On Storage
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bought a Drobo. A Drobo is a cool new gadget billed as a "data robot", an intelligent, scalable storage device that takes the fuss and fury out of reliable, scalable hard disk management.
There are several downsides to owning a Drobo. For starters, it costs five-hundred wing-wangs and that's just for the housing device. Drives, which, in case you haven't caught on are really important when using a Drobo, cost extra. I found some nice cheap SATA drives on Newegg.com for $65 a pop.
Once you get it out of the box, you'll find that your Drobo only connects to your system via USB 2.0. For exactly the same reasons that washing your car angers Aquamec the rain god, my purchase of this device is a sure sign that USB 3.0 will be out in a matter of minutes. The Drobo also only support NTFS and HFS+ partitions, so you're only going to have luck using the device on a Windows machine or a Mac. ext3 support or network connectivity is something that Data Robotics, Inc. is "working on".
So with all these minuses working against it, why did I buy it?
Well, let's look at the alternative. The Ultimate Perfect Forever-Free Storage Solution is going to involve buying a new system, setting up hardware or software RAID on multiple drives, and installing Linux in order to create an LVM configuration for your multiple drives, stitched together with RAID and formatted with a Big Bad filesystem like ReiserFS, JFS, or XFS that will never lock your data into some proprietary format that is going to require you to pay through the nose for the privilege of keeping your data handy.
If you put your data on a system like this, it is safe for as long as all your drives work. If one drive dies, you power the machine off, replace it, and rebuild your array. This solution is scalable, open-source, and gives you unlimited options for how you shape your storage. It can be maintained forever and easily transferred to another setup five years down the road when the hardware starts to flake.
This solution is also going to cost you a minimum of $500 in hardware, and you will constantly wage the risk of asking yourself "Even if I only pay $25 for a RAID controller, do I really want to entrust all of my most important data to a $25 RAID controller?" So my opinion is that you should not scrimp on your Ultimate Perfect Forever-Free Storage Solution. Trying to low-ball your hardware is only going to cause headaches at best, and data loss at worst.
So even once you've taken the risk of getting some cheap gear together, you now need to assemble it. Plan on at least one evening spent building your box, putting SATA drives in, screwing them in, taking them out, turning them right-side-up, then putting them back in again. Once everything POSTs, you still have to install CentOS, fdisk the drives, set up RAID devices, set up LVM, and choose your file system. If you want to get to your data from across the network, that's going to require an NFS or Samba config, too. How much is your time worth to you?
I would love, positively love, to do all of this. It's good experience and builds character. I want to be able to trust that my data is safe because I've built every last layer of protection into the system with my own two hands. But you know what? I have, at this exact moment in time, precisely 18.1 GB of free space on my C drive, and this precipitates a rather urgent need for a scalable storage solution that isn't going to cost me both $500 and an entire weekend.
The Drobo, by comparison, is pretty much a "plug it in, go have a beer" kind of technology. It's pricey and it only works correctly when directly attached to a Windows system. But you know what? So are consultants.