Drobo - early days, but useful so far.

Software: Avid (All)
Platform: All
Skill Level: Basic

Not a tip, sorry - and a long time since my last post - but I just wanted to draw your attention to a useful bit of hardware that might assist smaller productions like my own when Unity or other media space gets tight.

The item in question is a Drobo.  This is essentially an empty box into which you can place any combination of SATA (or SATA II) drives to create a protected storage system.  In our case we bought the Drobo plus two 750Gb SATA drives - giving us roughly 680Gb of protected data storage.

Now I know this seems kinda stingy, considering I stated with 1.4 Terabytes of storage - but it's that 'protected' word that makes all the difference.  The media that we've moved off our Unity represents about 120 40-minute Digibeta tapes at DV25 4:2:0 (which is what we use for offline).  If the offline storage of this media were to fail, then it would mean a least two weeks of very late nights for my assistant (hee hee) and some loss of sleep for myself.

Now I know I could have gone with a Raid (which the Drobo is not - don't ask me, read their explanation) but I like the simplicity of the setup, the fact that I can add drives later, and that the Drobo will take care of formatting it, and making the extra space available.

So all-in-all this is a pretty useful (if admittedly niche) solution for us, and one that has gotten us out of a bit of a Unity Storage hole (when the show is a bit tight for space - like now).

One Caveat - this thing writes at about 20 MbPS and reads slightly above that - so it's only ever going to be a media drive for DV-res stuff.

And the price?  $899 Aussie (or $499 USD).  Pricey compared to a DIY raid - but a fair bit simpler, and it just works.  And the SATA drives?  Well check your local supplier (or your odds-and-ends box; you might have a couple you could use that are just lying around.)


Disclaimer