Podcast in Blog Form: Using a Drobo as a Primary Hard Drive for Photos

So here's the deal, I've been working 13-hour days for the past three weeks and it's beginning to get to me. To thwart the upcoming burnout, I decided to get away for the weekend - gone, out of town, adios. The one task I didn't complete before I left was, of course, recording this week's podcast. Instead of waiting until next week, here's this week in a blog post since visuals aren’t really necessary for this one.

I've been using a Drobo (2nd gen) for a little over a month now. There’s really nothing special about that fact, lots of folks use them. The differentiating factor is that I use my Drobo as the one and only location for my photo library, sync it with Lightroom, and have removed every single photo from my computer's hard drive. If that piqued your curiosity, read on…

During the busy season, I put on about 8-10 GB of photos each weekday, then about 20 GB on a Saturday wedding (all shot in RAW, of course). There's no way my seemingly measly 500 GB internal hard drive can keep up with that pace, especially during the backup process. My former workflow had me exporting JPG's and dumping RAW's about every other day to conserve drive space, not so much anymore.

So there's the setup - lots of photos, not enough space.

I looked into running my photo library on an external hard drive, but hated the idea that the hard drive could fail at any given moment, which would make me want to back it up, which would then be more cumbersome than just keeping them on my internal drive. That's about the point where I noticed the Drobo. See, it's a little different in the fact that it backs up the data from one drive to the other(s) on-the-fly, no software, no worries (unless all of the drives crash at once, that is) - it’s a RAID for the rest of us. After learning that the Drobo was a safe place for my photo library to live (still vulnerable to fire, flood, or theft, but super-protected against crashes), I went through the process of picking my components.

First, I picked the Drobo 2nd gen (at least) as it has 4 drive bays and the coveted FireWire 800 port, assuming you have one of those on your computer. Running your photo library on an external drive requires a great deal of through-put, and FW 800 can handle it (more on that later). When selecting drives, I didn’t get the 7200 rpm drives as 5400 rpm are plenty. Why not more power, you might be wondering? The bottle-neck of this setup is not the speed of your drives, it's the cable connecting your Drobo to your computer. Getting 7200 rpm drives will only make your Drobo's fans run more often as the drives run warmer - they will also give you the illusion of a performance increase, but I’m not really into that. As a matter of fact, I recommend using 'green' drives/drives that advertise super-low power consumption - those drives will give your Drobo's fans a rest and won't impact your performance in the slightest.

The biggest apprehension I had going into this setup was performance - how well would my library load, import and export my photos, the develop module's adjustments take effect, etc.? The short answer: perfectly. I haven't noticed a decrease in speed since I began using this setup. It's surprising, I know - I was just as shocked. But it works, it genuinely functions just as well on the Drobo through FW 800 as it does internally. I'm sure someone could spit out some statistics that would say otherwise, but as the end-user, my experience has been seamless and smooth.

So what happens when (not if) a hard drive fails? Well, that’s the beauty of a Drobo - if one drive fails, the other(s) will still have all of your data ready for you without a hiccup. Just pop out the old, slap in the new. Same thing if I run out of space - just pop a new one in - it doesn’t even have to be the same capacity as the others. It’s because of the combination of redundancy, stability, and performance that it makes perfect sense to use a Drobo as your primary photo drive.

Comments

[Aaron D. Priest]

Mike, what are you using for offsite backup? I currently edit on striped SSDs, but due to space limitations I offload the finished product to a larger mirrored hard drive array when I'm done. That in turn gets backed up to two external HDs that I rotate once a week just to keep some data out of the office in case of a fire, etc. Online storage and tape is not feasible due to sheer size. A Drobo would be more effective than my RAID 1 array, and once my 2TBs are getting full I plan on getting a Drobo, but that still doesn't help with offsite storage. Getting two Drobos and swapping them out weekly would not be cheap! No storage over 2TB is cheap though. I'm hesitant to archive different years to different drives and shelf them in case one drive does fail over time and you don't realize it. I'm curious what others do for backup routines and offsite storage?

[Mike]

Hi Aaron,

I can't believe I forgot to mention that, thanks for asking. There are two things I do for off-site backup, the first isn't truly offsite, it's just a duplicate in my house, the second really is off-site.

1) PogoPlug. I use the same drive for sharing my files to clients as I do for keeping a backup. If the drobo counts for 2 (due to the redundancy), the PogoPlus is the third line of defense. It still doesn't protect against fire or theft (I'm not too concerned about flooding on the second floor of my house), so it's not perfect.

2) Safe Deposit Box. Sounds odd, but it works. Every quarter, pop out one of the drives and take it to the bank. You don't need an endless supply of drives, you can just rotate them every three months. If that frequency is too long, shorten it to every month, or every two weeks, it's totally up to you.

I have the same problem with online backup solutions, my data will literally never finish backing up as there's too much fresh data being added to the queue. I think both of those are viable solutions. I don't think there's a 'perfect' answer, but this setup works for me.

Thanks,
Mike