Drobo 5D heralds domestic disk drives dramatic decluttering

I'm removing some of the build up of small disk drives that have proliferated around the home network.

There's all kinds of drives with video, photos and miscellaneous other stuff. And that's as well as a network attached storage unit.

There's even one of those disk docking stations that can have raw drives plugged in, like a sort of 'cassette' hard drive. They all have power cables and connectors, so it gradually becomes quite a tangle. At night, one room looks a little like the inside of the TARDIS, with all the twinkly lights.

I've been using a Drobo 5D as the replacement. So far I've consolidated several terabytes of separate loose drives and I've got a few more in my sights.

The Drobo is remarkably quiet and cool running unit about the size of a sliced loaf of bread. The completely plug-and-play unit works out the most frequently used data and caches it onto a solid state drive. Behind the SSD storage layer there's a set of hot pluggable hard drives which can provide a solid RAID 6 type protection. That's the level where a pair of drives could fail but the system is still hot recoverable.

The unit is also fast on a Thunderbolt connection and even quite usable as a data server on a USB connection.

I think it's described as a 'RAID6 like' because it has an interesting additional ability (so called BeyondRAID) to mix the drives both by size and type and if needed to hot swap to a larger unit.

I suppose it raises an interesting question about where all of this data originated? A few years ago the rashbre home network would have been sub-terabyte in totality. It's the increases in binary large objects like photos, music and videos that has bumped the space consumption so quickly.

And of course the need to have a second copy of everything stored on a different system.

This little unit seems to be a very effective as a main place to store everything. I think I'll hold out on updating the networked NAS unit until this technology can be trickled onto the LAN as well. I'm guessing there will be a Drobo 5N announced before long.