I have a Drobo Mini and my computer is a Mac 2 TB desktop. I found this on Amazon … Western Digital 2 TB 3.5-Inch WD Se SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive WD2000F9YZ [Frustration-Free Packaging]
and was wondering if it would work for the mini. Is it efficient? What I need? fast? etc… I figured I would by 2 to start with.
I take photos and have 45,000 on my computer with a small external harddrive.
Please can someone help. If this isn’t what I need can you direct my to where to purchase. I do have a Best Buy and Staples here in town and I’d love to be able to just run over there and get them than to have to wait for them to come in the mail.
it says takes “Up to four (4) 2.5″ SATA I/II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives – 7 mm and 9.5 mm in height (sold separately).”
i think the main idea of starting out with at least 2 drives in the mini is a good idea, its just that they would need to be 2.5 inch (smaller in physical size) drives.
but… as you are a photographer, i think you still have a good WD 2TB drive, which i think you should keep if you can, so that you can have an extra backup of your photos too. (and the mini also supports dual drive redundany)
Thanks Paul. I am on a MAC. The info was helpful. I’ve seen what they suggest but I can’t seem to locate any. Do you have a link to a 2.5 2TB harddrive that I can use in the mini drobo?
I’ve always just purchased the 2TB external harddrives so I know nothing about the harddrives that this drobo needs.
Thank you
ah you could always try amazon.com they are quite good and global, and they are quite quick with posting options too.
(i once ordered a book and got it delivered within 12 hours or something)
one thing you (could) do, and especially if your mac mini was just bought from them, is to go back to your local shop and to try and swap it for a Drobo 5d, or gen3 (5d has 5 drive slots though), and then you could use the 3.5inch drives and could buy more from them at the same time, which is good if you want to start using it sooner than later.
having a spare standalone drive for extra backups is always worth it, and theres a useful tool on mac called quickpar which is very good at reconstructing files in a folder (on any device) and can even add more recovery options for very low overhead. (first thing is to get your drobo sorted out, but if you get some spare time have a search on these forums for “quickpar” without quotemarks as i pasted lots of info in other posts too, but if you still get stuck i can try and help further)
The WD Blue or the Seagate would be fine. The WD Green is too thick to fit your Drobo Mini (0.6 inch is more than 9.5 mm). The WD AV is optimised for use in digital video recorders. What you want are general purpose drives. Get the WD Blues or the Seagates and you’ll be fine. Note that you’ll need at least two of them and preferably three or four. Two of them will give you somewhat less than 1 TB of storage space; three, somewhat less than 2 TB; and four, somewhat less than 3 TB because the space of one of them is used to provide redundancy, which will help to protect your data when one of the drives fails.
If you want more capacity you’ll need to use 2 TB drives instead of the 1 TB drives I’ve recommended. The problem, as you’ll see from my comment about the 2 TB WD Green drive, is that many of them are just too thick to fit. There is one 2 TB drive that measures only 9.5 mm thick that I know of but you might well struggle to find it in a High Street store. It was originally made by Samsung but Seagate bought the hard disk division of Samsung and now produces it. You can get it at Amazon.
Yes, indeed. I don’t have a Drobo Mini but I do have one of those drives. 2 TB is the largest capacity you can currently get in a size that will fit. Get a pair of those and you’ll have about 1.8 TB of protected storage for your photographs (see the Drobo Capacity Calculator) and you can add more as your needs increase. The price at Amazon is very good at the moment.
The capacity of one of your drives is used to provide redundancy against failure of any of your drives, therefore it isn’t available for storage. The key word is protected. A regular USB connected single disk you might buy in the High Street does not provide that protection. If the drive fails you lose its contents. With a Drobo you get the opportunity to replace a failed drive without losing your data. Of the space that is available for storage some is taken up by the file system itself (metadata, journal, etc). So, with all hard disks you can store somewhat less on them that their quoted capacity.[hr] This page explains a little about how it works.
as a general rule of thumb, i tend to calculate usable space as all hard drives raw sizes added together (take away the raw size of the largest drive for SDR, or take away 2 largest raw sizes for DDR, and then times the remainder by 0.9) approx
The info was helpful. I’ve seen what they suggest but I can’t seem to locate any. Do you have a link to a 2.5 2TB harddrive that I can use in the mini drobo?