The Promise
I enjoyed building and maintaining my FreeNAS (chabak.blog/server/home-server/). As life got busier, I looked for a simple, robust, out of the box solution. Something that required minimal admin. The Drobo more than delivered (https://chabak.blog/avcomps/drobo/)! It was 2013, and I had a network RAID unit where I could mix and match drives, hot swap drives, run Plex, set up notifications, and most importantly, I didn’t have to spend time managing it.
The Drobo just worked, I loved my Drobo!
The Reality
The Drobo was a definitely a rockstar for data backup and sharing. Over the years, I have incrementally upgraded the drives. I started with 2 drives, and gradually worked my way up to having all 5 bays filled up, with 2 and 4 TB drives, a total capacity of around 8TB of usable space with 1 drive redundancy. No need to worry about drive size, matching etc. Just plug and play. It was truly a revolutionary product. It did stream music and movies well, but for some reason, fell short when it came to photo shows. My Drobo ran non stop for over 10 years. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it!
The beginning of the end
Drobo felt victim to “Corporate Inertia”, probably the best way to state it. It stopped innovating. It was sad to see Drobo go into Chapter 11 and then Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
My DROBO started acting up. First it showed a red light, I replaced the drive at that location, then it worked for a little bit but then it went all crazy! It was the end of the road for my unit as well as for DROBO. On hind sight, probably not the best idea to wait for the last moment to do a data migration. I took too long to decide what I wanted the NAS replacement to be.
Back to Requirements
My needs are not too severe. I need a large backup, since I take lots of photos and videos, I would also like to run Plex, be able to connect to the NAS when outside, and (new requirement) would like to direct backup full resolution photos from our phones to the NAS.
I spoke to my friends and did a bit of research, looks like the Synology DS224+, coupled with a couple of 12 TB drives running Raid 1 is the sweet spot for me.
New Beginnings
Now I have 3 tasks on hand.
1: Get my NAS up and running. Install the required apps and get familiar with the Synology ecosystem.
2: Figure out a way to retrieve the data from the Drobo. My colleague suggested using UFS Explorer. Am looking for a 5 bay enclosure to go with it, else I will end up with a jumble of cables connecting to the drives!
3: Document my steps so others in such a situation can benefit from it.
Follow my progress on my Personal Cloud page at: https://chabak.blog/technology/building-your-personal-cloud/
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