Drobo storage/NAS 5400 or 7200 speed drives?

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Hi Folks,

Need some advice.

I have just aquired a pair of 2nd hand, 4 bay Drobo units without drives. (DRO4D-D)

I'm intending to use them with my new Imac 27" 2017 (1Tb ssd) to store and keep image files in my photography studio.

The plan being to keep just apps and working files on the imac, then transfer to the Drobo once completed. The second drobo unit can mirror the first (using Carbon copy cloner or similar) and be kept off site , ie: at home.

Only issue is that some files regularly need to be retrieved from the Drobo and transferred back to the imac when updating team photos etc. These files can be up to 20 layers and are often around 2gb in size.

So do I invest in 7200 or 5400 speed drives?
I'm looking at 3tb or 4tb capacity drives.

Thoughts?

Cheers
Andy

[hamiland (Anders)]

Hi Andy, you would probably be fine with either rotational speed given the interfaces on these units (USB2 / FW).

However as you have 4 drives running together the drive manufacturers only rate their NAS (or Enterprise) drives for this configuration due to the mutual vibration of the drives, thus either WD Red, or Seagate Ironwolf are the choices if you want "Manufacturer Supported. This means that you only have 7200 RPM drives available.

The manufacturer documentation mentions "Tested" so the others may be not be tested but capable of running 4 spindles in one chassis maybe. Depends on how important the data is and whether you want to run drives in an "unsupported" configuration.

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Thanks Anders, appreciate your suggestions 😀

[sil (Steve)]

Definitely stick to designated NAS class drives, cheapie HDD can get destroyed with the work stresses .

Read the manual for the NAS and look for upgrading/replacing drives as some make it a bit tricky or restrictive. Personally I recommend getting the largest drive you can rather than cheapest (smaller sizes). I'm in the process of replacing all mine with 8TB drives as my growth needs grew faster than expected. Fillling the four slots should be doable over time as you can afford drives. Also if possible if it offers some form of hybrid raid formatting try to choose option that gives you one drive redundancy.

Whatever you do, choosing drives for the NAS these are what to look for in order:

1) NAS rated/class drive eg Western Digital Red
2) Capacity as largest you can afford and the NAS supports, 8TB may be a good price point and been around long enough for NAS updates to allow support.
Longer term aim to fill the slots with identical drives, prices generally drop over time so you should be able to expand as you can afford.

3) that's it really. Take a look at the features the NAS offers like some form of App Market that lets the NAS also take on other roles like a streaming media server, web server cloud storage etc and if appealing make sure to choose the larger drive size over the smaller.

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Originally Posted by sil

Definitely stick to designated NAS class drives, cheapie HDD can get destroyed with the work stresses .

Whatever you do, choosing drives for the NAS these are what to look for in order:

1) NAS rated/class drive eg Western Digital Red
2) Capacity as largest you can afford and the NAS supports, 8TB may be a good price point and been around long enough for NAS updates to allow support.
Longer term aim to fill the slots with identical drives, prices generally drop over time so you should be able to expand as you can afford.

Cheers Sil,

I installed 4 x 4tb identical Seagate Ironwolf drives. So far so good

[OICURMT]

Originally Posted by hamiland

This means that you only have 7200 RPM drives available.

Two versions of the WD Red NAS exist , 5400RPM and 7200RPM.

BTW: Try not to purchase multiple drives from the same vendor at the same time. If there is ever a manufacturing defect, it could affect the entire run. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a pain. I suffered from a bad batch of Seagate Baracuda's. I was lucky in that both drives had bad sectors, but in different areas. One drive was the backup of the other, so all my data was recovered.... WHEW!