RAID Hard Drive Enclosure Question

Hello everyone,

I am planning on buying a RAID Hard Drive Enclosure and I just wanted to know the difference between the expensive Drobo 5D and a normal RAID Hard Drive Enclosure.

The Drobo 5D is around $500 w/o hard drives! I have been looking at the Vantec or Mediasonic RAID Hard Drive Enclosures (Canada Computers | RAID Enclosures) and they are 1/5 of the price.

What are the difference between them? They both take the same amount of hard drives and both are RAID configuration..

Thanks in advance!

It looks to me like the drobo does a lot of the work for you. It's more like an automated raid enclosure. An analogy if you will, a modern washing machine vs using a river back in 1800s to wash your clothes. If you know how to implement raid and you feel sufficiently confident you can do so, I would save the money and go with a cheaper 1/5th the price solution. This is just my opinion. You pay the extra money so it can do the work for you, if you're ok with that and can afford it, go for it. Your choice. I am in no way mocking or anything, just my honest opinion. I myself bought a 40 dollar Marvel 4 sata III PCIE raid card and I can implement raid inside my tower. It just depends how many HDDs you want to implement, your projected TCO and how much ROI you're expecting.

Just curious, isn't all of the RAID enclosure pretty much self-automated?
Don't I just stick the hard drives in and start dragging and dropping files? (Many photographs)

The drobo isn't a true RAID enclosure, it is more RAID like. It performs the functions of a RAID but has some differences. The Drobo lets you mix and match the HD sizes and utilizes all of the different drives capacities. True RAID wants you to have all the drives the same capacity and will only use the capacity of the smallest drive for each drive in the array(i.e. if you have 3 drives, 1 TB, 2 TB, 2 TB, it will only utilize 1 TB on each drive).

xunile said:

The drobo isn't a true RAID enclosure, it is more RAID like. It performs the functions of a RAID but has some differences. The Drobo lets you mix and match the HD sizes and utilizes all of the different drives capacities. True RAID wants you to have all the drives the same capacity and will only use the capacity of the smallest drive for each drive in the array(i.e. if you have 3 drives, 1 TB, 2 TB, 2 TB, it will only utilize 1 TB on each drive).

So I guess that's the main advantage?

That is one of the main selling points of the Drobo.

xunile said:

That is one of the main selling points of the Drobo.

Do you think the Drobo is reliable for the long term end point user? Just out of curiosity. First time I heard of it and it piqued my interest

Yes the Drobo can swap and switch drives easily, but if you added a different capacity drive, the extra amount will be allocated to "Reserved".

With regards to the cheaper RAID enclosures like the Mediasonic ProRaid, what is one drive fails? Can't I just add another drive just like the same as the Drobo?

With some enclosures you would have to go into it's configuration page and tell it to rebuild the array. It usually isn't too hard.

xunile said:

With some enclosures you would have to go into it's configuration page and tell it to rebuild the array. It usually isn't too hard.

If that's the case, I don't think the Drobo is worth it...It's basically a $600 RAID Enclosure.