Portal To Rejuvenation & Rejuvenation Of My Image Storage Solution

 

Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 24mm ISO 200 f/11 3-bkts Lr3; HDR Efex Pro

“Portal To Rejuvenation” is a side entrance/passageway at about the mid-point of the west side of the Mission Inn.  The hotel spans a full city block on all sides,  I did pump up the hue and saturation on this image, I wanted to amplify the feeling of going from a cold, dour environment in to the warmth and welcoming environment inside.

I just installed my Drobo FS  last week.  Very simple installation and a big sense of relief offloading all my photos from the laptop.

I already back up my laptop to my Apple Time Capsule, which is a combination Air Port wireless router and 1TB disk drive via Apples fully automated Time Machine application, but I ran out of space on the Macbook Pro drive (250GB).  So I had to find a data storage solution quick.

The reasons I decided on the Drobo:

• Drobo automatically configures itself for data protection so you don’t have to.

• When a drive fails, your data is still safe (and all drives do eventually fail).

• Drobo senses any corrupted data and ensures that you only access non-corrupt data.

• No downtime to add capacity. Just add a drive to an empty Data Bay, or replace a smaller drive with a larger one regardless of capacity, speed, or manufacturer.

• After a drive is installed into an empty bay, the new drive capacity is immediately available and protected.

• Drobo can act as one large drive, making it easier to find whatyou’ve stored on it.

• Upgrading capacity is as simple as adding ink to a printer.

• Mix ’n match any 3.5” (SATA) hard drives; no worrying about

matching make, model or capacity of Drobo’s existing drives.

• Upgrade forever—just replace Drobo’s smallest drive with a

larger capacity drive. No data migration or reconfiguration is

required.

Physical installation steps:

1.  Install the software on a computer on your network.

2.  Slide one or more drives in to a slot in the Drobo cabinet.

3.  Connect the Drobo to a port on your router with the supplied Ethernet cable.

4.  Connect the power cord to the back of the Drobo and to an electrical receptacle.

5.  Push the “On” button on the back of the Drobo.

The Drobo box will boot up, the software will find it and prompt you through a couple of configuration steps, including setting an Administrator account up.  This all took under 20 minutes.

It then took about four hours to copy over about 200GB of data from the laptop to the Drobo, which was expected.  Under normal operating conditions the Drobo is very fast to serve up individual files.

Currently I have three Hitachi 2TB drives mounted in the Drobo cabinet, am using 231.94GB of that storage and have 1.56TB available.  I don’t get to use the full 6TB because of the way I have the Drobo configured to run dual redundant drives, (i.e the three physical drives are configured as four virtual drives.)  I’ve got two more Hitachi drives on the shelf, either as replacements if any given drive fails, or as expansion.

If you are concerned about securely storing you photographic files, you should seriously consider a Drobo.