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DROBO Storage device

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Just ordered a Drobo. Dumb question: does the box provide SATA power? I'm about to order three 500GB drives for it and am wondering if I need molex-to-SATA power adapters?
Jan:

You don't need anything, not even screws -- the bare drive slides right in to the DROBO and snaps in place. The only requirement is they have to be 3.5 inch SATA1 or SATA2 drives.

When you add a drive, you automatically gain space. Just look at the pie-charts in the 2 drive versus the 3 drive screenshots --- that all happens automatically.
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
I was thinking with a traditional raid when you change the capacity (by adding a stripe for instance) you need to rebuild and repartition.

But the Drobo looks like a 16TB device. Then, as block in this 16TB space are written to it maps them to blocks in the free pool. So the device size (geometry) never changes as disks are added or removed, only the number of total and available blocks.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
As I tried to explain earlier in the thread you can format DROBO initially as a 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 TB array, the larger the longer it takes to boot. Smaller and it boot faster, but may need to form multiple volumes as you expand. It then spans the data across the multiple volumes automatically.
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
Ah, yes, I see now - 1min per TB to start up. I think I'll just set it to 16TB; 4min, 8min, or 16min to start doesn't matter that much I think, it's still a wait. And since I plan to use it for NAS with the Drobo Share I doubt I'll ever turn it off. Especially if it can spin down the drives after being idle for an hour or two.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Hey Jack,

Sweet! Sounds a good choice you made.

I bit the bullet as well and just ordered a Thecus N5200Pro with 5x 1TB. Yummy! I plan to run Raid-0 on 2TB and Raid 5 on 3TB at the same time. Will be interesting to see how that goes. Can't wait to get this sucker. LOL

Btw. My first few days with the Mac were a blast, what a sweet operating system that OSX truly is. My main Mac has not been delivered yet, but I have my MBP and love every minute of it.

...Only, why did I fart around for soooo long with bleedin PC's... :ROTFL:
 

David K

Workshop Member
Jack, you are a brave soul but I'm glad you put this unit thru the ringer. Nice when a product does what it's supposed to do. No wonder they're backordered...
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hey Jack,

Sweet! Sounds a good choice you made.

I bit the bullet as well and just ordered a Thecus N5200Pro with 5x 1TB. Yummy! I plan to run Raid-0 on 2TB and Raid 5 on 3TB at the same time. Will be interesting to see how that goes. Can't wait to get this sucker. LOL

Btw. My first few days with the Mac were a blast, what a sweet operating system that OSX truly is. My main Mac has not been delivered yet, but I have my MBP and love every minute of it.

...Only, why did I fart around for soooo long with bleedin PC's... :ROTFL:
Hi Georg:

Congrats on your new unit -- please report back on it here after you have it up and running as I'm sure others here are looking for performance units too!

You might want to re-investigate doing the RAID 0 on 2 drives and RAID5 on three, since RAID 5 over 3 or more drives is usually as fast as RAID 0 across 2 to begin with, and RAID 5 across 5 drives may actually be faster in some boxes than a single RAID 0 pair. You would however gain more performance with RAID 0 across more than 2 drives... Depending on your RAID card, you can sometimes do a thin RAID 0 5-drive stripe across all the drives, then do a redundant RAID 5 on the remaining large partitions of those same drives, which might give you the best of both worlds. Were it mine, I would probably just RAID 5 4 drives and keep the 5th as a hot spare for a bit of extra security... The typical advice is use RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for redundancy and RAID 5 for the best of both worlds. However, if all you want is performance and don't care about reliability, then do RAID 0; if all you want is redundancy, use RAID 1.

FWIW the ultimate performance/redundancy strategy involves RAID 0-1. To get the most from this, you would have something like one box of 4 drives in RAID 0, mirrored (RAID1) to another 5-drive box with the same size drives in RAID 5. Fair bit of coin for that one though :)

As for why we held out with PC's, maybe because we assumed Vista would actually work really well instead of worse than XP?
:D

Cheers,
 

jlm

Workshop Member
i just picked up a Drobo with four 500G drives USB2 for about $710 plus tax from B&H. PC use for backup. i may also look into Jack's working scheme for striping my main two drives...
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
That's a great deal John --- basically less than 50 cents a gig for fully redundant storage :thumbs:
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Congrats on your new unit -- please report back on it here after you have it up and running as I'm sure others here are looking for performance units too!
Yup, will do!

As for why we held out with PC's, maybe because we assumed Vista would actually work really well instead of worse than XP?
:D
Well, honestly, I had high hopes for VISTA, until I had it in my fingers for about 3 hours.... No more windows BS on my ranch, soon! :D

As for the RAID levels, agreed on your summary.

Just for giggles, I decided to torture test the DROBO and so saved all of you other curious folks the trouble
LOLOLOL :ROTFL::thumbs:

That's a great deal John --- basically less than 50 cents a gig for fully redundant storage
I never looked into that before, mainly because I just added another wallwart, external HD when needed and bought the "sweet spot" at this time.

The cost of my NAS box per Gig is 0.22 euros, not bad.
 

jlm

Workshop Member
drobo up and running, very simple

now that i'm getting serious, no more hand backups.

any strategy, software, etc. for back-ups?
for example, do you do an image print once, then incremental B/U weekly?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
John:

I use software back-ups. On the PC I used a program called "Mirror Folder," with the Mac I use "Carbon Copy Cloner" and hear good things about "Chrono Synch" too. You can set these to copy at he drive level or folder level and set up scheduling as well. Mirror Folder can even run real-time. Bottom line is I have CCC set to back-up images from my working image drive to DROBO each evening. any of my older historical images I may pull off the DROBO to work on, I do a hard save-as back to the DROBO.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Update on the volume size format:

It turns out the 16TB format strategy is probably a smart one. I powered off my DROBO today and even with the 4TB setting it booted in under a minute. I'm debating about starting fresh and reformatting it to 16T now before I load the rest of my data on it...

Cheers,
 

Lars

Active member
Jack,

Remember my comments about bad experiences with Seagate drives this spring? I spoke to a friend here in Stockholm who runs a server room with a few hundred drives online. He says he had the same experience with seagate until he switched to the Seagate ES enterprise quality series two years ago. Since then, not a single failed drive. Quite a track record. ES drives cost a little more perhaps $20 per drive but it sounds like that's a good investment.

Drobo is a bit of a strange beast, for me it doesn't make sense to get a box that doesn't do Gbit LAN and eSATA. Backing up multi-TB over USB is not too much fun. But perhaps it's different if all your computers do FW800. In the end, actual throughput is key, most affordable NAS setups seem to top out at around 30-35MB/sec in independent tests.

BTW, I played around with a performance setup on my desktop, two RAID0 arrays using 3 drives each. Sustained copy speed between the arrays? Almost 300MB/sec... hehe.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hi Lars!

Yes, Lloyd Chambers also recommends the Seagate ES drives for RAID arrays as well. An important thing for folks to keep in mind is that in true RAID, drive choice is important and enterprise class drives are usually the best way to go.

As for DROBO, the concept for me is really about high-capacity-simple-to-manage redundant data storage, and it does that extremely well. It is not about performance, but even still I get 50MB/s sustained reads and writes which is about as good as any single previous generation SATA drive delivers.

And yes, RAID0 definitely kicks butt :D. For performance, I keep my current working image files on a 2-drive RAID0 array which gives me blinding fast reads and saves, close to 200 MB/s. You can figure about 100MB/s sustained throughput per drive in the array with current high-end drives like your Seagate Enterprise class -- Kudos on your 300MB/s array! :thumbs:

If money is no object, then a pair of 4-drive RAID0 boxes with 1TB enterprise class drives in them, mirrored to each other, would maybe be the pinnacle of data performance with redundancy.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Per post 73, and since I only had a little under 600G of data loaded, I decided to go ahead and reformat the DROBO to 16TB.

A FWIW piece of information: I figured if I pulled the drives and rearranged them when the unit was off, it would screw it up enough to cause them to call for the reformat automatically. Wrong. On boot, it detected some "inexplicable" errors and sent me a message it was rebuilding the data! (And that it was going to take 6 hours to do it.)

Anyway, using the DROBO software I did a hard reformat and selected the 16TB option. That took three or four minutes and then I had a 16TB volume sitting on my desktop according to my OS. (Note to Mac users, IGNORE the OSX "Initialize Drive" command --- that comes up part way through the DROBO software format process but goes away once DROBO finishes.)

First point: This time I had three drives in from the start and it took about 3 hours to move the data over, or about 50MB/s sustained transfer rate over the FW800 port. So three drives is definitely faster than two in any case.

So, how did moving to the 16TB partition affect boot time? The good news is very marginally. Total boot time now from power off to being able to pull data off is less than 90 second; maybe 20 seconds longer than the 4TB partition took. I'll rarely boot it, so for me this is a trivial concern against the convenience of only having one volume to manage over the foreseeable lifetime of this product.

Cheers,
 

David K

Workshop Member
Good news Jack... if and when my unit arrives I'll do the 16TB format. For those who are thinking of getting one of these units any time soon.... be prepared to wait longer than the lead time indicated on their website. I ordered mine 14 days ago (when the backorder time frame indicated 5 days) and it still hasn't shipped :(
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
From playing with the Drobolator it seems like the best strategy is to upgrade drives at least in pairs. If I have three 500GB drives and add a fourth 1TB drive, only 500GB of the 1TB one will be used. Presumably because it has nowhere to mirror the other half. Another side effect might be that speed becomes variable; with 2x500GB and 2x1TB is seems like there's essentially two speed layers: one consisting of the first 500GB, which is spread across four drives (3/4 data and 1/4 parity), and one 500GB layer which is spread across two drives (1/2 data and 1/2 parity). The half of the 1TB drives that simply mirror one another is, I'm sure, not going to run at full tilt. So at least upgrade in pairs, preferably all four for performance.

So what I've done is bought 4x500GB drives (for $300) for 1.4TB of usable capacity. When it fills up I'll see if I can get 4x1TB for $300 to double the capacity, and simply swap all four out.

Got the drives sitting here... waiting for the Drobo itself. Lead was 5 days, but now is posted as 7 days, so... who knows.

Got the DroboShare already though, as it was available for immediate shipment. It only uses USB however, so is not likely to get more than 30MB/s or so, assuming their software can make good use of it. The good news about USB is it'll be easy to unplug the DroboShare and hook up the storage itself directly to a computer.
 

David K

Workshop Member
Well my unit finally shipped on July 31st, a bit over two weeks (17 days to be precise) after placing my order. Lead time was indicated at 5 days when I placed the order. Should be in next week and I'll post a follow up.
 

David K

Workshop Member
My Drobo arrived this morning and I began the installation process. This was not without it's challenges so I thought I'd share the experience. No problem installing the software, pretty straightforward. In this context Jack had suggested not having the Drobo automatically check for updates so I followed his advice. Upon plugging in my three available 1TB hard drives I wound up with solid red lights... not good. Got an error message indicating that too many hard drives had been removed. Tried a bunch of silly things like removing them and rearranging their order... that wasn't it. Called Drobo support but they weren't open yet so went thru the user manual and read about wiping the drives clean by disconnecting power, inserting a paper clip in the back of the unit, turning on power and holding the clip in place for about 30 secs. That did the trick. That brought me to the format option of the Drobo Dashboard. Selected 16 TB and waited about 5 minutes but got an error message at the end of that process that said Drobo couldn't partition it. Opened Disk Utility and selected Erase... waited till that was done and voila the Drobo is now on my desktop and in the process of what's estimated to be 10 hours of copying. All's well that ends well but it wasn't entirely plug and play. BTW, my drives were previously used so this may not occur if you use new ones.
 
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