Drobo Vs. Nas ?

Here is an answer to a question I posted on another site I mainly wanted to preserve it here so I can remember what I said but also for people to hopefully learn something from:

“Hey everyone… I’m looking to upgrade my current back up solution. I know that this site is sponsored by Drobo and they look great but someone also mentioned another brand called "Firmtek – SeriTek/5PM". Does anybody have any experience with either of these solutions? I’m totally up for other brands with the "no-brainer" raid backups. Any opinions are welcomed. Thanks!”

Reply:

Well i can say this – I have and still use a ReadyNAS NV – never had an issue with it – recently I won the DroboPro that Scott was giving away and it has worked very well for me… That said with in the first week I had a drive fail.. all new seagate drives – it was a strange deal.. since then thou no issues and the drive is under warranty.

I think backup strategy is much more important than what you use… I do like the fact that you can use any size drive – basically I can put crap old drives to use till they really are useless and then chuck them and replace them with bigger drives.

The big secret that not many seem to get is that the Drobo is looked at as either one huge or multiple external hard drives so many of the offsite backup solutions do not limit this where as a NAS on a LAN is limited and they will not back those up.

So currently I have transferred over 4tb of data to the cloud for 5 bucks a month based on my drobo being looked at as 3 external drives – the best part is this is even true when using iSCSI… so network speed with the ability to mirror offsite for very good prices.

The initial investment is large no matter what you get but price does = quality in a NAS or Drobo style solution.

Also understand that a NAS or Drobo is only as good as the drives you put in it and itself being backed up to something else… drive redundancy does not = a backup…it = insurance

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