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Wicked1

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 13, 2009
3,283
14
New Jersey
Looking at getting a 4 drive Drobo, just not sure how well it works on a Mac Mini 2010 model with FW800?
 

blevins321

macrumors 68030
Dec 24, 2010
2,768
96
Detroit, MI
I had one, and absolutely hated it. It overheated often because of the lack of sufficient ventilation. Plus it's very slow if you do high-volume work. I was getting slower than single disk USB external speeds out of it. The redundancy is nice, but there are much better choices out there. I personally love my Synology 411j. I wrote a review on it HERE.

Edit: You might get more responses in the Mac Peripherals section. :)
 

PurdueGuy

macrumors regular
Jun 23, 2010
241
2
I have a Drobo v2 and like it. It houses all my iTunes music and other media.

I can read about 2 GB/min off of it (34 MB/sec), which for me is plenty fast. I usually download from iTunes directly to the Drobo, so write speeds aren't as important, b/c the bottleneck is my ISP, not the Drobo interface.

I had Synology CS407 before, and while it was nice, it wasn't HFS+, and was limiting some things I wanted to do. Since I had a Mac Mini already connected to the home theatre, I wanted a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) instead of a NAS again, and this way I can use Slink or MobileMe to jump back quite easily to get anything I might want.
 

Alrescha

macrumors 68020
Jan 1, 2008
2,156
317
I have the v2 as well. I find it to be slow for file-open operations and randomly slow for reading and writing. Using it as an everyday desktop drive makes everything feel sluggish and irritating, so I use mine for archival storage where its speed issues* don't matter to me.

On the data side it has been 100% reliable. I have it on a UPS, so there have been no improper dismounts which I am sure helps. I don't have heat issues, there are 4x1TB Western Digital GreenPower drives in the box.

I also chose the Drobo because I did not want a NAS. I use my network for plenty of other things (A NAS plus streaming with iTunes is especially nuts, as your data ends up traveling over the network twice).

A.

* speed issues: Yes, I can get 35MB/sec out of it. Sometimes. Other times I will be copying a multi-gigabyte file from it and I'm lucky to get 10MB/sec. Just now as a test I tried to copy a 1GB file from the Drobo to /dev/null - 34MB/sec. I tried to copy a second, slightly larger file the same way - 10 MB/sec. I'm sure there's some cool technical explanation, but to the end user it's just unpredictable and annoying.
 
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