Drobo D5 3 Thunder Bolt3 or Lacie 2Big Thunder Bolt3

[Garmit]

Getting ready to purchase one or the other. Would like some opinions. for a 8 Tb setup the Drobo is $400 more but has 5 bays allowing for future needs of expansion and dual disk redundancy. My fear of Lacie is only 2 drives so limited to raid 0 or 1. And the need to use large size drives instead of multiple smaller size drives. Thoughts ?

 

[jeffW]

Doesn't Drobo use a proprietary system so you will always have to use Drobo no mix and match down the road?? Raid isn't so much for back up and archival redundancy as much as a way for hard drives to become faster, does that really matter with SSDs? what are you trying to do? scratch disks or backup?

 

[Garmit]

Raid is never a backup option although it is a viable part of a good backup system. Im tired of this drive for video, this for photos this for work, etc. Im looking for one source for my data files that can grow instead a collection of larger and larger drive as time goes on, also providing redundancy for real time protection and the speed increase that comes from a raid of multiple disks. The Lacie 2 big or the Drobo will be backed up daily to another non raid 8 to 10 gig hd with Super duper, And nightly to Backblaze I will also be backing up with Time machine nightly with one weeks worth of incremental saves just in case I want to go back to a earlier version of a file from that week. Drobo is proprietary software I understand but with my daily backup on a non raid hard drive there's no loss of data If the Drobo fails or I want to change to another raid system I just copy the files over to what ever system I go with. Heck with Drobo If It crashes I can take out all 4 or five disks put them into a new Drobo all at once and fired it up. It will set itself up just as the old one. You do have to put all disks in before you fire up the new one or you could run into trouble. You can't do that with a hardware raid unless the same exact controller and drives are used. Lacies 2 Big contrains me to raid 1 and if that hardware raid goes unlike the software raid, the drives themselves can get corrupt when the controller craps out, You loose everything unless your backing up to a single drive daily as mentioned before. Lacie 6 or 12 big is out of the question because of cost. I haven't seen anyone complain about speed with the Drobo since they started building them with a msata slot and a battery back up that saves the data if power is interrupted and then writes it to the disk. Heck I think I made my decision by talking it out here unless there are other issues I did not consider. Thank you for responding and posing those questions to consider.