Drobo liquidation and BeyondRAID

[Matrixik]

Maybe this idea could be useful for Linus or NAS company he invested into:

Now that Drobo is in liquidation state maybe it would be possible to buy cheaply they BeyondRAID implementation?

White paper: https://www.drobo.com/beyond-raid/ (I also attached it to the post).

 

I hope one day we will get open source hybrid RAID that's available to all and not married to platforms of it creators like Synology Hybrid RAID, Netgear X-RAID or IBM Dynamic Disk Pooling.

 

I would love for it to be "idiot" prof, with simple UI so I don't need to mess in terminal, with hot swap, can work with any size disks (so I can simply replace them over time one by one with bigger one), auto rebalancing and volume expanding when disk are added or replaced (all happening online).

 

Do we have any info/updates of when the NAS company Linus invested in became public? I'm looking to get my first NAS and would prefer something more up to date than Synology hardware.

 

Beyond-Raid-01-01-15.pdf

[Needfuldoer]

What advantage does that bring compared to btrfs, or Linux kernel mdadm RAID? (That's all "Synology Hybrid RAID" is, an existing solution with an easier-to-use interface wrapped around it. Linux can mount a SHR array with no additional software.)

[Kilrah]

4 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

That's all "Synology Hybrid RAID" is, an existing solution with an easier-to-use interface wrapped around it

Whether Drobo's or Synology's things are prettifying an existing system or not - they're great and if they are the fact is that they're good solutions that no DIY NAS OS has been bothering to prettify into something actually usable by a random user.

 

I've never used Synology but with Drobo you can mix drive sizes and insert a new drive / upgrade an existing one at any time and you get both the capacity improvement and the performance of data being spread across multiple drives. That's not something you get from either Truenas, Unraid and such.

 

Drobo also gave you actual read/write SSD caching which again isn't a thing on anything "user-friendly DIY".