Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

You are here: Home / Archives for Drobo

Drobo 4-bay 3rd Generation

By

drobo-3rd-genI wanted to post this review 2 weeks ago when I first received my 3rd Generation Drobo, but sadly, the unit was DOA. After talking to Drobo via email ((a less than ideal experience as they made me register the unit first, then refused to answer questions I had asked several times like “do you send a new unit or refurb” and “what is the shipping process”)), I got the unit replaced via Adorama since they would send out a brand new unit. The ship back got there a week later, and for reasons unknown, Adorama waiting several days to ship a replacement. They did apologize for the delay, and upgraded the return shipping to overnight. I had the new unit the following day, and first thing I did was power it up with no drives in it to make sure it worked. It did power up, and went through it’s initial setup scheme. Being confident it would work, I powered it off, and dropped it in place of my 2nd Generation unit, and swapped the drives over. Power up didn’t take that long, but you could tell it was doing some migration of the data as they drives could be heard chunking away for a while afterward.

Initial testing showed the new unit getting about 36MB/sec over USB2 (sadly, my Mac Mini is only USB2), where the previous 2nd Generation Drobo only got about 16MB/sec over Firewire with the same drives.

[Read more…]

Drobo 5D Review

By

Drobo 5DFor the last year I’ve had a Drobo 5D on my desk hooked to my Mac Pro. I’ve loved the unit as it’s fast, and so far, extremely reliable. I have it connected to the Mac Pro via Thunderbolt, on bus 1 ((Don’t get me started on the Thunderbolt buses on the Mac Pro. I had to move stuff around several times to get one of my monitors to NOT randomly go black now and then)). When I initially purchased the unit, I didn’t have the SSD cache installed, and had 4 2TB Western Digital (WD) Black drives in it (giving me 6TB of usable storage). The only problem I had with it was the 7200RPM drives caused a bit of vibration, so occasionally it would make noise, or anytime something was touching the body of the Drobo, it would cause a rattling. But the performance was excellent (significantly faster than my Drobo 4-bay 2nd Generation at home).

Since buying it, however, I’ve done two things. First, I purchased a Crucial 128GB mSATA SSD for it’s cache, which boosted the performance another 25% or so, and just yesterday, I upgraded to 3x WD 4TB Red drives. The biggest advantage of that being TLER support, as well as drive speed/balance. The Drobo is now “silent”, and there is no physical vibration to the enclosure at all (gotta say, I love the “Red” drives). While the spindle speed is slower ((WD doesn’t actually advertise their speed, but it has been deduced to be 5,400RPM)), the platter density is higher. This should largely even out transfer speed changes with larger files, which was evident in my data restore once I had swapped all the drives ((Tidbit: The 5D is “smart” in that if you are replacing all the drives at once, it will come up in an error state if you pull all the old hard drives out, and put in new HD’s. You have to then “reset” it to get it to recognize the new drives. This is interesting because my 2nd generation 4-bay never did this)). If you’re upgrading drives, doing a backup/restore is going to be significantly faster than swapping one drive at a time (which the Drobo will let you do, but each rebuild will probably take 24 hours to complete if you have a significantly sized volume).

Actual read/write performance on the unit is pretty good. With sequential read/writes at 145MB/sec both ways. My 4-bay 2nd generation scored about 25MB/sec each way. Random access is not based on throughput so much as IOPs. Sadly, it scores only about 100/sec in that space, but that’s not bad for a Drobo, since my old 2nd generation only scored 50/sec.

All and all, I’m very happy with the 5D. While the price point is a bit high, it really is a great external storage device. If you can afford it, I’d highly recommend it.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Update: I contacted Drobo a few days ago asking about a review unit of the new 4-bay, and sadly, heard nothing back. As “luck” would have it, though, Adorama had a sale for one for about $70 off street price, so I purchased one to upgrade my home 2nd generation Drobo. I’ll be posting a review of that new unit once I have it, and move my drives over. =)

Drobo B800i

By

We purchased a Drobo B800i at work during summer break, and initially, I must admit I was a bit confused about it’s functionality. I thought, at a block level, iSCSI device, it was basically a SAN with an internal controller. I was wrong. That functionality sounds like it’s reserved for the 1200i. The 800i, however, is more aptly referred to as a “virtual storage appliance” (or something like that). You throw drives in it (1-8), of any size, then you basically tell it you want volumes. They can be any size from 1TB to 16TB, and as many as 31 of them. They call it “thin provisioning”, and that’s an apt description. It’s much like a VM, only storage. Sure, you can have 30 volumes, all 16TB in size, but only have a single 500GB hard drive in the B800i. Would you want to? Probably not (what would be the point?).

Since purchasing it, and realizing it’s capabilities, I’ve had it take over the role of “backup”. It serves to host previous terms of class data, and our Crashplan PROe data. And by and large, it works very well for that. It’s hard to get real performance numbers that would be useful to most, since I knew it wouldn’t be used for anything needing high performance, and therefore only put Western Digital 2TB Green drives in it (5900RPM. Not fast). It works, and it seems to work well. My only complaint is the software. They MUST use discovery to find the Drobo, and mount the volumes. You can’t, for some reason, specify that there’s a Drobo at this address. Because of this, and some as-yet-unknown issue with the OS X Server firewall, it takes a while for the software to find the B800i, and mount the volumes. But I’m going to investigate this more in the future, or ask that Drobo allow manually specifying the location of the Drobo rather than requiring it be “found”. Also, the software seems to rely on the GPU rendering the interface, which causes issues when combined with Apple Remote Desktop (the software pegs the CPU). I’ve reported this to them, and they weren’t of much help.

All and all, I’m happy. And at the price per TB (weird that it’s gotten to that point), it’s hard to beat it for near-line backup storage. My rating, a full point off, is because of the software issues. The hardware seems quite solid.

[xrr rating=4/5]