But for god's sake, buy something USB3 lol
Dude, the minute Apple deigns to update their iMac to something better than it is today, I'm all over it. I can't get USB3 without upgrading. Fastest I get is FireWire 800.
But for god's sake, buy something USB3 lol
Yeah.. Drobo's are inherently slow too, they use software raid.. slow slow slow..
What surprises me is it's THAT slow with SSD. Hell, a 4 HDD Disk raid array should be able to nearly match that.. This SSD unit should be pushing 1000 MBs easy..
At that price and poor performance.. .Passsss.
Your comparisons are not accurate though, because this is a four drive enclosure, with an optional 5th mSATA accelerator drive. And according to the Drobo product spec, RAID is available.
Yet with all those capabilities it's not even hitting SATA2 speeds. The mSATA is a caching scheme for the RAID array.
The point you're ignoring is the pitiful performance. 4 x HDDs, let alone 4 x SSDs via Thunderbolt or a PCIe RAID card with or without an mSATA cache is going to perform significantly better than 200Mb/s. The use of SSDs makes it all the more pathetic when there's 4 bay USB 3.0 enclosures that perform better than that for a fraction of the cost.
Whatever, the cache is there to increase performance. The point is, an equivalent array would either need to have the same, or you would need to look for a 5 bay enclosure and use one for a cache device.
I'm not ignoring it, it seems suspiciously low. Makes one wonder if they have mistakenly used the USB3 performance, but that seems like a silly mistake to make.
How is it even possible to achieve that performance with 4 SSDs unless they are set up in a mirror configuration with quadruple redundancy? Which makes no sense, outside perhaps a space shuttle. Point is, you would need to look for a portable 5 bay enclosure, if for nothing else to match it on storage space.
Edit: I have looked at the linked page in the article, the product spec and the data sheet pdf. There is no mention of a hard performance number at all, anywhere, as far I have seen so I wonder where the number in the article comes from?
http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/mini/
http://drobo.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/downloads/products/0520_DroboMini_DS.pdf
Internally, the Mini includes four 2.5-inch drive bays with an optional mSATA Accelerator bay. You can buy the Mini pre-equipped with SSDs or supply your own drives for a custom configuration. The Mini features both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports that support read speeds of 300MB/sec and write speeds of 225MB/sec.
I'll remind you where I got the performance figures from: -
Page 1, comment 1 of this thread!
As for USB 3.0 being the culprit for why it's performing so slowly compared to alternatives. That's not possible because USB 3.0 enclosures perform better with a SINGLE SSD than the Drobo does with 4 of them! Follow the link to barefeats I posted and prove it for yourself.
You can't deny that the Drobo is underperforming for either a Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 device with RAID capabilities and doesn't have a justified price tag.
Duh! Where did they get it from? Not from Drobo it seems, if they did where is it?
I don't know if the cause is that the USB 3 figure has been used, it was just something that came to my mind when I posted the comment. Perhaps more likely it's the performance figure with regular HDDs?
Well, I have not tried this so I can neither deny or confirm it. But the spec cheat mentions an "up to 10x performance increase with the cache drive", which has to be with a single HDD and the cache for it to be 10x, and it would also be above the stated 300MB/s.
You're clutching at straws!
Not one review of this enclosure paints it in a good light for performance, reliability or cost at all whether it has SSDs or HDDs fitted and regardless of the mSATA caching scheme.
Really? Where are the official spec for performance or a benchmark? Do you think it makes sense for a 4 drive RAID to perform worse than a single drive?
The point is 10x a single 2.5" laptop drive is above the stated performance by MacRumors. But I can not vouch for this thing, I have never used it. The point is, the stated performance here is terrible, no need for silly comparisons.
If it's garbage and been proven in countless benchmarks to be bested by far cheaper alternatives with less capabilities (dual drive vs 4 + mSATA etc...) none of the comparisons are remotely silly. This is undeniable.
All I'm asking is a link with the official numbers for this updated model, not your word. The comparisons are silly because they are completely different class of products. At $449 you will not find a significantly cheaper portable RAID with 4/5 drives. If the numbers are correct, then they speak for themselves.
Your tedium is like a stuck record and your "word" would be more valuable because?
There's an easy comparison to the drobo if you want a 4 drive Thunderbolt enclosure. The Pegasus J4:
You'd have to ask the original poster of this thread where they got "their" figures from but if HDD benchmarks with the same enclosure are 101Mb/s with 4 x 750Gb 7200rpm HDDs and the quote in the first post of this thread shows barely twice that with their new SSD-based options, it would seem the boost over it's pitiful HDD performance shows it's pitiful SSD performance too.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/drobo-mini/2/
Have I said that my word would be more valuable? If I thought so, I wouldn't as you, would I? I said that some official numbers would be more valuable.
I'm aware of that. It's comparable unlike the stuff you presented earlier, and of course also in price.
Thanks. Have you come across numbers on the Internet that seems so bad that you doubt they are true, or do you accept anything that is presented to you without hesitation.
With an blinkers-on ego like yours this pointless exchange could go on all day. Yawn...
How is this "new" those mSATA port drobo mini and 5D have been available for ages , if it wasn't for the fact im looking to go from my 2nd gen 4 bay to an 8 bay, id have bought a 5D with mSATA last year !!!
is it JUST the capacity jump of the SSD they are touting ?
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not had an issue with my drobo (touch wood) but both my time capsule and time machine backup to a single 4TB drive have regularly corrupted and required full drive wiping before it could be used again.
as always, i dont treat the drobo as a SAFE place to store files, i still have a crashplan backup of everything on it, and everything that goes onto it.
the drobo is not an excuse to not backup, its just slightly more tolerate to a single disk failure than not at all.
treating any raid as an alternative to good backup practice is inviting disaster sooner or later.