Drobo questions

Hey all. Hopefully this is going to be the right place for this thread. If not I'm sorry. I've been doing some research on the Drobo recently and I'm thinking about getting one. Basically I'm looking for a simple, small device thats going to make back up easy, and increasing capacity over time easy. All while not jacking my electric bill!

My home network has primarily all Linux based machines, and it has two Windows machines. The windows machines are my wife's desktop, and netbook. My wife would be accessing the drobo to backup simple word documents, pictures, and streaming music. Nothing crazy.

The linux machines will be the ones using the drobo more often then not. I currently have a linux based HTPC (master bedroom) that will be streaming movies (SD, 720p, and 1080p), TV shows (SD and 720p), and music from the drobo. My main computer will also be doing streaming of all content types, as well as constant backups of other important information.

Lastly, I have an Xbox 360 in our living room. I'm hoping to be able to stream movies, and tv shows from the drobo to the xbox as well. So, on to the questions.

1: I had planned to format the drobo using EXT4, as I'm just used to the file system from linux. Assuming this is the route I go, what do I have to do so the windows machines will see the drobo, and not have issues with read/write.

2: Can I stream from the drobo to my 360?! Is it even possible? Is it going to be an issue if I'm using EXT4?

3: Should I be using EXT4? I switched over to linux about 5 years ago and I've been using the EXT file system for the last 3 years. Prior to that, any storage drives I had would be formatted to NTFS. In time I found that it was kind of a pain and linux didn't really like it. Since switching to EXT I haven't had any issues.

And I guess lastly just wondering if anyone here has any experience with the drobo? The reviews I find to be 50/50. So, anyone here with some real world experiences that can offer some pros and cons would be great!

Thanks,
-RYknow

1) If the Drobo is accessed through a single computer, you will want to setup Samba. It doesn't matter what filesystem you decide to format it with as that has no bearing on the file sharing level of software.

2) Sharing to an XBox is tricky, but can be done. The key is this: "Share your directories on *nix via Samba, and make sure the directory is readable by everyone or by the "guest" account you'll specify in Samba. Make sure Samba is set to allow anonymous and guest browsing." Pulled from this thread. I've successfully done this in the past.

3) I would suggest EXT4 simply for the tools that are available for recovery alone. If you want something that is more "tested" (has been out in the open for far longer), you could use EXT3.

Personally, I run a server with 25 TB of raw disk space using CentOS 6.0. I use Samba for shares and EXT4 for the filesystem. I don't have experience with Drobo, but from what I've heard, it isn't the quickest and the price is hefty. If you have the space to run the disks internally, you could easily setup a mdadm software RAID array in Linux. I would actually suggest this over a proprietary format, any day. You can expand in the future much more easily and you can transfer it to another computer should that system fail. A normal Linux install should pick up the RAID array upon boot and it should be available with no downtime (it may want to check the array, though).

Before locking myself into a proprietary format, such as a Drobo, I would find a lot of information on how to recover files should anything go wrong. Find out how it handles failures and how quickly/accurately it recovers information.

+1 for mdadm linux, so easy I can do it. I'm running ext4, accessible via a couple windows machines and my wife's macbook.

Thanks thideras for your reply! I feel pretty fortunate to be receiving server advise from you! I don't post here often, but I do read through here regularly. I've spent some time going through your "rack mount overkill". Thats a really nice setup you have, and I envy you for your knowledge on the subject! With that said, I'm gonna admit that my server knowledge (including raid configurations) is lacking. Bear with me, these questions are probably a little noobish. :

You mentioned running my raid array internally, and the ease of expanding later. I was under the impression that this is one of the Drobo's nice features. As bigger drives become available/cheaper, you simply swap out the smallest drive for the bigger, newer drive and Drobo does the rest? Also, I thought doing an internal raid like you've mentioned would be best suited for drives that are all the same size (and speed for that matter)? I currently have 3x 1TB WD Black drives, and 2x 2TB WD Black drives in my storage "server". Doing some kind of raid array with mixed drives isn't going to be an issue?

If I decide to go the software route, what raid configuration would you suggest? I currently have all the drives setup as JBOD. Obviously just begging for a hd failure and significant data loss. : Thats what I'm trying to prevent. Now, with the drives I mentioned earlier, all of them are holding a large amount of data that I currently have no way of backing up. Can I build a raid array within linux using these drives, without formatting or dealing with data loss? I can't imagine thats possible, but maybe I'm in for a pleasant surprise!

You mentioned that you use CentOS for your server. I've never used that distro before, but I did download it after reading your post to give it a shot on my netbook. I'm most comfortable with Ubuntu, as thats what I've been using since 6.04. Currently running 10.10 which has been rock solid for me! Just wondering if CentOS is just personal preference, or if it has some things Ubuntu doesn't?

Part of my dilemma is my wife too. She's always on my case about shutting the computers off when not in use. So if I'm upstairs on my computer, and need a file from the storage server, I have to go downstairs, log in, and then go back upstairs. Now...this obviously isn't a huge deal. With the drobo though, it could be on all the time (it's not a computer...so she can't give me crap! haha!) and my data is available from any machine, at anytime.

Any input will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks again,
-RYknow

I will start this off by saying that I appreciate the input on my existing projects. I'm always happy to see someone that can benefit from anything I've done. I'm also working a very large and comprehensive home server guide, but that isn't going to be done for quite some time.

-RYknow said:

You mentioned running my raid array internally, and the ease of expanding later. I was under the impression that this is one of the Drobo's nice features. As bigger drives become available/cheaper, you simply swap out the smallest drive for the bigger, newer drive and Drobo does the rest? Also, I thought doing an internal raid like you've mentioned would be best suited for drives that are all the same size (and speed for that matter)? I currently have 3x 1TB WD Black drives, and 2x 2TB WD Black drives in my storage "server". Doing some kind of raid array with mixed drives isn't going to be an issue?

Click to expand...

This is correct. With an internal RAID array, you want the same size drives. But, you could technically get away with using larger drives in the future. For example, if you have three 1 TB drives and you create a simple RAID 5 array using partitions instead of the drives themselves (/dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sda). If you add two 3 TB drives, you could create a 1 TB on each drive and add that to the existing RAID array. You could then use the rest of these drives in another RAID array or access them directly. It certainly is not as simple as "drop drive, get more space", but you have a much tighter control on how the space is distributed.

-RYknow said:

If I decide to go the software route, what raid configuration would you suggest? I currently have all the drives setup as JBOD. Obviously just begging for a hd failure and significant data loss. : Thats what I'm trying to prevent. Now, with the drives I mentioned earlier, all of them are holding a large amount of data that I currently have no way of backing up. Can I build a raid array within linux using these drives, without formatting or dealing with data loss? I can't imagine thats possible, but maybe I'm in for a pleasant surprise!

Click to expand...

In any case, you are going to be shifting around the information, whether it be putting the drives in a Drobo or doing software RAID. You don't want to be changing the function of a disk with valuable information still residing on it. For the RAID level, that is something you will have to decide. It changes depending on your needs and the drives you will have available. For example, if you have two drives and want redundancy, RAID 1 is the obvious option. If you are running 3-5 drives and want redundancy with maximum space, RAID 5 is the best option. If you have an even number of drives, don't care about the space loss and want quick read/write/access times, then RAID 10 is best. You can see how this gets messy quickly. Regardless, RAID 5 is going to be the option you probably want until you have more than 5 drives, in which case I would suggest RAID 6.

-RYknow said:

You mentioned that you use CentOS for your server. I've never used that distro before, but I did download it after reading your post to give it a shot on my netbook. I'm most comfortable with Ubuntu, as thats what I've been using since 6.04. Currently running 10.10 which has been rock solid for me! Just wondering if CentOS is just personal preference, or if it has some things Ubuntu doesn't?

Click to expand...

Basically, it is the same thing when it comes to an operating system (oversimplifying a lot). I use CentOS because it is targeted toward enterprise groups, which means that it has been proven to be rock solid stable at the cost of new features/bug fixes. CentOS is basically Red Hat Enterprise stripped of the logos. This is purely a preference option and Ubuntu, if that is what you prefer, would do fine.

-RYknow said:

Part of my dilemma is my wife too. She's always on my case about shutting the computers off when not in use. So if I'm upstairs on my computer, and need a file from the storage server, I have to go downstairs, log in, and then go back upstairs. Now...this obviously isn't a huge deal. With the drobo though, it could be on all the time (it's not a computer...so she can't give me crap! haha!) and my data is available from any machine, at anytime.

Click to expand...

There are multiple solutions for this, but again, you will have to decide what works best for you. The most obvious option is to dedicate a computer to be a server and simply leave it on all the time. An alternative is to enable WOL and simply have a program send a WOL packet to the server, turning it on. My final suggestion is to build a very low power server, but this can be costly. Running a dedicated server does not go well with turning it on and off. It greatly increases wear on the drives and increases the chance for failure.

thideras said:

...

2) Sharing to an XBox is tricky, but can be done. ...

Click to expand...

Another option that (I think) will work is to run a DLNA server on the file server which will stream content to your XBOX. I do that using Mediatomb to serve movies to a PS3. (Mediatomb runs on Linux - I'm presuming you could run it on one of your Linux systems or perhaps even on the DROBO device if it is Linux based.)