The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

DROBO Storage device

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Drobo is fine if you have a bunch of mismatched drives laying around collecting dust but its not what you buy if starting from scratch and going for the latest/greatest HDs. Drobos are going to be slow no matter what the interface, its inherent to their design and its expensive doing it your way. You're much better off with a high quality, high speed e-sata RAID from LaCie or other competing manufacturers. Drobo's bottleneck is copying large files over, which is going to be the case if you're going to use it as your main image server, specially in your case David and the type of files you're dealing with. Setting up a RAID array is very simple, almost as simple as formatting a disk. You open he software, decide on the RAID type, there's a clear and detailed explanation of each type with the software, then click format, that's it, the rest is invisible.
As David K said, he was looking for simplicity which DROBO is; just add or replace any drive when you need to. In a regular RAID 5 array you have to purchase the main box which can be more expensive than DROBO, but even at the same price you need to buy all new IDENTICAL drives plus a back-up drive or two, and then then be willing to learn how to manage it properly... The way I see it, these are two different solutions for differing philosophies of storage: DROBO smart raid for simple mass storage, regular RAID 5 for optimal performance with mass storage.

Cheers,
 
D

ddk

Guest
As David K said, he was looking for simplicity which DROBO is; just add or replace any drive when you need to. In a regular RAID 5 array you have to purchase the main box which can be more expensive than DROBO, but even at the same price you need to buy all new IDENTICAL drives plus a back-up drive or two, and then then be willing to learn how to manage it properly... The way I see it, these are two different solutions for differing philosophies of storage: DROBO smart raid for simple mass storage, regular RAID 5 for optimal performance with mass storage.

Cheers,
As I mentioned in the post you can buy a ready made solution like the ones from LaCie which come with the appropriate controller and software, just plug it in open the software, choose the RAID type to format the drives and you're done, I don't see any more complicated than the Drobo. You still have to install the Drobo software, and let it format the drives the same way, I don't see the LaCie arrays any more complicated than the Drobo. Price wise there's really nothing between them if you have to buy al new drives for Drobo. The really big, Big, BIg,BIG difference is speed, the two aren't comparable when accessing or writing files to them. Don't get me wrong I have a couple of Drobos and they're great for incremental backups, but I bought them because of all the spare drives that I had sitting around, otherwise I would have bought more LaCie raids, a lot faster, more versatile and just as secure.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
As I mentioned in the post you can buy a ready made solution like the ones from LaCie which come with the appropriate controller and software, just plug it in open the software, choose the RAID type to format the drives and you're done, I don't see any more complicated than the Drobo.
The difference is the work you have to go through when a drive on your normal RAID fails...

Regardless, I agree it is a much tougher decision IF you are buying drives too -- like you, I had a bunch already laying around...
 
D

ddk

Guest
The difference is the work you have to go through when a drive on your normal RAID fails...

Regardless, I agree it is a much tougher decision IF you are buying drives too -- like you, I had a bunch already laying around...
You have a point there Jack, theoretically you can replace the failed drive with another orphaned one of any size and Drobo would take care of the rest. I need to test it out and see what is really involved. Still, do you see your Drobo as a primary image server or a more secure backup?
 

David K

Workshop Member
David, I don't question your expertise in this area which certainly exceeds my own, but notwithstanding the greater speed I might have gotten elsewhere, I do think this is the right product for me. As I'm sure you know, everything is fine until it isn't and that's what concerns me with a RAID setup. Also, since this is simply backup for me, the additional speed that I might have gotten isn't of much concern to me. I'll probably do what Jack is doing and throw in some on hand drives for starters, then buy more as needed. Jack makes a good point about hard drive prices moving in one direction only.
 
D

ddk

Guest
David, I don't question your expertise in this area which certainly exceeds my own, but notwithstanding the greater speed I might have gotten elsewhere, I do think this is the right product for me. As I'm sure you know, everything is fine until it isn't and that's what concerns me with a RAID setup. Also, since this is simply backup for me, the additional speed that I might have gotten isn't of much concern to me. I'll probably do what Jack is doing and throw in some on hand drives for starters, then buy more as needed. Jack makes a good point about hard drive prices moving in one direction only.
My concern was that you were thinking of this as your primary image server and were going to spend a lot money for new highend hds, I just wanted to warn you if that was the case, otherwise it seems like a great product for backups and orphaned drives, but now I have to test that auto rebuild theory...
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
You have a point there Jack, theoretically you can replace the failed drive with another orphaned one of any size and Drobo would take care of the rest. I need to test it out and see what is really involved. Still, do you see your Drobo as a primary image server or a more secure backup?
David, DROBO is my first tier of image back-up. I work by myself and do not need a dedicated image server. My current strategy is:

1) WORKING: a pair of internal drives striped for my current working files, giving me plenty of speed on reads and saves. I am not concerned about the reliability of RAID 0 here as these images are backed up per #2 below;

2) ONSITE BACK-UP: ALL images, current and historical, backed up to an onsite DROBO as current working file back-up and storage for historical images. Note I don't regularly need to access my historical images, so the slower read speeds off the DROBO is not a concern to me;

3) OFFSITE BACK-UP: ALL images backed up to single drives stored offsite, updated monthly or after any significant shoot. Note that these drives get checked and/or replaced periodically, as I funnel newer, higher performance drives into my main system, and migrate the offsite images onto the older drives as they become available.

Note that the DROBO is new to me -- I have NOT owned the earlier model and specifically waited for the FW800 interface. (It is replacing a set of SATA2 and FW external boxes, and I chose DROBO because I had several mixed drives already.) A few of my shooting buddies do use the USB2 versions and are quite satisfied, hence my decision to try the new box. What I'm saying here is the verdict is still out for me. Acoustics, or lack thereof, is of importance to me. The new DROBO is supposed to be very quiet with newer fans and more intelligent control of them; so should be quiet except perhaps on a build or large save where drives heat up and the fans kick into high gear. If the new DROBO is noisy at idle, it's going straight back for a refund -- my working environment is relatively silent right now and I intend to keep it that way. (Of course another nice option is I can buy the NAS attachment for DROBO and move the unit off to my machine closet ;))

Cheers,
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
DROBO unit just arrived!

UPDATE: Loaded 2 1TB disks, plugged it in and let it do its thing. About 30 seconds later I get the dialog on my screen to initialize, so I do, another 20 seconds elapse. I install the Drobo Dashboard software, follow the instructions, register the unit online, disconnect and reconnect Drobo so it can finish the install, all goes fine like clockwork. About 5 minutes spent to get to this point, including the online registration and software/firmware update check (which it didn't need).

I next select about 500G of images and drag them over to the DROBO icon and drop them off. It is chugging away on that task at present, and doing it very QUIETLY :)clap:) I actually have the unit sitting right next to my keyboard as it does this and all I can hear are very soft head-seeks. IOW the box is as quiet at idle as my Mac Pro --- YEAH!

Transfer rates for those curious are running around 33MB/s -- not smoking fast but not horrible either.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Been running about an hour. About every 15 minutes, the fans kick into a slightly higher speed and run for a few minutes, then subside again. At this higher speed, the fans are audible, but not unpleasantly noisy -- still a very quiet box and frankly better than I anticipated. Very impressed so far.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Okay, filled up the 2 @ 1TB drives and added a 3rd 1TB drive to see what would happen. Got a notification it was preparing the new drive and warning me not to remove any drives as it could not protect my data during that period. That lasted about two minutes then everything back to green and normal, except now with an extra TB of storage available. Couldn't have been easier!

It seems the unit is working in the background as I can hear some soft head seeks, so I suspect it is optimizing the data storage across three drives. This procedure has NOT increased heat appreciably and the fan is running at its lowest "essentially silent" speed. Way cool!!!

NOTE: Read speeds were identical to the write speeds of 33MB/s with the two drives in. I will let this 3-drive configuration get fully organized and run a comparative performance test on the three-drive array.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
INTERESTING! With the 3rd drive in, read and write speeds went up to 50MB/s, or roughly a 50% increase. Way cool! Adding a 4th drive now to see if that improves yet again, though I suspect not.
 

David K

Workshop Member
Jack,
Maybe a good idea to post the answer to the question I asked you offline for other potential users to see...
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Jack,
Maybe a good idea to post the answer to the question I asked you offline for other potential users to see...
Good idea David! Here is the exchange:

In response to a question David asked me via email about how the DROBO can be formatted and partitioned, here was my answer:

DROBO formats itself as one large drive. In standard form it will show up as a 2TB volume REGARDLESS of how many or what size drives you place in it. If you place four 1TB drives in it thusly configured, it will show two volumes AFTER you exceed 2TB of data on it -- a 2 and a .8 -- but will spread your data across them automatically. IOW you do NOT have the ability to "partition" DROBO to your liking, for example two 1.4G volumes. You can however add any number of folders you want and let them expand until you run out of room. Next, using the DROBO software, you can format it to show as a 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 TB drive. The advantage is you won't span multiple volumes, but the downside is it takes longer for DROBO to boot, about 1 minute per TB as formated, as it needs to check 4TB of data as opposed to 2. I chose the 4TB option since I plan on leaving it running most of the time anyway and wanted to see it only ever as one volume, so not too concerned about longer boot/check cycles. When/if I replace a 1TB drive with a 2TB drive, then even my format at 4TB will span across multiple volumes. This would require a re-format to 8 or 16TB, but of course all data would be lost on a reformat and need to be rebuilt -- again, another reason I chose the 4TB option at the outset...


On Jul 24, 2008, at 4:00 AM, David Kipper wrote:

This is NOT the way I thought this worked but should still work fine for me... at least I think it should. Let me explore this a bit further. Let's say I start with 2 x 1TB drives and 2x 500 GB drives (in a way this doesn't appear to be an optimal arrangement since the Drobo "reserves" space equal to the largest drive installed so you get less bang for the buck this way).
That is correct, DROBO is going to be most efficient when all drives are equal size, but really doesn't matter that much as you'll see in a minute.

Once I've run out of room I pull out one of the 500 GB drives and replace it with a 1 TB which should give me a true net increase in storage of 500 GB since the "reserved" portion is already maxed out at 1 TB. Have I got this part right ?
Precisely correct. Note that the amount of reserved space is not exactly equal to the largest drive, but close enough for our purposes on estimation.

Now I've run out of room again, substituted another 1 TB for the last 500 GB and run out of room once more.
Yes, and you get the next 500G of space, so you now have 4 @ 1TB drives and a total of 3 TB protected storage.

What happens now... Do I daisy chain more I TB drives in external boxes or substitute a 2 TB drive for one of the 1 TB (I didn't think there was such a thing as a 2 TB drive).
You can daisy-chain in another DROBO for sure, but there likely will be 2TB drives long before you need to do this, and you could pop out a 1 and start replacing them with 2's as your needs grow. The advantage of waiting until you need it, is the larger drives usually command the highest prices per gig of storage when first announced, but drop significantly after a few months. For example, just 6 months ago, 1TB drives were selling for just under $300 while 500G drives were just over $100 --- we would have been far better off using 4@500GB than 2@1TB from a price point of view. Now the 500G drives are around $90 and the 1TB's around $170, so pretty close per gig...

Also, if you need to reformat it at that point where the heck are you going to store the data you've got on your existing drives.
You only need to format the first time you plug it in with at least two drives installed. From there on it will automatically format the new drives you add or replace them.

Does it make any sense to format the Drobo as an 8 or 16TB drive at the get go. Like you I could care less about the boot up since it will likely be running all the time.
This is precisely why I chose 4TB, as I won't hit a full 4TB until I have 2@1TB plus 2@2TB. Replacing 1 of the 4 1TB drives with a single 2TB drive is unfortunately NOT going to get us much total storage gain -- back to the original formula, the total drive space minus your largest drive :) So when we do finally swap in 2 @ 2TB drives (we'll have to do them one at a time and let DROBO build across the first before installing the second) we will have a true, single 4TB volume...

So our format issue will crop up as we add drives beyond that and there is no easy way to reformat once you've started a DROBO unless you have all your data backed up yet again off DROBO. I happen to since I keep redundant single drive copies of all my images stored offsite in case of fire or theft at my main office. However, at that point having data spread across 2 4TB volumes seems like a small issue -- the data is still there and visible, just maybe have to look in two places for it instead of one.

The problem with the boot times is DROBO needs 1 full minute for each TB as formatted. So if you start out formatting as 16TB, then every time you start DROBO after a shut down or power out, it would take 16 minutes to come online even if you only have 2TB of data on it... Hence I felt there was a good balance between volume size and boot times for me at the 4TB setting...

Cheers,
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
I was thinking a rather different approach.

Stay in the sweet spot; I paid $78 for a 500GB Seagate 7200, 16M perpendicular-recording drive. It's reasonably fast, quiet, and cool. There's also a 32M version that's less quiet and cool for about the same price, but for me the minor performance gain wasn't worth having to listen to it for hours on end.

So start with say two of these (for 500GB or so of effective space, I assume). When it's getting full get another sweet-spot drive at 750-1500GB or whatever it might be at that time. Repeat when it gets full again. Now all four slots are occupied.

At this point, whenever it gets full, pull the smallest drive and replace with a sweet spot purchase. The replacement drive is likely going to be 4-8X the size of the one pulled. I assume here that when the larger replacement is inserted it simply rebuilds and incorporates the unused space into the total free pool.

This assumes any one drive gets about 1.5-2 years of service. If the unit fills up faster (it won't in my case, I'm fairly sure of that) it's probably still cheaper to add a second unit when needed and repeat the pattern above, rather than front loading a single unit with the biggest drives available.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Just for giggles, I decided to torture test the DROBO and so saved all of you other curious folks the trouble :D

I had loaded about 500G of images across the three drives per above, then decided this morning, what the heck, before I load any more images I'll just yank a drive and see what happens... I know -- I can be an pretty stupid at times -- but I NEVER follow the axiom, "If it aint broke, don't fix it!" And curious minds HAVE to know!

Well, the answer is DROBO did exactly what it was supposed to do. It sent out a warning a drive was lost with a notification it was rebuilding the data across the two remaining good drives. Here is a screenshot of that message:



Note that it is saying about 4 hours to rebuild... Of course now I start wondering if I can add back in another drive? Doesn't say I can, but doesn't say I can't... Look in the IB and I can't find any reference to this in the instructions or FAQ's. Being the curious soul I am, I figure what the heck again, I've got everything backed up offsite if I screw it up so why not? (About one hour has passed since I grabbed the above screenshot.) So I hold my breath and insert another blank drive and ----- nothing happened. Hmmm... I breathe. Hmmm again, now what? After a minute or so of debating should I pull that drive, the bay lights up and I get a message that DROBO is now rebuilding the data across three drives. Still cautioning me not to remove any drives, essentially identical to the other message other than the time to rebuild has been cut by a few hours (Just like above, three drives are faster than two in this unit -- I assume the difference between RAID1 and RAID5 is working on the rebuilds too.) So in short, this thing appears to do exactly what it claims it will do... Amazing!:


~~~~~~~~


Just for reference, here is a screenshot showing the three healthy drives after the above rebuild:

 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I was thinking a rather different approach.

Stay in the sweet spot; ~SNIP~

At this point, whenever it gets full, pull the smallest drive and replace with a sweet spot purchase. The replacement drive is likely going to be 4-8X the size of the one pulled. I assume here that when the larger replacement is inserted it simply rebuilds and incorporates the unused space into the total free pool.

This assumes any one drive gets about 1.5-2 years of service. If the unit fills up faster (it won't in my case, I'm fairly sure of that) it's probably still cheaper to add a second unit when needed and repeat the pattern above, rather than front loading a single unit with the biggest drives available.
Jan, I think that is a perfectly sound strategy with this unit :thumbs:
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber 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 Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
Hey, what happens when you resize it by adding a drive, from the OS perspective?

Edit: never mind, I see it uses thin provisioning
 
Top