Drobo and Streaming from Airport Extreme = SLOW!

[OrangeSVTguy]

Well I've had this setup for a week or two and it's all working great, except for the speed. Since I put all my media onto my Drobo connected to my Airport Extreme, it's incredibly slow for streaming my HD movies and such.

I'm not looking or was expecting for blazing fast performance, just enough that I can play my media without any lag.

Ran an Xbench test on the HDD and this is what I get below. I would have thought I'd get better out of this setup. I have 3 partitions setup, one for media and the other 2 for TM backups which everything else works great.

Now I'm thinking I should just go for a simple RAID1 setup when I had just a single SATA HDD hooked up the Airport Extreme router via USB and it was great, just couldn't have everything on a single drive.

 

[calderone]

Drobo is about redundancy, not speed.

The reviews and user impressions on the net reflect this sentiment. Needless to say, you picked one of the worst combination for streaming.

 

[blueroom]

If you can return the Drobo get a Synology NAS and drop your drives into that.

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

Drobo is about redundancy, not speed.

The reviews and user impressions on the net reflect this sentiment. Needless to say, you picked one of the worst combination for streaming.

Thanks.

I know I wanted some redundancy but I also wanted decent performance good enough for streaming. Picked the Drobo because of the ease of use and 4 bays. Must haven't read up enough on it for my needs.

I thought I'd get what I needed so I guess I'm gonna have to go with something else. Worked great when I had it connected directly to my MBP via FW800 but that was expected. Thought streaming via Airport Extreme on USB2.0 would have been sufficient. Thanks.

I'll look into the Synology NAS and see what else is out there.

 

[peskaa]

A four-bay Synology NAS will give you RAID redundancy and a better speed than the Drobo - plus more flexibility as well, as the Synology is a NAS rather than a simple HD.

 

[DroboAdmin]

There are many Drobo customers using this exact setup with success.

The FW800 and USB speed on the Drobo are very similar in performance but when using USB and wireless (not only with an AirPort Extreme but other wireless routers as well) there are new variables introduced that could cause such issues that you are experiencing.

When sharing out a USB mass storage device through an AirPort Extreme, performance is generally decreased due to the AirPort having a underpowered CPU that can't handle processing the USB traffic.

See other MacRumors.com articles like the one below that explain this issue...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/332365/


If you need some additional information regarding this setup, please navigate to...

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/67/

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

There are many Drobo customers using this exact setup with success.

The FW800 and USB speed on the Drobo are very similar in performance but when using USB and wireless (not only with an AirPort Extreme but other wireless routers as well) there are new variables introduced that could cause such issues that you are experiencing.

When sharing out a USB mass storage device through an AirPort Extreme, performance is generally decreased due to the AirPort having a underpowered CPU that can't handle processing the USB traffic.

See other MacRumors.com articles like the one below that explain this issue...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/332365/


If you need some additional information regarding this setup, please navigate to...

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/67/

Thanks.

I have had a performance gain. I don't know why but I was able to watch a movie the other night with minimal lag. It would pause a sec every 15 minutes or so it seemed like? Ran XBench again and the scan is higher than before, more than 4x. Also TM backups have sped up too.

I'm currently only using 2x 2TB 7200 RPM drives.