[REVIEW] Drobo

[Roger Burton West]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 09:14:43PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:

>My alternative was either a hardware RAID controller of some kind or a 
>small, low profile box running *nix and software RAID. The former gives 
>me the willies - one too many stories of hardware RAID controllers 
>dying and otherwise servicable data being unrecoverable due to not being 
>able to get the exact make, model and rev of controller again. The 
>latter violates my zero-effort policy. In my experience no matter how 
>simplisticly I've set up a *nix box it still requires more admin and 
>more fiddling than a black box that I just plug into the wall.

Seems fair enough. I'd always go for the generic hardware approach; I've
been bitten too often by having to keep kit running past its useful date
just to support some obscure interface card that isn't made any more.

(Getting my "CD elimination server" up and running was a bog-standard PC
build, plus about ten minutes of reading mdadm documentation. I like
mdadm. Even when it tickled an obscure kernel bug that made it look as
though all the drives were failing at once, it managed to avoid losing
any data.)

Roger