Power User Data Storage

ByMike Moffit

I have a growing media library and a GoPro camera that I use to record my sailboat racing, so my storage needs keep growing, and will eventually exceed the capacity of the drives I have right now. I need a system that will aggregate multiple drives for lots of storage and some redundancy. If I were a business, I might buy one of our Promise Pegasus RAID units, but as a consumer, I don’t want to spend quite that much and I don’t want to have to buy all the drives at the same time (or replace them all with identical units if I want to expand). This narrows my choices down to systems that are not pure hardware RAID, but special variants that allow for drives of different sizes.

One option is to go for fast local storage using the new Drobo 5D. It is a relatively new product from Drobo, and it supports up to five hard drives, as well as an SSD expansion slot to speed up data access. Using Drobo’s Beyond RAID technology, you can put in up to five drives, of up to 4TB of space, and choose one or two drive redundancy support. You can replace failing drives with new ones while it is running, and you can swap smaller drives for bigger drives to grow your storage. It has two Thunderbolt ports and one USB 3.0 port. The Drobo 5D retails for $849.99 and you can find it here on our website.

The other product I am considering is a network-attached storage device (NAS), the Synology 1512+. Synology has a variety of models, but this is their top notch 5-bay unit. Rather than accessing data locally, it would act as a network file server. Its Synology Hybrid RAID system also supports using drives of different sizes and from different manufacturers, and you can run it with one or two drive redundancy, and upgrade on the fly. It also offers further expansion via up to two 5-bay expansion units, so you could have up to 15 drives in one system! Check it out on our website here.

The Synology uses a network connection instead of Thunderbolt, so it is not as fast as the Drobo with Thunderbolt, but it does have some extra features that are not on the Drobo. As a NAS system, it is really a server computer with a bunch of drive bays, so it can perform any server functions that they include in their DiskStation Manager software, as well as support other packages that you can install.

DSM support file sharing, web sharing, photo sharing, media sharing for a digital video collection, music sharing, backup, and a whole bunch of other stuff you can see on Synology’s own website.

I’m not sure which one I might get in the future, but they are both very cool choices! For drives, I would use the new RAID and NAS-optimized Western Digital RED drives that support time-limited error recovery (TLER), something which might be the topic for another article… View our selection of Western Digital Red hard drives on our website.

Now, as a consultant, I have to give the caveat that drive redundancy does not equal backup. Just because a system can survive the failure of one, or optionally two, drives, it does not mean that you are protected. You should always have any important data backed up on another system. If I plan on storing any unique data on either of these systems (and not just backups of my computer drives), I need to either buy two of them or budget for another storage system to keep a copy of all that data.

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