Interesting sequence of events Zim. Per our conversation, I trust my Drobos, but they have some quirks. I have taken their shutdown sequence to heart, always through the dashboard. Occasionally I'll fire a Drobo up and it just decides to shut itself off early in the boot up sequence. I love the flexibility and interface, I've just learned to do everything according to the book and deliberately. 5D number 3 arrives Monday. They better not get quirky on us, I have 10K invested at this point!!

My 6TB LaCie Cube had 1 drive go toes up a week or so ago. They are 1.5 TB Seagate drives. I debated about fixing it, because all the drives are obviously the same age, but I decided 6TB is 6TB, so I ordered a new drive from New Egg for 79 bucks. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether I could replace all the drives in that array with 3 or 4TB drives and have it work normally? Guess I could call LaCie.

Your LaCie might work if you stuffed it with 3TB drives, but I would not bet on it. I've had several devices -- one is right next to me now -- that had some upper limit stuffed into their chips because "that oughta be enough for anybody" and they don't work well beyond that.

The one I have right here is a two-drive setup that would allow RAID-1 and RAID-0... so long as each drive was no bigger than 1TB. This was not advertised, I had to find it out by plugging two 1.5TB drives into it and then suffering through a lot of tech "support". It's now two independent 1.5TB drives in the same enclosure, not a very useful concept really.

If you're curious, definitely call LaCie before trying it. If you're not that curious, fix the drive and then sell it.

Rodolfo Paiz wrote:
gerov wrote:
Have those of you who are backing up to DVDs considered burning onto blu-ray discs, which are supposed to hold 50gb of data?

Gero, I'm a big believer in hard-drive storage. Optical discs (CD, DVD, even BR) can all be scratched or corrupted fairly easily, and I worry about being able to read them years down the line. They're also a much slower and lower-capacity solution than hard drives. And they're off-line storage... you can only get to the data on the disk you currently have inserted. Too much of a hassle for me, with no real payback in my eyes. I just don't think they're as good a solution as a plain ole hard drive, with its MTBF of hundreds of thousands of hours, fully-online storage, high speed, total compatibility, and compact size (even portability).

Optical disks have a high cost, too. Large hard drives are about 5.0 cents/GB ($150 for 3TB), while cheap off-brand 50GB BD-R DL disks in a 25-pack come out to 9.3 cents/GB and even a 100-pack of Verbatim 4.7GB DVD-R disks costs 6.2 cents/GB. Hard drives are better, faster, cheaper, safer, and more trustworthy IMHO than any optical disk you can throw at me.

Not that I have strong opinions on the matter or anything...
I'll go with that I back up all my photos and documents on a pair of 2Tb Raid (1) hard drives on the computer and then back up photos to a pair of 2Tb external WD Book hard drives in rotation but I still run out of disk space, so I've started backing up previous years' (ie I'm about to do 2012) RAW files to a small external Hard Drive (500Gb) I reckon that after a year I probably won't want to acces the RAW files again, but if I do, I've got them
Niall

JWilsonphoto wrote:
Interesting sequence of events Zim. Per our conversation, I trust my Drobos, but they have some quirks. I have taken their shutdown sequence to heart, always through the dashboard. Occasionally I'll fire a Drobo up and it just decides to shut itself off early in the boot up sequence. I love the flexibility and interface, I've just learned to do everything according to the book and deliberately. 5D number 3 arrives Monday. They better not get quirky on us, I have 10K invested at this point!!

My 6TB LaCie Cube had 1 drive go toes up a week or so ago. They are 1.5 TB Seagate drives. I debated about fixing it, because all the drives are obviously the same age, but I decided 6TB is 6TB, so I ordered a new drive from New Egg for 79 bucks. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether I could replace all the drives in that array with 3 or 4TB drives and have it work normally? Guess I could call LaCie.

Generally raid arrays need to all be the same size. You can put in a larger drive, but it will only use as much as is available on the other drives in the array. So you would need to replace all of them to get a larger array,

I did this a while back with a four drive Netgear array. The process was lengthy but it did work flawlessly. Took out one drive and put in the replacement drive. The array then took a fair amount of time to recover the data that was on the removed drive. Notice I didn't do any manual copying; the array took care of recovering the data. At the end of that process everything looked the same as where I started with the new drive only half used.

I repeated the process,one drive at a time (and this is critical; if you do more than one at a time the array will not be able to recover the data). When all were done the array looked exactly the same as at the start with every drive now half used but all the data the same as at the start. I rebooted the array and the array then expanded the entire array to use all the new space. This process again took quite a whle.

So the process was rather lengthy but all was done by the raid array itself; there's no need to watch over it while it does what it's designed to do. Is it worth doing? In my case, the Netgear is a very nice device, compatible with Windows, Mac, and UNIX, all of which I have in the house. And it has a Gb interface as well. I might not have bothered if it had a 10/100 interface.

Rob

RobMoser wrote:
Generally raid arrays need to all be the same size. You can put in a larger drive, but it will only use as much as is available on the other drives in the array. So you would need to replace all of them to get a larger array,

I did this a while back with a four drive Netgear array. The process was lengthy but it did work flawlessly.

Which points up one of Drobo's chief selling points: you can expand your available storage space by replacing just one drive at a time with a larger one.

But, however, and this is a big 'but', the 5Ds Jim and I bought are limited to a partition size of 16TB, because who would ever need more than that? I'm not precisely sure what happens when, down the road, we start replacing the 4TB drives with larger units as they become available (right now, with single-disk-fault protection, the 20TB of disk provides 14.89TB of available storage on a single, 16TB partition). Presumably you'd have to repartition the array into a pair of 16TB partitions...but in order to do that you'd have to wipe the data and reload from...where, exactly? I'm planning to use my first (and so far only) Drobo 5D as primary storage, with a farm of individual external disks as its backup, once I finish loading the Drobo from that self-same disk farm. But if I do that, logically, the disk farm should become my off-site backup, which is a PITA.

*sigh*. It never ends.

I guess my next big purchase won't be a new camera or a nice piece of glass, but a second Drobo to use as my offsite backup.

nrferguson wrote:
[...] so I've started backing up previous years' (ie I'm about to do 2012) RAW files to a small external Hard Drive (500Gb) I reckon that after a year I probably won't want to acces the RAW files again, but if I do, I've got them

I wouldn't bet on that... I find myself often going back to prior years to reprocess a photo that I loved, but now with better tools and slightly-improved skills. IMHO, it's better to invest in more storage (with the key again being that one 3TB drive is cheaper than three 1TB drives). Once a RAW file is gone, it's gone forever.

Thanks for the insights Guys. I'm just going to replace the one failed drive, load the array with files, put it in bubble pack and store it off site. What I could sell a used 6TB LaCie 4Big wouldn't be worth the time involved.

Zim, I've thought about 16TB deal. I think it will be on eof those things where we will just buy new enclosures filled with the bigger drives as drive capacity expands. I've read reports of gas filled 5.5TB drives in development, but who knows how long it will be before they are available, and remotely affordable. I think our 14.89 TB Drobos will serve us well for quite a while. You've discovered the problem though, having that capacity in one simple box makes you realize that you need more simple boxes of that capacity.

I haven't loaded mine with the SSD, not sure I will at this point.

Trust is a two way street

Erich

JWilsonphoto wrote:
Thanks for the insights Guys. I'm just going to replace the one failed drive, load the array with files, put it in bubble pack and store it off site. What I could sell a used 6TB LaCie 4Big wouldn't be worth the time involved.

Zim, I've thought about 16TB deal. I think it will be on eof those things where we will just buy new enclosures filled with the bigger drives as drive capacity expands. I've read reports of gas filled 5.5TB drives in development, but who knows how long it will be before they are available, and remotely affordable. I think our 14.89 TB Drobos will serve us well for quite a while. You've discovered the problem though, having that capacity in one simple box makes you realize that you need more simple boxes of that capacity.

I haven't loaded mine with the SSD, not sure I will at this point.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the helium filled drives, Jim. The initial development is focused on fast dives (10k & 15k) like what I use in big SAN arrays in the data center. I think it will be a while before this trickles down to consumer drives using end user device interfaces.

Rob

Image time...

Errikson Skycrane, Malcolm,...is still sting waiting,...
While I really want to capture it in the air,....given it will only be in action if the Bushfires get going,...Im happy to see it sit on standby


Al

That's kind of what I figured Rob.

Angry wrote:
Image time...

Errikson Skycrane, Malcolm,...is still sting waiting,...
While I really want to capture it in the air,....given it will only be in action if the Bushfires get going,...Im happy to see it sit on standby

<snipped the pic>

Al

How about Malcom's older sister Christine to whet your appetite Al?

A verry cold (for me that is) morning.

wow. That is nice!. The tape is a bit out of place for such a pretty airplane.....

Looks like they taped over the cabin air vent; how cold was it, Paul?

That is a beautiful Staggerwing.

david russell wrote:
Angry wrote:
Image time...

Errikson Skycrane, Malcolm,...is still sting waiting,...
While I really want to capture it in the air,....given it will only be in action if the Bushfires get going,...Im happy to see it sit on standby

<snipped the pic>

Al

How about Malcom's older sister Christine to whet your appetite Al?

Anya and I are now back in Miami... hi, everyone!

Daniela and Rolf did not make it. Apparently, someone -- who shall remain nameless for pity's sake -- forgot to take his old passport (the one with his U.S. visa in it) with us when we went to Guatemala. So until that passport gets down to Guatemala, he's stuck there.

I hate it when that happens, don't you?

I have the passport here with me, and I've already set up its transportation arrangements for tomorrow. Other than the $560 in costs ($160 to ship the passport and $400 in penalties to change the two reservations), it's a piece of cake. I just thought y'all would be amused to hear about this latest adventure by our mysterious marauder...

Have not posted in a while. I was shown this youtube video yesterday and thought folks may be interested here. I don't know if it's been posted here before or not.
Worlds Smallest Airport
vid

Link to background info

Oh boy Rodolfo, that "unnamed" person is going to be on the owing end of a lot of honey do's for the forseeable future..............