I currently have a TS140 running SAMBA on Linux and sharing files from an older DROBO attached by USB 2.0. Since the DROBO only guards against drive failure and not human error, I added another drobo and setup regular snapshots to it every night. This has worked exceptionally well and our needs are not large. We store video records of public meetings which we are required by law to keep for 3 years. We also have hard copies on DVD so not life or death but it is important to me to have trust in the data storage.
OK, so we are now in the age of HD and these files are getting bigger. We also encode live right to the storage and performance is starting to be a concern. I am going to take a drive tray out of an old Dell we have laying around and load the 4 HDDs from one DROBO into the TS140 and load FreeNAS on to it. I only get about 28MBps from the DROBO currently and my testing at home with a similar setup (consumer hardware) rips along and can saturate the Gigabit connection with no issues)
TL;DR: So, finally to my question. I want to have an off site backup. We have a location many miles away with a server room that is hardened. I can ask our IT department for a VM in that room but not a dedicated machine. I want to take the second DROBO and have it passed through to a VM running FreeNAS (for the simplicity of snapshot replication). So, with a bit of testing using VMs yesterday I know that it will "work" but my question is whether I will face any possible corruption or loss on that remote DROBO on a VM? I hear a lot about how FreeNAS does not like external raid controllers etc. My thinking is that the DROBO handles all of it's own internal redundancy and error checking and I will not need to worry about ZFS since it is a single drive right?
Thanks in advance!
OK, so we are now in the age of HD and these files are getting bigger. We also encode live right to the storage and performance is starting to be a concern. I am going to take a drive tray out of an old Dell we have laying around and load the 4 HDDs from one DROBO into the TS140 and load FreeNAS on to it. I only get about 28MBps from the DROBO currently and my testing at home with a similar setup (consumer hardware) rips along and can saturate the Gigabit connection with no issues)
TL;DR: So, finally to my question. I want to have an off site backup. We have a location many miles away with a server room that is hardened. I can ask our IT department for a VM in that room but not a dedicated machine. I want to take the second DROBO and have it passed through to a VM running FreeNAS (for the simplicity of snapshot replication). So, with a bit of testing using VMs yesterday I know that it will "work" but my question is whether I will face any possible corruption or loss on that remote DROBO on a VM? I hear a lot about how FreeNAS does not like external raid controllers etc. My thinking is that the DROBO handles all of it's own internal redundancy and error checking and I will not need to worry about ZFS since it is a single drive right?
Thanks in advance!