Storage In The Modern World and A Bit of Luck!

Some of you who've been reading my ramblings for a while might think that I have a storage obsession..... and I might. However, as anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT world will tell you. That's actually the norm. We get paid to be prepared for and to recover from disasters of digital/ Binary proportions! See what I did there.....

Although I haven't worked in that world for over 10 years now, those principles are ingrained into my thinking. So, backing up and storage capacity is always on my mind. Right now, I'm in the process of taking my file server from 3 drives and 6 terabytes of HDD space to 4 drives and 8Tb. Some might consider that excessive, but really not so much when you consider that each of the 2 HTPCs have at least 500Gb as a scratch disk for temp storage and my desktop workstation has 4Tb by itself. .....and that's not counting any of their relatively small SSD boot drives. My rough rule of thumb is always to have at least as much as the combined capacities of all of our home computers' storage space in the file server that functions as backup AND media server.

What I had done in the past when using Microsoft's Windows Home Server was to simply trust in it's built-in redundancy schemes and call it a day. Well.....first of all, I've decided to move away from M$ now that WHS is a dead product and secondly decided to move to a more sophisticated (read secure) backup/redundancy set up. I think I've previously discussed migrating to NAS4Free before, so I'm not going to get into that here other than to say that in order to fully implement ZFS in an efficient manner I needed a 4th, 2Tb drive which will allow me to still have 6Tb of storage while losing only one drive's capacity to parity. I'll do a detailed "build-up/rebuild" post on the retooled Spectre when it's up. So, that's it? That's all I'm going to talk about this morning? A rebuild that hasn't even happeded yet?

Oh NO!!! Not by a long-shot! I'm going to talk about this: the Drobo Mini.

As you can see by this image, it's external storage.... with a twist! So; it has 4 bays, "so what"? Ah....let me start from the beginning and tell you a little story. 

Much like House with Wilson, many of my little ideas come from conversations with someone else. This last summer while my "location video" producing brother-in-law was here with his family, we discussed all things computer but as part of our little project to rip our DVD movies to digital files, he made mention of the fact that he had many external hard drives that he's collected and used them as necessary to store the many gigabytes of video files for his job. And that they are just kind of a necessity of his work-world. My question to him was that; "aren't they too slow" at USB 2.0 speed? His reply was, that it was pretty much the best he could do since Firewire was dead and that Thunderbolt was too difficult to find AND too expensive. Holy Interfaces Batman! That sounds like a challenge!

After consulting the Bat-Computer, I came across the Drobo line of storage. Yes; that which is most beloved of professional photographers and Mac-o-philes the world over.Of course, being of the "great unwashed" (PC users), I knew squat about them, but I did learn that they were pretty much "desktop" devices "Rats! Foiled by the Riddler"! Wait-a-minute; according to the bat-computer (that's Google to you, Bat-brain), there was a portable version that had hit the market in 2012.

Even better, it would allow you to intermix drives of all different capacities and makes, all while keeping a RAID scheme going giving.....TA-DA..... DATA REDUNDANCY!!! Oh; it gets better! There's a bay to take a mSATA SSD to allow caching acceleration, has BOTH USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt pass-through interfaces! All built into a 7" x 7" carbon-fiber reinforced "soft-touch" case with 2 whisper-quiet cooling fans and the smallest power brick-ette you ever saw. What's not to like?!? .......uhhh.....the $649 "List Price" (yikes)!!! Even the $399 Amazon price is pretty stiff, since remember; you have to provide your own drives!

Yeah; this is about what I felt like. For a tech-head like me, it's pretty much like the 16 year old who saw, fell in love with, then went to the Porsche car lot and looked at the price sticker. That price is all well and good for a professional who's writing this off as a business expense and is expecting to make money with it, for an "enthusiast" like me, it amounts to taking a Saturday afternoon and going by the Ferrari and Aston Martin dealers to look at the new models! 

Then, this happened! On occasion, you can still find really good deals on eBay! On Tuesday; St. Patrick's Day, just randomly surfing, I came across not just a Drobo Mini on eBay at a decent price (about $150 at the time), but it was fully populated with 4 Western Digital Blue 320Gb drives AND a Crucial M4 256Gb mSATA SSD! OK, so after I slowed down the heavy breathing, I decided to just keep an eye on it "just in case" it didn't go into an astronomical price-point that I couldn't justify. I got home yesterday afternoon and it was at about $190. At that point, I put my eBay strategy into play; which is deciding what it was worth to me, the max that I was going to be willing to pay for it and setting that as a limit. The amount was $250. Here's my rationale (such as it is for something I don't need to have): 

• At worse, I can sell it for at least that and get my money back since they sell for well over that amount on a regular basis. Know you product!
• The amount was reasonable given it's price at that point and since "that point" was within 45 minutes of the end time (which as an awkward weekday, before the evening so most folks are still at or trying to get home from work). 
• I could completely "walk away" without a blink of an eye since I really didn't "need it", and I can afford it right now since I'm doing a series of computer jobs that would pay for it.
• It was fully populated meaning that I can put it to use immediately without paying one more dime to buy any drives, although I have several sitting around right here. Further more, this would allow me to buy bigger ones (2Tb) over time and replace them and the Drobo is set up for me to replace them "on the fly" and restore the data on the ones that were in use since that's one of it's major selling point/features.
• And for some reason that guy put a 256Gb mSATA SSD in there as the "accelerator" which was completely unnecessary since the firmware sets a 64Gb cache limit! Again; do your research and know your product. Therefore, I at some future date can pick up a 64Gb drive for that purpose, and move the 256Gb one to my ThinkPad X1 with has an empty mSATA socket to up the storage capacity of that machine which I was planning on doing anyway! 
• In the final calculation, I had to figure about $70-90 on the plus side for the mSATA that I'll end up using in my ThinkPad. I could if I was so motivated, sell the 4, 320Gb drives for at least $15 each. That total would be around $130.

In the end, I bid $237, which was below my "cut-off", and won it at $225 (free shipping). If I deduct the other amounts which was the drives in it that I'm going to retask or replace, that will put the "bare" Drobo Mini at less than $100. At the end of the day; if I find that it's not useful or I just want to get my money back out of it, the transaction should turn a profit. Will I do that? Doubtful: I'm certain I'll be able to use it as a semi-portable storage solution that has built-in redundancy and is upgradeable. And in the today's digital world; is there's no such thing as having too much storage!?!