When I bought my first computer (an Apple II+), the salesman asked me if I wanted some floppy disks for digital storage. I asked how much one held; 140Kb was the response. One hundred and forty thousand characters (give or take) boggled my mind. I said I’d take one (back then they sold single floppy disks, believe it or not). I never thought I’d fill that single floppy disk up and I wasn’t smart enough to realize that I needed another for backup.
I was back within a week for several boxes of those disks, and I soon learned how to “notch” the disks to double their storage capacity.
Then came 3.5-inch drives that could store 800KB. Once upon a time I had four of them connected to an Apple IIe with a big honking RAM disk card installed.
My first hard drive was a Mirror Technologies 40/40. It was a 40MB hard drive with a 40MB tape drive backup in a box. It was connected to a Mac Plus and was so spacious I never thought I’d fill it up.
It took me a while to figure out that my digital storage needs are never-ending, but now I always buy the largest capacity hard drives I can afford. And I seem to be replacing drives every two or three years as our storage needs are growing on the order of about 1TB per year or so.
Centralized storage on our servers has also become a problem, so now I’m shopping for some sort of removable-drive RAID system within which I can slide larger capacity drives as they become available.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got my choice narrowed down to two devices: The G-Technology G-SAFE and the Drobo S. As unfortunate as it is predictable, both have advantages and disadvantages over the other.
Oh, and then there’s the Promise Pegasus lurking over there in the corner. But it’s a Thunderbolt device and not one of our computers or servers has a Thunderbolt port. Chances are we’ll need a lot more storage space before we have servers with Thunderbolt ports. But you never know.
The G-Technology G-SAFE
G-Technology’s G-SAFE has two proprietary drive bays that are hot-swappable and is configured as an industry-standard RAID 1 (mirrored data) device. Data copied to the device is immediately mirrored on both physical hard drives. It’s current top capacity is 3TB and it has 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0 ports. It offers read transfer speeds higher than 75MB per second. The G-SAFE has a three year warranty, is made out of aluminum, and has an internal 70-watt power supply. The 3TB configuration costs US$700 from G-Technology and about US$100 less on Amazon. PROVANTAGE is my vendor of choice for this kind of stuff and sells the 3TB G-SAFE for US$578.15
The downside of the G-SAFE is that it uses proprietary drive caddies. A 3TB spare drive module costs US$299 (US$207.17 from PROVANTAGE), for example, where the same Hitachi drive (G-Technology is owned by Hitachi) costs US$170.64. And G-Technology does not sell empty drive caddies. So for three years (the length of the warranty; using third party drives works but isn’t supported and voids the warranty) I’d have to use the Hitachi drives. My preference is to use the enterprise Hitachi drives that have a five year warranty and seem to be bullet-proof.
Another downside to G-Technology gear is that it tends to be pretty loud; it’s most likely a side effect of the excellent build quality. Our servers live in a closet, though, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
The Data Robotis Drobo S
Data Robotics’ Drobo S has five caddy-less drive bays that are hot-swappable and is configured as a proprietary BeyondRAID device. Where standard RAID 1 environments require identical pairs of hard drives to function, Drobo’s BeyondRAID constructs RAID-like redundancy using disparate hard drives of different sizes and from different manufacturers. Throw any hard drive in one of the bays and it will be added to the BeyondRAID array.
The value of this can’t be overstated: To add capacity to the Drobo S, I need only add additional drives (or replace the lower-capacity drives already in the Drobo S, if the bays are full). The additional storage becomes available as soon as the entire array is rebuilt.
With the G-SAFE, I’d have to pull one of the drives and replace it with a larger capacity drive. The RAID protection would be broken until the G-SAFE copied all the data from the remaining original drive to the newly installed, larger capacity drive. Then I’d have to replace the remaining original drive with the identical second larger capacity drive and wait for the G-SAFE to copy the data to the second drive and restore the RAID. Each RAID rebuild would take a considerable amount of time (about one minute for each 5GB of data; that’s at least 10 hours for 3TB of data). And I’d have to physically juggle the drives.
With the Drobo S, if a drive fails, the time to recovery depends on the total amount of data. Unfortunately, the Google brings user reports of shockingly long recovery times when replacing a failed drive or increasing storage capacity with large amounts of data. User accounts of more than four days if the Drobo S is at more than 80 percent capacity are common. And when would you ever be increasing storage capacity except with large amounts of data? Reports of shoddy support from Data Robotics are also quite common.
The general consensus seems to be that the Drobo S transfers data at about half the rate of standard RAID 1 systems like the G-SAFE. Data Robotics has apparently made a design decision to trade performance for redundancy and simplicity.
There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding what kind of drives to use with the Drobo S. Users report that 7200-RPM drives overheat and 5400-RPM drives underperform. Data Robotics itself seems to be confused about what kind of drives work best. On its web page about drive selection it says, “Choose faster spinning drives (≥ 7200 RPM) for applications that can take advantage of higher-performance storage.” In an illustration on the same page it says that Desktop “green” SATA drives (5400-RPM) and Desktop “performance” SATA Drives (7200-RPM) are supported and recommended but enterprise SATA drives (of either 5400- or 7200-RPM flavors) are supported but presumably not recommended.
The Drobo S has ports for USB 3.0 (backwards compatible with USB 2.0), eSATA, and FireWire 800. It offers read transfer speeds of about 67MB per second. Unlike the G-SAFE, the Drobo S offers a software-switch option for double-disk redundancy. Data Robotics also offers Drobo Dashboard monitoring and management software.
The Drobo S is made of plastic, has an external power supply, and a one-year warranty in the US (with a one- or three-year DroboCare extension available). The Drobo S (with no drives) retails for US$799 and is available on Amazon for US$679.99. Surprisingly, PROVANTAGE is a bit higher at US$707.18. That’s right, the Drobo S with no drives costs more than the G-SAFE with two 3TB drives. Configured with two 3GB drives (using the same drives as in the G-SAFE) the Drobo S is US$1021.27.
Head-to-head comparison
So, what’s the best option for my needs? Here’s how it breaks down:
| G-SAFE | Drobo S | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (2 x 3TB configuration) | US$578.15 | US$1021.27 |
| Drive bays | 2 | 5 |
| Construction | Aluminum | Plastic |
| Claimed read speed | > 75MB per second | 67MB per second |
| Warranty | Three years | One year |
| Ports | 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0 | USB 3.0 (backwards compatible with USB 2.0), eSATA, and FireWire 800 |
| Caddy system | Proprietary | Industry standard |
| RAID support | RAID 1 (mirrored data) | Proprietary BeyondRAID |
| Data redundancy | One | One or two |
Conclusion
I’m going to wait a few days to make a decision but I’m leaning strongly toward the G-SAFE because I don’t need more than one level of data redundancy, I’ve had good luck with G-Technology products in the past, and Dobro’s BeyondRAID—while it offers some significant benefits—has the very significant problem of being proprietary. And that scares the crap out of me. If the Drobo S were to fail catastrophically, the drives would be readable only by another Drobo. If the G-SAFE fails catastrophically, the drives are still readable by virtually anything.
Or, maybe I’ll just wait for the 4TB G-SAFE. It’s got to be just around the corner. Looks like it’ll have a Thunderbolt port (G-Technology has announced, but is not shipping, its 8TB G-RAID and its 4TB G-DRIVE both with Thunderbolt ports).
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