in a bit more detail. There is no real difference between raw images and audio. Audio takes between 5-15 MB/minute/channel, raw images are between what 1'-2' MB? Maybe a bit more? (My D2'' runs about 16.5 MB including approx 5'' K in-camera JPEGs per shot.) I enjoyed the analogy with the D1'''s raw images which were about 1' MB that every time I pressed the button, I filled up the equivalent of the entire hard drive of the original IBM PC-XT!

I don't have a good solution for backup on Mac, but on Windows, I use timed and manually initiated backup with Vice-Versa Pro. I found the Shutdown command for Windows so I run VVPro manually on my main audio machine when I'm done for the night and it runs a command at the end that shuts the machine down. I have the same installed on the photo machine, but I'm currently letting it run all night since I try to fill the slide feeder before retiring.

I really like the NAS boxes -- we have eight XP computers here for a family of four -- long story -- so we're a bit atypical. The main backbone is gigabit Ethernet. Six of our computers are 2.8-3.2 GHz, and running 1-3 GB of RAM. I haven't made the leap into CoreTwoDuo land, but I've been underwhelmed by a few systems I've used that were supposed to be screamers...but that could also be Vista.

Cheers,

Richard