For the past 3 years, I have been watching the prices for Drobo. I have wanted one for the longest time but their prices are ridiculous. As of now, I do not have a choice but to get a NAS system as I am in need of more hard drive space and hard drives. So, these past couple months I’ve been stuck on either purchasing the 5N or the 800. I do not know which to get. The 5N is cheaper but according to Drobo Support, with single redundancy and 4 x 4TB hard drives. I will only have 14TB total. That system will not hold up for too long with all my media. Then again 6TB Hard drives are out and being tested by Drobo but who knows if that will even work out. If it does work out though, that’s a lot more space. Choosing the 800FS with 6TB approved by drobo will be a better investment. I would not have to max out my bays anytime soon and can afford dual redundancy. I hope someone here can help me make a decision. What I do and plan to do with my Drobo is store over 1.2K movies and run plex media server. Lately, I have been upgrading my movies to 1080p as well as adding more movies to my server which currently runs on my main set up. In two days, I sucked up a TB in new movies and two TB’s in upgrades. I am still not even done with my movies. My goal is to be able to run my Plex Media Sever on my Drobo and have it backed up and protected and have a lot of hard drive space. If anyone has any advice as far as types of hard drives, what I should do. PLEASE, let me know and help me decide.
I’ve been running 6TB drives with the B800fs’ for a few months now without any issues whatsoever.
Side note: Since the B800fs only supports 2 16TB volumes, if you load it up with 8 6TB drives, it will be unable to allocate beyond 32TB of space. So even if you use dual disk redundancy, there will still be another ~600GB of space that will be unallocated (and thus wasted). I’m hoping they fix this limitation soon enough. Being able to add a 3rd (or more) volume will easily resolve this problem. I understand the 1200 series supports more than 2 volumes. I’m not sure why they haven’t brought that functionality to their other models yet (or updated their capacity calculator).
Really, How many drives do you have that are 6TB? When you say only supports 2 16tb volumes. I can only have two partitions and not have just one massive partition?