Can DroboPro be used for Home folder?

[Abbas]

I have a Mac Mini. I replaced the internal drive with an OCZ SSD but because of its limited capacity, I had a Seagate Free Agent 1TB drive connected through Firewire 800 that was used for Home folder for myself and my wife. The Free Agent drive died last week. Luckily, Time Machine made a backup of everything on a USB drive connected to Airport Extreme so the data is safe.

At the moment, I have two options. One is to use my 2.5" external 320GB USB drive as a replacement for the Seagate. I dread this will be too slow coming from a 3.5"/7200RPM drive connected with Firewire 800.

The second option is that I have a Drobo Pro connected to another Mac on the Network as an iSCSI device. That Mac is powered on 24/7. Can I use the Drobo as a Home Folder for my Users? With Gigabit Ethernet and RAID, it should be plenty fast. But I'm not sure how to direct Home Folders to it. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Darth.Titan]

A home folder located on a network volume will introduce quite a bit of lag, especially if it's on a Drobo. Drobos are built for redundancy, not speed. Add that to the latency of accessing it over a network (even gigabit) and you'll get slower performance than a local drive. Probably not unusably so, but it's not something I'd choose to do.

However, what you want to do is possible. Personally I'd run some comparison tests between using the local USB2 drive you mentioned versus the network Drobo drive before committing.

 

[Techhie]

A home folder located on a network volume will introduce quite a bit of lag, especially if it's on a Drobo. Drobos are built for redundancy, not speed. Add that to the latency of accessing it over a network (even gigabit) and you'll get slower performance than a local drive. Probably not unusably so, but it's not something I'd choose to do.

However, what you want to do is possible. Personally I'd run some comparison tests between using the local USB2 drive you mentioned versus the network Drobo drive before committing.

You will be sorely disappointed with the speed of the Drobo compared to the SATA you are used to. Like he said, it's made for RAID backup and storage, not for a main drive.

 

[Abbas]

*sigh*

I guess its over to a 5400RPM/2.5"/USB drive until I gather some funds for a new firewire 800 drive.

Any recommendations? The Seagate died in a little over a year so thats one route I'm definitely not going