I find it ironic, that on a Mac forum, a Mac owner has a hard time justifying the purchase of an accessory that makes one's life easier. This is not that unlike the same justification in any Apple purchase, so I guess we all would have to dig down deep in our Apple vs PC ammo.........
Thanks, but Mac or no Mac, I do like to have a realistic clue as to what
value I'm getting out of buying something. When the claim is "makes life easier", then it should be easy for someone to articulate some specifics, so others can then judge for themselves if its worth the higher cost to them.
For example, I understand the concept of the drobo feature of being able to do incremental upgrades using any old random drive, but what I question is the real world pragmatic value-added of this feature. My admitted cynicism is because my HD upgrade cycles over the past 20 years have tended to be such that the older HDs are fairly quickly "left in the dust", such that it becomes questionable pretty quickly as to even bother to keep the old HDs actively available. Afterall, why bother to do so, when one can buy a pair of 400GB HDs for $100?
The slipperly slope here becomes the question of how large of a stack of external HDs do you want to eventually collect in your office, each with its own spinning fan making noise. On my first PPC system, I think at one point I had my system running 6 spindles. The new machine had more HD than all of those others combined, so they were retired...and gosh, the office was suddenly and dramatically silent!
Similarly, for drobo's RAID platter failure, the automatic email alert function is duplicated in freeware, with products such as
RaidEye or shareware such as
RAID Alert.
I also find it quite ironic one would not spend the money to protect something that can not be replaced.
I agree, but I'm not really all that sure that the question was intended to really articulate between 'total storage' versus 'backup strategies', even though the two topics are interrelated.
FWIW, I had believed that I was being clever a few years ago when I bought an external case that used a removable tray system (and had 3 trays/3 HDs). The reason why is because it turns out that the power supply on the external case was a single point of failure opportunity. Granted, it was nothing that buying a couple of new enclosures didn't solve, but the initial troubleshooting was problematic when the power was intermittant and some drives appeared good, then bad, while others that had seemed bad became good, etc.
-hh