Thanks for the feedback and inoput Jim. Very useful. I’m going to share your comment link with others I know who’ve asked.

Great post and nice to see some good conversation on workflow. I figured I’d chime in to clear up a few misperceptions about our BeyondRAID technology, drive failure, and recoverability of data.

First off, ALL RAID technologies are proprietary. You cannot take drives from RAID vendor X and place them in RAID vendor Y. Even if those arrays happen to have the exact same RAID controller, you could still run into issues with different firmware levels, etc.

While BeyondRAID is unique to Drobos, we treat the drives in a Drobo as a “disk pack” that can be read in any like Drobo array or, in some instances, a different Drobo array. Not only is this really nice for offline archiving and upgrading to a bigger Drobo, but it also guarantees portability to another Drobo device should something happen to your Drobo. The entire list of supported disk pack migrations can be found here:

http://bit.ly/diYOd5

Regarding drive failure, this too is not unique to Drobo. For single drive protection mode, Drobo can protect your data from one drive failure regardless of which drive fails. This would be true for any RAID array that is running RAID 1, RAID 5, or similar. Should a second drive fail before the array is able to rebuild, the data would be lost, regardless of the vendor. There are recovery services that can help in these situations and we partner with Drive Savers to help recover data in the rare cases where this happens.

FYI – One thing Drobo does to further help protect data is self-healing. All Drobo arrays offer what we call “virtual hot spare” technology. In the event of a drive failure, Drobo will automatically put the data back into a protected state if it has enough free space on the remaining healthy drives. This greatly reduces the risk of data loss due to additional drive failures since it happens automatically and instantly without manual intervention.

If you are paranoid about your data (aren’t we all?), all Drobo 5 and 8 drive arrays offer the option of checking a box for dual drive protection which allow for up to 2 simultaneous drive failures without data loss. As we move from 2TB to 3TB and larger drives, rebuild times will inevitably grow. Having added protection against the probability of a second drive failure during rebuild is cheap insurance.

At the end of the day, using RAID to protect your data is a positive step. We feel the benefits that are unique to BeyondRAID (auto-configure, self-healing, mix and match different drives, instant and perpetual expansion) deliver the best possible storage experience for all users.

This is especially true for creative pros such as yourselves that would rather be shooting or editing video than trying to become a RAID storage expert.

Best,

Jim Sherhart
Drobo

Can’t remember if you software is what I saw recently but it is exactly what I was referring to. The odds of a file getting corrupted on transfer are very small but it only takes one bad file that is critical to ruin your day or your company.

Ron you should take a look at Dan’s software. Will give you a little extra piece of mind on your archives.

ShotPutPro makes sure your copies match the originals (verifies the copies), while doing so as efficiently as possible. So there’s no worries about corrupted files.

ProxyMill transcodes to self-contained files of any resolution you wish–and can do it while ShotPutPro is offloading the cards. This saves a tremendous amount of time.

Sorry to sound like a sales pitch, but thought you should know.

Looks like a great plan Maceo. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to your participation in future posts.

Hello from Spain. Ron’s Data Workflow looks good. Here is how I do it:

1. Raw files go into a RAID 1 Hard Drive.
2. Convert files to Work Hard Drive in RAID 0 for speed. (Here is where all the work is done)
3.Bounce final project into Drobo and a back up copy off site.

My set up is kind of expensive, but I make sure my workflow has full redundancy and is fast.

For more details feel free to contact me! Love to participate more often on these kind of posts.

Thank you, Maceo

Great idea Kris. I’ve thought of the same thing. Calling all entrepreneurs! 🙂