That means a single Canon 5D Mark II RAW file might take ~3 seconds just to read on the Drobo eg 6 seconds to duplicate. Here’s kicker: when a drive fails, Drobo performance is cut by another 60-80%, down as low as 7-8MB/sec in my testing. You can do better with a good USB thumb drive! It’s not unfair to say performance is pathetic. I’ve never seen a slower Firewire 800 enclosure, and that’s using the Drobo with the fastest SATA drives I’ve yet tested, the 2TB Hitachi 7K2000. If you’re after reliability, get new enterprise-grade drives (here’s one good choice), and get a quality enclosure that also offers high performance, such as the OWC QX2. And it’s annoying when things ought to be quiet. The Drobo is a real busybody, and even when you are not using the drive, the Drobo often continues doing whatever housekeeping it needs to do: this puts extra stress onto drives, including extra heat stress. It all gets back to how cheap new hard drives are, new hard drives matched in capacity and speed. A flaky drive might be tolerated by the Drobo, but then again there might be a problem. When the goal is reliability, it’s a self-defeating approach to mix and match hard drives. So look at the total cost, then performance, etc, then decide. For example, you can get a 1TB Hitachi for about $90. New hard drives are selling at rock-bottom prices they are faster, more reliable, and under warranty. The concept of paying $329 for an empty box that can take dumpster-grade drives might appeal to some, but it’s absolutely nuts for anyone whose data is of value. And in reality, anything more than a few hundred gigabytes is painful with the Drobo, because it’s too slow even to back it up in any reasonable amount of time. The mirrored solution is 2-8 times faster, depending on how it’s connected, and it tolerates failure of a drive. For that, you can buy a 1TB mirrored solution (two 1TB drives as a RAID 0 mirror). The Drobo costs a lot up-front- about $329 when empty, without any drives. Wow! Your friends will be impressed, and your sex life will improve. Pull out one drive and nothing bad happens. With the Drobo, you can revel in the fact that you can insert dumpster-grade drives, and the Drobo will work its magic with them, incorporating them into its storage pool. Drive failure or drive full? No problem, just insert a working or higher capacity replacement. No doubt those who have drunk the marketing koolaid and already own a Drobo will find something to like with it- the marketing is brilliant and the idea is intoxicating: insert any new or fast or slow or half-dead hard drive, and the Drobo will incorporate it into a pool of storage. What Data Robotics has done is to generalize a well-understood technology (RAID) such that dissimilar drives can be used together, truly a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, or RAID (which ironically Drobo claims not to be!). The appeal of the Drobo is that (a) a drive failure can be tolerated without loss of data, and (b) drives of different capacities and brands can be mixed and matched, and (c) more capacity means replacing any drive with one of larger capacity.Īccording to Data Robotics, the Drobo is not RAID 5 (striping + parity), but it’s the same idea: some data plus some redundant information is stored on each drive such that failure of any particular drive can be tolerated without data loss. The Data Robotics Drobo is an external drive enclosure supporting functionality similar to RAID 5, allowing drive failure without data loss. Updated - Send Feedback Related: backup, diglloydTools, eSATA, hard drive, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, RAID, RAID-0, RAID-5, storage, USB
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