The Drobo USB 3.0 4-Bay Storage Array (DDR3A21) has BeyondRAID. I don't really know what that means. Does the unit come with a hardware RAID controller? Can it mirror two drives to the other two drives so that the data is protected in case one or two of the hard drives fail? Does the unit have a power supply and a cooling fan for the hard drives? Are there any other hardware or accessories that I need to install drives in it? Can I install four 4TB drive in it? Larger than 4TB? Can I use this drive in it? E.g. Seagate 4TB NAS HDD SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000VN000) Can the unit run all the time 24/7?If I need more storage, is there another Drobo unit that has more bays? Or can I hook up another 4-Bay unit with USB 3.0 using a USB hub? The Drobo USB 3.0 4-Bay Storage Array (DDR3A21) has BeyondRAID. I don't really know what that means. Does the unit come with a hardware RAID controller? Can it mirror two drives to the other... » Read More The Drobo USB 3.0 4-Bay Storage Array (DDR3A21) has BeyondRAID. I don't really know what that means. Does the unit come with a hardware RAID controller? Can it mirror two drives to the other two drives so that the data is protected in case one or two of the hard drives fail? Does the unit have a power supply and a cooling fan for the hard drives? Are there any other hardware or accessories that I need to install drives in it? Can I install four 4TB drive in it? Larger than 4TB? Can I use this drive in it? E.g. Seagate 4TB NAS HDD SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000VN000) Can the unit run all the time 24/7?If I need more storage, is there another Drobo unit that has more bays? Or can I hook up another 4-Bay unit with USB 3.0 using a USB hub? « Show Less
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The DROBO allows you to slide 4 separate drives into it, it then automatically formats them and creates a RAID type system. It does contain its own power supply and cooling fan for the drives. You get a redundant back-up of anything you copy to the DROBO, so if one drive fails, all your data is safely on the other drives. You simply replace the bad drive and march on. Yes - you can use 4 separate 4TB drives. Be aware though, that since it creates a redundant back-up of your data, you will not have 16TB of total storage, but just under 11TB. I suggest you visit the DROBO website, it has excellent documentation on everything. The DROBO allows you to slide 4 separate drives into it, it then automatically formats them and creates a RAID type system. It does contain its own power supply and cooling fan for the drives. You get a redundant back-up of anything you copy to the DROBO, so if one drive fails, all your data is safely on the other drives. You simply replace the bad drive and march on. Yes - you can use 4 separate 4TB drives. Be aware though, that since it creates a redundant back-up of your data, you will not have 16TB of total storage, but just under 11TB. I suggest you visit the DROBO website, it has... » Read More The DROBO allows you to slide 4 separate drives into it, it then automatically formats them and creates a RAID type system. It does contain its own power supply and cooling fan for the drives. You get a redundant back-up of anything you copy to the DROBO, so if one drive fails, all your data is safely on the other drives. You simply replace the bad drive and march on. Yes - you can use 4 separate 4TB drives. Be aware though, that since it creates a redundant back-up of your data, you will not have 16TB of total storage, but just under 11TB. I suggest you visit the DROBO website, it has excellent documentation on everything. « Show Less
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BeyondRAID is Drobo's proprietary version of RAID 5. Like RAID 5, it has the ability to re-build the RAID if one (and even 2) drives go bad. But, it also has the ability (unlike RAID 5) to use hard drives of different sizes and to expand storage beyond the original capacity. That Seagate drive should work and you can run it 24/7. There is a 5 bay unit: Drobo 5D: Direct Attached Storage - 5 bay array with mSATA SSD acceleration - USB 3 and Thunderbolt ports (DRDR5A21)
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4 internal bays with caddies. Bios will support 6 HDD with unauthorized BIOS flash, and the extra 2 HDD can go in the 5 1/4 bays for DVD, etc. To add the 2 drives will take some expertise and extra cables, so I'll leave the details up to your web data mining prowess. It has 2 external USB 2.0 and 1 internal USB 2.0. Mine has 2 4TB WD and an SSD system disk. It runs Win7 and Ubuntu for me. Buy the memory upgrade to 8GB. No hardware problems at all - highly recommended. Not much in the way of graphics and fast CPU, but as a data or media server it is fine. It has 1@1 gig ethernet port, and can be remote booted (not tested by me). 4 internal bays with caddies. Bios will support 6 HDD with unauthorized BIOS flash, and the extra 2 HDD can go in the 5 1/4 bays for DVD, etc. To add the 2 drives will take some expertise and extra cables, so I'll leave the details up to your web data mining prowess. It has 2 external USB 2.0 and 1 internal USB 2.0. Mine has 2 4TB WD and an SSD system disk. It runs Win7 and Ubuntu for me. Buy the memory upgrade to 8GB. No hardware problems at all - highly recommended. Not much in the way of graphics and fast CPU, but as a data or media server it is fine. It has 1@1 gig ethernet port, and... » Read More 4 internal bays with caddies. Bios will support 6 HDD with unauthorized BIOS flash, and the extra 2 HDD can go in the 5 1/4 bays for DVD, etc. To add the 2 drives will take some expertise and extra cables, so I'll leave the details up to your web data mining prowess. It has 2 external USB 2.0 and 1 internal USB 2.0. Mine has 2 4TB WD and an SSD system disk. It runs Win7 and Ubuntu for me. Buy the memory upgrade to 8GB. No hardware problems at all - highly recommended. Not much in the way of graphics and fast CPU, but as a data or media server it is fine. It has 1@1 gig ethernet port, and can be remote booted (not tested by me). « Show Less
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RAID requires multiple drives. RAID stands for (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). Redundancy is it's primary function. This could be used to create one but only as a component. You also need a RAID controller either in hardware or in software (sometimes in the OS). This device can fit only 2.5"drives, of which it will hold six. I don't think you have the expertise to build one on your own. Read about RAID on Wikipedia and the other answers.
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I am far from an expert on such things and do not know what you are trying to accomplish. Several things you should think about. This is an older 3GB/sec drive not the newer 6GB/sec drive. It takes 4 hard drives to do RAID 10. Does your motherboard support RAID 10? Does your mother board support 6GB/sec drives? The reason to use RAID 10 is speed and redundancy. If your motherboard supports 6GB/sec drives, these drives would not be your best choice. These drives are listed for RAID 0 & 1. I would guess that they should work fine in RAID 10. I use two in RAID 0 with no problems and have had two 320GB blue drives in RAID 0 for several years. I am far from an expert on such things and do not know what you are trying to accomplish. Several things you should think about. This is an older 3GB/sec drive not the newer 6GB/sec drive. It takes 4 hard drives to do RAID 10. Does your motherboard support RAID 10? Does your mother board support 6GB/sec drives? The reason to use RAID 10 is speed and redundancy. If your motherboard supports 6GB/sec drives, these drives would not be your best choice. These drives are listed for RAID 0 & 1. I would guess that they should work fine in RAID 10. I use two in RAID 0 with no problems and have had... » Read More I am far from an expert on such things and do not know what you are trying to accomplish. Several things you should think about. This is an older 3GB/sec drive not the newer 6GB/sec drive. It takes 4 hard drives to do RAID 10. Does your motherboard support RAID 10? Does your mother board support 6GB/sec drives? The reason to use RAID 10 is speed and redundancy. If your motherboard supports 6GB/sec drives, these drives would not be your best choice. These drives are listed for RAID 0 & 1. I would guess that they should work fine in RAID 10. I use two in RAID 0 with no problems and have had two 320GB blue drives in RAID 0 for several years. « Show Less
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1) I've never seen anything like that -- and I check regularly for USB 3 cards (and also SATA III cards). 2) It is EXTREMELY unlikely ANYONE puts out a card that will do RAID with ESATA (as opposed to internal SATA). RAID is set up under the assumption that all the disks will be treated as a single unit. I don't know of anyone who would be using EXTERNAL drives for RAID. 3) Keep in mind that this is PCIe x ONE, not 4 or 8 or 16. That means it has limited bandwidth. You MIGHT be able to find a PCIe-x1 card that can handle 2-disk MIRRORED RAID (I think that's RAID 10), but with more disks (i.e., striping as opposed to mirroring), an x1 card probably couldn't handle the throughput of modern drives. You could still read and write to the drives, but there would be no speed advantage to using multi-disk striped RAID.
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I wondered the same thing when I bought it since I wanted to be certain of this. The manufacturer said it was "compatible" with SATA III, but that does not necessarily mean anything. The external interface is USB 3.0 and limtied to 5Gbits/sec max throughput, of course. Anyway, after testing with a fast 3.5" 7200 disk drive, I came to the conclusion that the drive internally is running at max performance for its platter write speeds - as you can see from my reported review. Unless I were to check with an SSD, I would not be certain of the interface, but my educated guess is that it is is an internal SATA III interface ... hope that helps!
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I have never opened mine up to look. The thing has a 1T hard drive, that's enough for most purposes. I was concerned about - what happens if I have every important thing on the one drive and then it fails. My solution was to buy a NAS network drive with 2 3T continuous duty rated hard drives. Everything has a mirror image back up copy and it can be accessed from anywhere. It was expensive, about $300, but I have all the storage space I will ever need, and all my stuff is safe. It's not dependent on any one device in any one location. I never tried to put anything more into the ASUS.
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The RAID processing is on board the ProRAID. The connection to the computer is a standard USB 3.0 or eSATA (multiplier) port. No special interface card required for USB 3.0. eSATA must be able to handle multiple drives.
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This is diskless - just be sure to get HD's that are made for NAS (Seegate ST4000VN000, WD WD40EFRX, etc) do not use energy savers or spin down disks, it will cause havoc on your RAID integrity. So plz do read what drives are supported and are recommended. I put the ST4000VN000, in all of my devices, works great.
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My experience may not be valid. It seems that 2 of the drives failed before I noticed the problem. My past experience with RAID let me to believe I would be notified by the RAID manager software if there was a problem. I replaced one of the bad drives and lost all the data. Other people have not been so unlucky. The unit does come with multiple ways to connect it to your PC, including firewire and USB 3. To get USB 3 connectivity on my machine, I had to buy a USB 3 card. It will also talk to USB 2. One more thing. When I had problems, I called their help line. The person I spoke to had no idea whatsoever what a RAID was, what it would or would not do, etc. This unit seems to be manufactured by a Canadian company that has outsourced its support. Bad idea. Very bad. I junked the unit and got a SansDigital external RAID. It is USB3, has a good monitor program and I am quite pleased with it.
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Big difference is all MacPro computers 2006 to 2012 have a SATA II controller built in, you are adding in a SATA III controller which is theoretically twice as fast as the built in controller. Although you will not get twice the speed as the internal, it will take pull advantage of the speed of your SSD where the internal controller will not. Another big advantage is that controller has a plat you can add to it and put two SSDs on it and use a RAID 1 or 0 allowing you to make a mirrored set so you are redundant (you can loose a drive and still be up and running) or stripe across two drives making them one logical drive and increase speed significantly. Your internal MACPRO slots with a HDD will top out with 4 drives running raid 0 at about 540Mbps, just two SSD drives on your SATA III card will be well over 660Mbps even if they are slow SSDs. Adding in a second TEMPO and configuring 4 drives RAID 0 will be around 1280Mbps! You can use the SSD to run your system boot drive while using cheaper HDD in the drive slots for data and backups.
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In the past RAID has been a hardware supported function. I don't use this in a RAID setup as I only have two drives in it so far. You should view this as four separate USB to SATA bridges. Any RAID function you want to use will have to be 100% software implemented.
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Jeffrey: 1st .. SAS drives do not come with USB cables. You do NOT use a USB interface with them. Your need a Raid or HBA controller. Many motherboards have on-board SATA raid controllers which are not designed for SAS drives. There are some "enterprise class" mobos with SAS controllers but they are very pricey. Most discreet Raid / HBA controllers (LSI / Adaptec are the best) use an 8087 internal host connector which branches out to (4) connectors on the hdd end. The hdd end connectors are dependent on whether your drives are internal / external. More info at: http://www.elpeus.com/categories/sas-mini-sas/external-sas-cables.html The biggest differences between SATA & SAS is that all SAS drives are enterprise class and designed for Raid whereas most SATA drives are not designed for Raid. SAS can read / write simultaneously and SATA can only do one or the other. For most SOHO applications the motherboard SATA raid will suffice. WD makes some very good enterprise class SATA NAS hdds. You will find better performance from SAS but the Raid controller / cables are not cheap. I hope this helped. Good Luck & have fun:) Oh, by the way, I'm still running my Seagate SAS drives with no problems. I'm a happy camper.
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Don't have exactly such an experience, but this is one among not many (if not the only!) capable to connect multi-drive bays with spawned (e)SATA. Have connected self-made 5 drives bay, worked fine.However, i would advice you to ask Drobo's tech support regarding tech specs requirement and if their boxes either provide multi-drive (spawned SATA), or single logical RAID-drive on eSATA port.
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if you mean that you are working with less than 8 drives, yes, you can add other drives, one at a time (the system will do a rebuild of the array when you effectively add the new drive). Beyond 8 drives, you can only add other drives with the expansion unit. That means the USB and esata interfaces cannot be used for drives that are meant to be part of a RAID array. External drives (through usb and esata) can only be shared on their own, as individual volumes. And yes, all raid options are supposed to work with any number of drives. I started my array with 6 and soon went to add a 7th drive.
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The diskless NAS does not have any drives installed in it. I bought the diskless thinking I would use the four matched drives I had in an existing server. That would have been perfect, but the drives were not supported by the EX4. If you have existing drives, and they are on the WD EX4 supported list, this would be a great way to make use of them. Otherwise, you might as well purchase with disks and have a single warranty covering the entire NAS and drives.
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I have had a Drobo 5G for about 7 months now. I originally put 2 WD RE 4TB drives in it. I recently had to replace a drive in this unit for the third time. I did not remember which slot the first failure was in, but the third failure was the most recently replaced drive. I am a bit concerned that the drives I have chosen for use in my Drobo have had 150% failure rate. I do not know whether to blame the drives or the Drobo. Drobo tech support requested a diagnostic report and according to them, there is nothing wrong with it. I do not know enough about the Drobo to say what type of RAID technology it is, but it sure seems to be another data point for this thread. I have had a Drobo 5G for about 7 months now. I originally put 2 WD RE 4TB drives in it. I recently had to replace a drive in this unit for the third time. I did not remember which slot the first failure was in, but the third failure was the most recently replaced drive. I am a bit concerned that the drives I have chosen for use in my Drobo have had 150% failure rate. I do not know whether to blame the drives or the Drobo. Drobo tech support requested a diagnostic report and according to them, there is nothing wrong with it. I do not know enough about the Drobo to say what type of RAID... » Read More I have had a Drobo 5G for about 7 months now. I originally put 2 WD RE 4TB drives in it. I recently had to replace a drive in this unit for the third time. I did not remember which slot the first failure was in, but the third failure was the most recently replaced drive. I am a bit concerned that the drives I have chosen for use in my Drobo have had 150% failure rate. I do not know whether to blame the drives or the Drobo. Drobo tech support requested a diagnostic report and according to them, there is nothing wrong with it. I do not know enough about the Drobo to say what type of RAID technology it is, but it sure seems to be another data point for this thread. « Show Less