[X4U] Firewire Drive Recommendations?

[Dave]

That is good information to know Neil. I haven't heard of any issues with the 2 Drobo's I've seen. 

Another suggestion then, but one that requires some hardware as well as software skills. Run FreeNAS http://freenas.org/ on a retired PC tower, fill with drives, and configure as desired. I have an old Dell PII tower running 24/7/365 for 3 years now. It is rock solid stable. The web based configuration is reasonably easy to use. It isn't as slick as a Drobo, but might be a valid solution.

Dave

On 2010-02-09, at 06:33, Neil Laubenthal wrote:

> Not to sound negative . . .because personally I find the idea behind the Drobo quite interesting . . .but I've seen a considerable number of reports of issues with them.
> 
> It's only anecdotal evidence . . .but I would guess it's running about 3 really satisfied customers to 1 unsatisfied customer based on reading this list, the Tidbits list and a couple of other Mac oriented lists. The issue varies . . .but failure of a drive taking down the whole RAID and killing all of the data seems to be a common but not universal symptom.
> 
> Of course . . .there are a lot of other issues that can cause total failure of a RAID as well . . .and the same issues may affect other RAID brands . . .but I've seen it enough that I might not want to trust my backups to it at this point.
> 
> Between that and the additional price (500 for the empty unit) . . .perhaps a couple of stand alone 2 TB drives would be another thing to consider. These can either be RAIDed within Snow Leopard . . .or there are numerous free/low cost applications that will script a drive duplication so as to make an incremental backup of the backup drive once a day or something like that.
> 
> I agree with the Time Capsule . . . seems like a lot of issues with them and reliability isn't what it should be at this point.
> 
> The real key to backups is . . .of course . . .multiple ones. I don't bother with multiple backups of Time Machine . . .but my laptop drives get cloned periodically in addition to a separate drive and the really important stuff on my laptop gets script duped to a folder on my file server daily. My file server has Time Machine, scripted daily and weekly backups with versioning to both the internal and an external drive, and scripted weekly/daily backups with versioning on another machine (actually an old mini that is the Time Machine destination for the laptops as well as backing up the file server). In addition, there are Mozy (free version so only the really important stuff) and JungleDisk/Amazon S3 offsite backups of the file server share.
> 
> 
> -- 
> neil