With a traditional RAID system, you’re stuck with one capacity of drive and it’s a pretty good idea to make sure they’re the same make and model as well. You also need to buy all the drives you want to use for the RAID up front, whether you’re using the capacity immediately or not.  With Drobo, however, those steps are not necessary. Using the Drobo Capacity Calculator, you can test all the configurations your Drobo can accommodate.

With Drobo, you can use any drive; it doesn’t matter what brand or capacity of the drives. You can have a Drobo 5D filled nice and neat with five matched 4TB drives, or a B1200i mismatched with all kinds of drives. You can even add new drives at any time. Drobo’s BeyondRAID™ technology creates a single virtualized shared storage pool for disk space. To test a virtual Drobo with the drive capacities, use the Capacity Calculator—which is easily accessible from any product page on the Drobo website.

While any pairing is possible, not all pairings are created equal. Let’s say you have a B1200i with 4 old 250GB drives and add a new 1TB drive; the 250GB drives will pair with the 1TB for redundancy, but the remaining space in the 1TB will be held for future expansion until another 1TB drive is added. To help you test this out and get the most out of your Drobo, we have the Capacity Calculator.

Unlike a traditional RAID that requires matched drives, Drobo lets you mix and match drives of any capacity. The Capacity Calculator helps you determine how particular pairings will affect your shared pool of storage. For more information on Drobo products, go to Drobo.com.  You can also watch our YouTube video about the Capacity Calculator.

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Drobo B800i

Our case studies are typically posted on Drobo Reviews, but we thought the readers of myDrobo would enjoy this too:

Innervel Solutions, Inc. is an IT services company that provides managed datacenter cloud hosting, communications solutions, and network and infrastructure consulting. They understand the intricacies of optimized storage, which is what helped guide their decision to purchase and install a Drobo B800i iSCSI SAN storage array to augment their existing infrastructure. While the staff had also considered using a Dell EqualLogic storage array, they chose the Drobo because it offered them a number of advantages, and saved them $5000 over the traditional storage solution as well.

The Drobo B800i is an 8-bay device capable of holding eight 3.5-inch SATA drives, for up to 28TB of raw data storage using today’s readily available 4TB drives. It provides the reliable, consolidated storage for servers that Innervel Solutions needs. They are using their Drobo device to store data from a file server, a Citrix XenServer, and as a physical server and workstation backup. The unit utilizes industry-standard iSCSI protocol, and is integrated into their existing TCP/IP network.

Among other aspects, the Drobo installed at Innervel Solutions allowed them to reduce storage management complexity, while at the same time expand a file server. In addition, it gave them the ability to implement tiered storage for virtualization.

The organization chose Drobo because it offered them the ability to expand their storage capabilities in the future as needed without overpaying for excess capacity now. They were extremely happy with the automatic RAID configuration capabilities of the unit, its efficiency, and its overall performance. According to Christopher Hays, one of the managing partners at Innervel Solutions, the Drobo gave them a larger terabyte pool for overall storage compared to competitors’ units.

To learn more about Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here and find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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myDrobo Top Blogs

Since 2007, Drobo’s mission has been to protect and serve the world’s data. Drobo is the safe and expandable data storage solution for your business or personal use. With DAS, NAS, and SAN offerings, Drobo plugs into your network or directly to Mac and Windows systems for data protection without the complexities of RAID, making it them most user friendly storage system.

Here are our top blog posts highlighting information that is helpful for all Drobo users:

Drobo Dashboard: Making Storage Management Simple

Drobo is designed from the ground up to be simple, hands-off storage. When it comes to configuration and management of the device, asking our customers to remember IP addresses, hostnames, or web URLs didn’t fit our objectives. While the light-based alerting system on the front panel allows for nearly all operations to be performed without the need to launch the Drobo Dashboard, there are some initial configuration tasks that must be performed with this tool… (read more)

Drobo: Increasing IOPS with an mSATA SSD

All prosumer Drobos now include an Accelerator Bay on the underside of the unit.  This feature allows for the use of an SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently accessed data, while still offering the expansive storage capacity of the traditional hard disks.  By combining disk technologies, the Drobo provides transactional performance for workspace storage that wouldn’t be possible in an all-HDD configuration.  The addition of an mSATA SSD increases the IOPS performance of the unit by three times, and significantly reduces access times when working from a network share with a very large number of files or directories on the Drobo 5N… (read more)

Drobo Data-Aware Tiering: Providing Accelerated Performance

Drobo recommends that when researching storage devices, the primary performance metric is throughput.  A quick scan of web reviews reveals that a majority of the focus is on how quickly the device can read or write large files. Think drag-and-drop. While this is a great metric if your device will primarily be used for data archive and backups, one must also consider IOPS performance as it relates to as workspace storage. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per second) performance is measured by how quickly the device can work with small bits of data… (read more)

Data Storage Management: How Drobo Keeps Your Data Safer

When considering data storage management, the single most important factor is protection. Is your data safe?  The answer may not be an emphatic “yes” unless you are doing several things the right way, and using the right technologies.  No one technology protects you from everything, so answering yes happens when you have the combination of safe storage, reliable backup, offs store protection, and the ability to do all of these regularly and easily.  And affordably too, so you have complete protection… (read more)

Drobo Performance: When Your Drives Break

A hard drive failure is a question of when, not if.  You need to be prepared and protected to maintain a high level of Drobo performance. Every day in our live demos and on live chat we talk with individuals and business owners who are looking for more info on how they can be better protected.  Do you have data storage solutions that you are protecting?  According to a poll by SanDisk conducted by Harris Interactive: “Photos are so precious that 64 percent of U.S. adults would not consider destroying their family photo collection for any amount of money, not even for one million dollars.”  The folks that contact us for help understand the value of their data.  Do you feel your data is worth $1M, and are you doing everything to protect it from inevitable hard drive failure… (read more)

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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