Drobo

I’ve been one of those guys for years now that has had a number of servers running in my basement. At one point, there were over a dozen doing various things and well…helped me learn for the job that I have now.

But, time moves on and for the past several years I’ve had just one machine that I used for backups and a little bit of development. And in the most recent 12 months, that machine has only been used for backups. Now, normally it wouldn’t be a big deal to have this machine running. But its getting up there in age and quite frankly, a 1U server running in the basement is LOUD!

The solution

It was time to spec out a solution and I was looking for a few things.

It had to be relatively quiet
Small form factor was a plus
Somewhat speedy

There are several players in the home NAS space (Synology / QNap / Drobo / etc) and my final choice came down to a Drobo 5N. What I like about the Drobo is that it has a good track record with several of my friends that have them. Though the same could easily be said about Synology and QNap. On this unit, we have a gigE interface with the ability for 5 SATA III 6Gbps drives AND have an additional mSATA drive there for caching. All at a fairly reasonable price. The Drobo Apps are decent enough to fill my needs with a MySQL server, BitTorrent Sync client and a few others.

To fill out the unit, I added 4 x 2TB drives from both Seagate and Toshiba. Why the 2 different vendors? Well, let’s just say vendor diversity is a good thing. I wouldn’t want a solution where I had 1 vendor and then hit a bug where all my drives die at roughly the same time. It *could* still happen, but by having the two vendors I can hopefully avoid getting into what could be a bad batch from the manufacturer. For the mSATA, I didn’t do anything fancy there. My main concern was to add a large enough cache that if I wanted to run a few VMs off the unit, it wouldn’t be a big deal so I picked out a 128GB model from ADATA.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the solution. Right now I’m consolidating data on to the device and have already retired my server that was running. Its been much nicer not having to hear that thing and soon I will be clearing out the bakers rack that it used to sit on in the storage area. This should make the big boss much happier.

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