Derrick
ლ(ಠ_ಠ )ლ
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2010
- Messages
- 5,085
- Reaction score
- 5
It’s really a very powerful NAS device, and the ability to use any SATA drive inserted is a real boon. However, it suffers somewhat on the performance front, especially when writing to the Drobo, which could hamper the “seamless user experience†somewhat.
A robot is a machine designed to do things humans cannot or won’t do. The Drobo is essentially one of the friendlier types. That’s what it stands for, and this I’m not making up: data robot. Cute.
It’s a hell of a network storage tool too. Clever in that it eliminates the need for identical serial-number drives, which is common in enterprise-orientated storage architectures. Helpful. It automatically checks for updates and is quickly and easily shared and available on the network. And reliable, in that it always allocates the disk capacity it needs to replicate the data in the stack, so that should a drive fail, the data ought to be recoverable.
Let me give you some details. Yes, you can really put any SATA drive you like into one of the four bays and it will increase your storage pool regardless of capacity. And that’s without you having to implement a completely new RAID level yourself – the embedded processes take care of it.
In the case of the review unit supplied, well, we only used two of their 80GB Seagates, and installed one 160GB Seagate and one 120GB Hitachi drive. That gave a total of 440GB, of which the Drobo grabbed just under 120GB, leaving a solid 320GB block of remote storage.
The Drobo doesn’t have an Ethernet port, but the DroboShare unit sports Gigabit Ethernet.
You first need to install the Drobo Dashboard applet on a connected PC of course, which will then find the unit on the network and prompt you to format the drives in the file system of your choice.
The Drobo then shares itself as a 2TB network disk, in the case of the NTFS file format. You’re kept alerted about what’s happening in terms of the installed capacity via the Drobo Dashboard and via a series of LEDs on the shiny black box itself. One for each drive installed, which turns orange when the disk is full and needs to be replaced, and a series of ten blue LEDs along the bottom of the face, which relate to overall capacity: no LEDs for empty, all ten burning for full.
The DroboShare unit is an optical device, which connects to the Drobo via its USB port, otherwise this interface would be the only means of connecting this clever box to a PC. It has just two LEDs: one for activity, and one for power.
The actual testing of the Drobo was interesting. Although the DroboShare is Gigabit Ethernet capable, the network I tested on could only manage Fast Ethernet, but the actual throughput never bothered the bandwidth limits of this LAN type. At least not in writing to the unit, which settled at a steady 3KB/sec to 3.5KB/sec. And the fuller the Drobo got, the slower the performance. With just 5GB left in the stack, it had dropped to under 1KB/sec.
Reading back the data was far quicker, saturating the 100Mbps Ethernet line a lot of the time at around 9.6KB/sec. However, an in-line storage device that is meant to appear seamless to the networked user needs to be able to negotiate incoming traffic streams faster. Opening multiple streams - as in writing to it from two different network clients - saw the overall throughput climb to 5.5KB/ sec, but there was definitely still some performance impact there.
At first, we hoped that the automatic updates would resolve the bottleneck, but to no avail. In addition, it was during these updates that we first noticed the Drobo - quite worryingly, considering the classic sci-fi references from earlier - referring to itself in the first person.
Naturally, it doesn’t affect the empirical components of this review, but it’s more creepy than cute. Nevertheless, as a means of adding very affordable, relatively scalable and almost zero-management data capacity to your network, the Drobo is very appealing. The ability to mix and match drives is a marvel and a long-term cost and usability benefit, while being able to be maintained by even the least technically minded office worker.
It even has automated data protection for peace of mind. And all without being locked into prescriptive supplier hassles. We just still have this nagging feeling that to truly deserve the title “robot,” and all the potential humanity shattering power that it implies, the Drobo needs to pick up the pace a little.
A robot is a machine designed to do things humans cannot or won’t do. The Drobo is essentially one of the friendlier types. That’s what it stands for, and this I’m not making up: data robot. Cute.
It’s a hell of a network storage tool too. Clever in that it eliminates the need for identical serial-number drives, which is common in enterprise-orientated storage architectures. Helpful. It automatically checks for updates and is quickly and easily shared and available on the network. And reliable, in that it always allocates the disk capacity it needs to replicate the data in the stack, so that should a drive fail, the data ought to be recoverable.
Let me give you some details. Yes, you can really put any SATA drive you like into one of the four bays and it will increase your storage pool regardless of capacity. And that’s without you having to implement a completely new RAID level yourself – the embedded processes take care of it.
In the case of the review unit supplied, well, we only used two of their 80GB Seagates, and installed one 160GB Seagate and one 120GB Hitachi drive. That gave a total of 440GB, of which the Drobo grabbed just under 120GB, leaving a solid 320GB block of remote storage.
The Drobo doesn’t have an Ethernet port, but the DroboShare unit sports Gigabit Ethernet.
You first need to install the Drobo Dashboard applet on a connected PC of course, which will then find the unit on the network and prompt you to format the drives in the file system of your choice.
The Drobo then shares itself as a 2TB network disk, in the case of the NTFS file format. You’re kept alerted about what’s happening in terms of the installed capacity via the Drobo Dashboard and via a series of LEDs on the shiny black box itself. One for each drive installed, which turns orange when the disk is full and needs to be replaced, and a series of ten blue LEDs along the bottom of the face, which relate to overall capacity: no LEDs for empty, all ten burning for full.
The DroboShare unit is an optical device, which connects to the Drobo via its USB port, otherwise this interface would be the only means of connecting this clever box to a PC. It has just two LEDs: one for activity, and one for power.
The actual testing of the Drobo was interesting. Although the DroboShare is Gigabit Ethernet capable, the network I tested on could only manage Fast Ethernet, but the actual throughput never bothered the bandwidth limits of this LAN type. At least not in writing to the unit, which settled at a steady 3KB/sec to 3.5KB/sec. And the fuller the Drobo got, the slower the performance. With just 5GB left in the stack, it had dropped to under 1KB/sec.
Reading back the data was far quicker, saturating the 100Mbps Ethernet line a lot of the time at around 9.6KB/sec. However, an in-line storage device that is meant to appear seamless to the networked user needs to be able to negotiate incoming traffic streams faster. Opening multiple streams - as in writing to it from two different network clients - saw the overall throughput climb to 5.5KB/ sec, but there was definitely still some performance impact there.
At first, we hoped that the automatic updates would resolve the bottleneck, but to no avail. In addition, it was during these updates that we first noticed the Drobo - quite worryingly, considering the classic sci-fi references from earlier - referring to itself in the first person.
Naturally, it doesn’t affect the empirical components of this review, but it’s more creepy than cute. Nevertheless, as a means of adding very affordable, relatively scalable and almost zero-management data capacity to your network, the Drobo is very appealing. The ability to mix and match drives is a marvel and a long-term cost and usability benefit, while being able to be maintained by even the least technically minded office worker.
It even has automated data protection for peace of mind. And all without being locked into prescriptive supplier hassles. We just still have this nagging feeling that to truly deserve the title “robot,” and all the potential humanity shattering power that it implies, the Drobo needs to pick up the pace a little.
