Robbie Ferguson: One of the alternative to backing up and this doesn’t, this doesn’t work for offsite stuff that something that will help to prevent data loss in the case where a hard drive fails and we’ve talked about hard drive failures and having the center that drives away to data recovery specialist and that can be pricey. One of the things that we can look at is were done in data storage, so what that is in its simplest form is say we have two hard drives connected at the same time and your computer thinks that they're one. So anytime you save a file, anytime you import your pictures from your digital camera, they get saved on two independent hard drives.

I mean you don’t have to actually copy them you're just saving it to one. So it can be your C Drive right or just you’re whatever mounts point in Linux. So that gives you redundancy, John is right in saying that that’s not a backup, its not but it gives us redundancy so that in the case where hard drives fails you’ve got a second hard drive that has that data on it, that’s in the simplest form that’s called RAID 1 where you’ve got two hard drives.

But its not always ideal and it is a case where, well what happens if there is a fire, what happens if there is you know something like a lighting strike that takes out everything in your computer and that second hard drive is done anyways. In a case where it’s the hard drive failure and I've had enough hard drives crashed in my time good to know to that its important to have redundant copies of my files, the nice thing about redundant files systems or redundant hard drives is that essentially in many cases if one hard drive fails you can keep working using just the other one.

And then you just you know as quickly as possible you get that old failed drive out and put in a new drive to replace it so that you get that redundancy again. So that’s something that’s really nice, I had a client that who called us in because they're having some trouble with their server running the backups and sure enough get in there and the one hard drive had been failed for like almost two weeks.

Christy Burton: Oh, that’s funny.

Robbie Ferguson: So, it was not, it could have been really, really dangerous right.

Christy Burton: Sure.

Robbie Ferguson: Because here they are running on entire business on their server with one hard drive but the point that I made to them was that you’re—because they were asking well we do really need replace the second hard drive? Do we really need that? And I said look, this redundancy is what saved you. The last two weeks that you’ve been working on this one hard drive is because of that redundant setup that you had. And that’s in this most basic form, so the fact that you’ve been able to work for the past two weeks, the fact that you didn’t loose any data is because of that redundancy.

Christy Burton: So is there any warning to let you know that’s in your backup system.

Robbie Ferguson: Well in a rate environment, you're going to know if a hard drive is failed. As long as you’ve a good enough card with an inter-phase that warms you right, just like any—they will actually tell you that a hard drive has failed, all right.

Christy Burton: Because I need one of those I wouldn’t be able to tell any ways.

Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, and you’d have to keep to an eye in it. Some of them have also like little lights at the front it’ll be green if it’s good and red if its bad it could be that simplistic too right? And were talking about servers, were not talking about you know big box system, what were talking about is like my home computer. Just knowing that my family folders are safe just knowing that you know the thousands of photo’s that I've taking with our digital cameras since my wife and I were married eight years ago.

Well what would ever happen if I lost all this that would be devastating. And this days you don’t even really print them a lot you print you know the occasional photo but for what it is worth say to be honest they're mostly just on my hard drive.

Christy Burton: Raid 5.

Robbie Ferguson: Raid 5 is cool, raid 5 what that does is with say four hard drives you’ve stripping into your ring, so you’ve got—and we don’t need to get into all the different levels of raid, raid is redundant on Raid of inexpensive disk. And that will allow you to have multiple disks operating as one of them. So there are all different levels of what that means. Raid 5 being stripped in mirror means that’s its going to be a little bit faster than a Raid 1 quite substantially faster, it has four hard drives and the ability to fill out one sometimes two depending on how many drives you’ve got and it gives you more space because where in Raid 1 you’ve two on here in the bit drives they're mirror so you only get one terabit.

It doesn’t matter that there is actually two terabit of space. But with the Raid 5 you're going to get more space that’s an advantage to that, the disadvantage is all that the drives have to be the same with any Raid pretty much the drives to have to match. So if you start out with the whole bunch of 500 gigabit drives and then you decide you know what I want to put in one terabit drives to make this thing bigger. And you’ve got two replace every single drive in the on Raid.

And that that’s expensive that’s where Raid doesn’t hold to its name, really. Just backing up a little bit. I was talking about just the fact that the rates on Raids have to have same size hard drives that can be a big problem. And in my case one of the reasons that I want to talk to you about this stuff is because I'm actually looking to improve the data redundancy here category five. Because were at the point now where we've done 96 episodes, 96 hours of video.

Christy Burton: Yeah.

Robbie Ferguson: Plus all the editing and all stuff.

Christy Burton: It’s workable.

Robbie Ferguson: Well it becomes a remarkable amount of space, were using a lot of space.

Christy Burton: Right.

Robbie Ferguson: And so where at the point now were very, very close to the point where were going to start loosing redundancy because were out of space. So my only option at this point is going to be start moving things off of the Raid on Raid and moving them onto independent drives. Because were going to be out of space, were going to have room on that rate. So, so I want to start talking to the community at Category5 and find out you know what do you think is should do?

So I'm going to explain in some of the many, many options that are out there. One of the things that I want to do is, is I want to be able to recycle some of those old hard drives I've got. I've got several 500 gig hard drives, I've a bunch of 400, a couple 300’s and I think a 160 kicking around. They're all eSata drive, so I don’t want to have to run out and buy all bunches of hard drives to build in on Raid when there are devices out there that might allow me to be able to pick in map.

Christy Burton: Sure.

Robbie Ferguson: So devices such as the Drobo, the Drobo allows you to plug in up to four drives and unlike on Raid those drives can be practically any capacity.

Christy Burton: So how this D-R-O-B-O, Drobo.

Robbie Ferguson: That’s right, yeah, so advantage is of course of the Drobo over say Raid. And I'm not touching on speed right now because were talking about data storage. I'm talking about a production system. This is just so that I have a place to store on my big files. So for you it might be all your images, your movies, I've got a digital video camera my sonny handy cam that we are talking about last week is digital. I always import them into MPEG files and it becomes a lot of stuff. So maybe that’s you maybe you need some redundant storage for that stuff.

So were not talking about the speed and like how fast the Raid is going to be that’s not my deciding factor, what I want is to be able to build something that’s expandable. So the Drobo that we just saw there you can take up to four drives. You can hot swap and pick the match just really, really nice that’s the advantage in fairness. So it doesn’t have to be the same drives you can—I can grab some of those drives and just throw them in and then what I want to put in more space if I've got all four spaces used up. I can just fail out or remove the smallest hard drive in the Raid.

So if I've got that 160 gig in there and two 400 gigs and a 500 I can just fail out the 160 remove it and pop in a one terabit and all of the sudden it rebuilds itself and then I've got more space in my Raid. So that’s very cool, very cool. So then there’s a disadvantage of to the Raid. I think the biggest disadvantages for me are that the way that it connects into your computer USB 2.0 or the fire wire, now they’ve added fire wire and then if you by the Drobo share other couple of 100 boxes then you get internet.

But there is no eSata so it’s again, I didn’t want to get into speed but it is a lot slower than on the eSata device. But that’s not going to be my deciding factor right, so let's keep in mind as were going through, because I want you to help me decide. But the Drobo is expensive, five to $600.00 for the hardware. They're going to put the drives in it, all right. Were counting is a bad idea can you expand on that for me thanks for the Drobo is a bad idea for Category5.

Crazy gloom mentioning that fire wire 800 isn't that bad really, which yeah, I can go for that. But only one of my systems has fire wire. So I would have to connect it into that system or install fire wire card in a stand alone system to use as a backup server you’re done in storage server to make it a nest. Unless, say about the Drobo share.