Wanting to build a drobo clone/rip off?

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1

ok so i have had my drobo since 2011 well this last week we had a bad wind storm and my pc was on while i was at work well when i came home my drobo was dead *rip plays the undertakers old school ring music lol* any ways i cannot afford a new drobo SO my next option is to build a clone or a rip off drobo i loved how if one drive died i could swap it out and not loose any data as well as use any HDD i wanted to so what i am asking is

 

1. what parts will i need? i do have 8? HDD

2. software?

3. will i be able to access the files when i am not home? can i goto my friends house and still get the data

 

if this topic is in the wrong fourm please let me know so i can fix that thank you

2

What's your budget? Alternatively you can check out the NASFeratu build Logan and Wendell did earlier this year to get an idea of what you would like or do need.

3

just an up date i remember i do have a mother board i have a gigabyte am3 and a amd am3 quad core cpu

4

You could have a look at flexraid, pretty sure it let's you used mixed and already filled drives. I tried it out a while ago and found it too slow so started using snapraid, but snapraid isn't real time.

Options like RAID and ZFS can have pretty steep hardware requirements as well as not allowing you to use pre-filled disks or add disks to the array after its been built. So you have to plan everything out in advanced and get the right hardware to begin with.