The New Drobo is here! (Firewire 800!)

$500 for an external hard-drive case? Hmm.

YES!!! I *almost* ordered one last week. Good thing I waited.

@soulcamp: clearly I don't, your majesty.

Corey, have you ever backed up you hard disk?

Yes yes, I understand what it is now.

The first impression I got was that it was some sort of externalized raid array.

@centro: What on Earth are you talking about?

@Corey: I knew you'd figure it out - I was just razzing you for not reading up on it before posting.

You can get a 4 or 5 bay eSATA enclosure for under $200, and the software RAID executing on your CPU will vastly outperform the pathetic hardware RAID chip in any RAID enclosure that costs under $10,000. Oh, and the eSATA link only gets saturated at 5 disks, whereas you can saturate a Firewire 800 link with 2.

And FW800 is a true bus-based architecture vs. eSATA which is purely a dumb data interface. They are not comparable in all cases, such as with a Drobo, where an eSATA interface would be just as expensive to make and significantly less flexible.

It's not hardware RAID at all.

Basically, you can load up your Drobo with 2, 3, or 4 disks. They don't have to be the same size!

And any one disk can fail and you won't lose data. If it fails, just replace the disk.

Start with 2 disks. When you run out of space, pop in a 3rd, and it will rebalance....

@soulcamp: actually, Firewire is closer to a switched fabric than a bus, which is why Firewire 400 is preferred over the ostensibly faster USB 2.0. There are two kinds of eSATA port multipliers. The dumb kind is a pure multiplexer, which is horrible for RAID performance, but FIS-based multipliers can implement NCQ on the multiplier, allowing true concurrent access to the disks, and linear scaling up until the link is saturated.

As for software RAID vs. hardware RAID, a modern x86 CPU with SSE2 support will beat the crap out of anything short of an Intel IOP, which you're not going to find in a $500 enclosure. This hasn't always been the case, but it sure is now.

I know, but Reamworks was spouting FUD about software RAID that needed answering.

You have these things to store backup data. If your Mac crashes and you have a software RAID, what's the point? I'd rather have my redundant file system in a box separate from my computer.

I use offsite backups, and all my source codes and documents are stored at ProjectLocker (http://www.projectlocker.com/) too.

I'm probably the only one here who needs to edit HD video for work. And I wouldn't touch a software raid. The raid controllers built onto Intel Mobos work fine....

@Reamworks - OK, here is where I have to disagree. The built-in RAID controllers on motherboards are shit. At least get a Promise card with onboard DDR cache. Your piano didn't cost THAT much.

There's no such thing as an on-motherboard SATA RAID controller. Every last one of them depends on a software driver, executing on the CPU, to perform all RAID operations. All the on-board unit does is mask devices in the BIOS from the normal SATA drivers and expose them to the software RAID driver instead. If you're using an OS with a mature software RAID stack, you'll get much better performance out of that.

@ Stark Raving Brad: me neither. Back to the Sears catalog.

oh, i'm torn. should i make the ol' standard creepy uncle wide angle lens joke here, or the lame 90s self deprecating sensitive man microscopic-camera joke?

i can't decide. i better just upload a pic of my wang, right?

@brad: not just a pic, but a gif. An animated one.