Drobo Announces New 4-Bay Gen3 with USB 3.0, Enhanced Time Machine Support

[paulrbeers]

As we've said, it's a nice solution, but not what the Drobo, G-Speed ES, Sonnet and Caldigit enclosures were built for.

We've? Who's we've? You're the only person arguing with me on this....

So what are these other enclosures built for? Redundancy? Raid 1 gives you redundancy. The ability to hold mulitple drives, the Mediasonic/Sans Digital/Vantec enclosures do that. Allow you to access your data at faster rates, done RAID 1 gives you 2x read speed (which is almost 400MB/s if using modern drives which is faster than any Drobo).....

The other issue we have here, is that G-Speed ES, Sonnet, and Caldigit offer full speed (or close to it) in their enclosures. I've never seen anyone report better than 200MB/s on their Drobo... You can't even compare a Drobo to one of those.

 

[macduke]

Download less porn! ;-)

I'm a web, app and print designer, photographer, and gamer. Lots of RAW files, 1080p footage, game captures and installs, huge HDR panoramic stitched PSDs, app mockups, illustrations, scanned sketches, etc. Since my first child was born last month I keep taking tons of photos and videos of her. Things are quickly spiraling out of control.

I don't understand why someone would archive pornography.

 

[Digital Skunk]

We've? Who's we've? You're the only person arguing with me on this....

So what are these other enclosures built for? Redundancy? Raid 1 gives you redundancy. The ability to hold mulitple drives, the Mediasonic/Sans Digital/Vantec enclosures do that. Allow you to access your data at faster rates, done RAID 1 gives you 2x read speed (which is almost 400MB/s if using modern drives which is faster than any Drobo).....

The other issue we have here, is that G-Speed ES, Sonnet, and Caldigit offer full speed (or close to it) in their enclosures. I've never seen anyone report better than 200MB/s on their Drobo... You can't even compare a Drobo to one of those.

Now, I don't know about the Meidasonic and Sans Digital bays, but I know that RAID enclosures I've used can't:

- Repartition on the fly
- Expand on the fly without rebuilding
- Reorder drives on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any size drive without defaulting to smallest drive size
- Use any drive without buying from the vendor
- Move drives from one enclosure to the next without rebuilding
- Change RAID configs and rebuild on the fly
- Remove drives from enclosure and rebuild on the fly while still pulling 150-200mb/s and not drop frames in Premiere Pro.

Now as far as USB 2 and 3 are concerned . . . . I can't pull a test on the fly. Some reviews say the 4-bay pulls 200 easy some say it doesn't, but that's the issue you're going to have if you mix and match drives.

The advantage of getting any drive over the run of the mill Korean hand me down is the support, and the knowledge that you aren't getting a grab bag of parts.

Again, I am no Drobo fanboy, I've got about 7 different brands of enclosures and 4 different brands of HDDs/SSDs in my various kits, but the end user is going to be the one that causes most of the trouble they'll have with a product, and there are far better solutions that give far better results than San Digital and Synology and Drobo . . . . you just gotta pay for em.

 

[paulrbeers]

Now, I don't know about the Meidasonic and Sans Digital bays, but I know that RAID enclosures I've used can't:

- Repartition on the fly
- Expand on the fly without rebuilding
- Reorder drives on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any size drive without defaulting to smallest drive size
- Use any drive without buying from the vendor
- Move drives from one enclosure to the next without rebuilding
- Change RAID configs and rebuild on the fly
- Remove drives from enclosure and rebuild on the fly while still pulling 150-200mb/s and not drop frames in Premiere Pro..

See here's where you keep failing....

The point of using "cheap" 4 bay drive enclosures is that they AREN'T RAID ENCLOSURES. The whole point is to use OSX's Built-in SOFTWARE RAID 1 which means you can do the following:
- Repartition on the fly
- Reorder drives on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any drive without buying from the vendor
- Move drives from one enclosure to the next without rebuilding
- Change RAID configs and rebuild on the fly (although limited to RAID 0 and 1)
- Remove drives from enclosure and rebuild on the fly while still pulling 150-200mb/s and not drop frames in Premiere Pro.

The ONLY advantage to using Drobo is:
- Expand on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any size drive without defaulting to smallest drive size

And I've ready stated those are the ONLY advantages to Drobo.... I've already stated of the above examples which ones can and can't be done.

 

[kaltsasa]

I retired my 2nd Gen Drobo a few months ago for a Synology NAS DS1512+.
The drobo 2nd Gen has always been slow, about 12 MB/s under USB and
maybe a squeek over 20 MB/s on FW800. I know another guy who has a 2nd
Gen Drobo his tests out almost identical, I don't think I had a lemon,
I think were just that slow.

I've used a Drobo Pro and a couple Drobo Ns over the years at work as well. At the times we got them, they were probably the best solution for the need.

I typically was having CCC make nightly backups of all my drives to the
Drobo. One clocks in at 1.2 TB, One clocks in at 1.4 TB, and one clocks
in at 700GB.

Given how slow the drobo is I thought I would do a test restore to
another machine, turns out I'd be waiting days to get back up and running should I have a drive failure. Some good that would be. Piddled around a bit
and settled on a Synology, they are well supported and have some great
features for building out additional storage. I wouldn't say they for
everybody, I'd probably suggest a QNAP device over a synology for most
folks.

My drobo was in use for 5 years, I've never regretted the purchase but as I've moved from 500 gig drives to 2TB drives in it, it would take me days to restore from my backups. It was just time to retire it. All things considered 5 years is a good run for any modern piece of computing equipment.

They are dead simple for the layman but for anyone with a modicum of
computer skill I'd go with a different storage solution like a QNAP.

The thing to remember about Drobo is that in 2007 the market was a different place. There wasn't a plethora of reasonably priced consumer/prosumer multidrive storage devices or NAS devices. In 2014 the value proposition is different. There's dozens of devices on the market. Drobo is still dead simple, and much faster than they used to be, but you might find yourself getting out grown soon. In 2007 it was pretty cut and dry, Drobo was the multi drive device.

tl;dr The Drobo Value proposition is not clear cut in 2014 vs. 2007/2008

 

[kastorff]

Got a Drobo 4 bay 2nd generation model about 3 years ago. No problems, works as expected via a FW800 connection. Since it's used exclusively for local backups, I don't have any issues with throughput.

 

[kaltsasa]

Got a Drobo 4 bay 2nd generation model about 3 years ago. No problems, works as expected via a FW800 connection. Since it's used exclusively for local backups, I don't have any issues with throughput.

Are you saying your 2nd gen drobo can sustain more than 25 MB/s on large transfers on FW800? Because that has never been my experience, with multiple 2nd gen units. Or just that you're satisfied with the throughput? I mean I was satisfied for years, but as my storage needs grew if I ever had a failure it would have been prohibitive to actually restore from the Drobo with 2 TB drives.

Would you be willing to go grab AJA System Test and test the throughput of your 2nd Gen drobo? I'm genuinely curious to have some more data on how fast these actually were.

 

[kastorff]

Are you saying your 2nd gen drobo can sustain more than 25 MB/s on large transfers on FW800?

No. Did I write that?

Would you be willing to go grab AJA System Test and test the throughput of your 2nd Gen drobo? I'm genuinely curious to have some more data on how fast these actually were.

Nope. Not selling Drobos, just adding my experience to a thread where a lot of people are bad mouthing the product. My experience has been positive, even dealing with customer support.

 

[isomorphic]

Previous Drobos did not support FileVault, due to the way that the device snoops the HFS+ filesystem to support thin provisioning. I haven't read anything so far which suggests that this device is any different. FileVault is a requirement for me, so I cannot buy a Drobo unit.

As others have pointed out, you can get hardware RAID 5 in a four-disk chassis from e.g. Sans Digital for just over $200. And that supports FileVault, TimeMachine, etc.

The other thing that scares me about Drobo is the proprietary on-disk format that others have mentioned. Other hardware RAID vendors use proprietary formats, but some use the Linux md format. I've specifically asked a Drobo engineer for an offline rescue utility e.g. that you can cold-boot into from a USB stick, that would let you rescue data on individual drives connected via other means (assuming your Drobo fails). He thought this was a good idea, but it is up to Drobo management to actually develop such a support tool.

 

[kaltsasa]

No. Did I write that?



Nope. Not selling Drobos, just adding my experience to a thread where a lot of people are bad mouthing the product. My experience has been positive, even dealing with customer support.

Hey man, I was just curious how you would define "issue with throughput". Because I've heard both ways over the years. "my drobo is the slowest thing I've ever used" "My drobo is super fast and I edit video on it" But nobody ever posts hard numbers of what the are actually getting out of it. And I've nary run into anyone who is like me, sort of ambivalent about them. In my experience, with 2TB WD Red drives or 500GB WD Green drives I've never been able to get it to sustain better than 25 MB/s. Half that on USB. A buddy's runs same. When I wasn't backing up 2+TB of data this wasn't an issue. The DroboPro I used ran about 65 MB/s, a Drobo FS about the same. Drobo 5N I setup with an mSATA card ran 80MB/s.

I've never bad mouthed them. I've never had an issue with support either, when the DroboPro at work failed they cross shipped a new one and walked me through the startup procedure with the old drives.

The internet removes the emotional nuances of in-person speech. I wasn't acting in accusatory tone. I was just curious as to the actual numbers of how your 2nd Gen drobo performs. Everyone complains (or praises) without any data for the rest of us to analyze. Like I said, I've never regretted the purchase and it was in use for 5+ years. In 2008 there really wasn't anything like it. But in 2014 we've got a lot more options on the table. The thing main Drobo still has going for it is they are dead simple to setup.

----------

As others have pointed out, you can get hardware RAID 5 in a four-disk chassis from e.g. Sans Digital for just over $200. And that supports FileVault, TimeMachine, etc.

I've used the OWC Mercury Elite Pro a couple times for a couple projects. If all you need is a Hardware RAID I really like those. They are bloody fast and rock solid. (If anyone is curious as to why I get to play with so many network devices I'm the Macintosh Administrator for a Research Hospital, lots of different projects going on)

 

[kaltsasa]

Download less porn! ;-)

I respectfully refuse.

 

[Digital Skunk]

See here's where you keep failing....

The point of using "cheap" 4 bay drive enclosures is that they AREN'T RAID ENCLOSURES. The whole point is to use OSX's Built-in SOFTWARE RAID 1 which means you can do the following:
- Repartition on the fly
- Reorder drives on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any drive without buying from the vendor
- Move drives from one enclosure to the next without rebuilding
- Change RAID configs and rebuild on the fly (although limited to RAID 0 and 1)
- Remove drives from enclosure and rebuild on the fly while still pulling 150-200mb/s and not drop frames in Premiere Pro.

The ONLY advantage to using Drobo is:
- Expand on the fly without rebuilding
- Use any size drive without defaulting to smallest drive size

And I've ready stated those are the ONLY advantages to Drobo.... I've already stated of the above examples which ones can and can't be done.

But software RAIDs are the worse kind. I would never recommend a user rely on OS based RAIDs. There's no reliability in them, especially in RAID 1.

Having the RAID config limited to 0 and 1 is another advantage of the Drobo.

And as I've said and linked to, the Drobo gets at best 140 mb/s depending on drives. I've gotten 100 mb/s easy on a 2nd Gen S over FW800 with WD Green drives.

 

[randian]

But software RAIDs are the worse kind. I would never recommend a user rely on OS based RAIDs. There's no reliability in them.

The creators of ZFS would like a word with you.

 

[paulrbeers]

But software RAIDs are the worse kind. I would never recommend a user rely on OS based RAIDs. There's no reliability in them, especially in RAID es.

Officially you have proven you have no idea what you are talking about.... I don't know where to begin especially since we are talking about RAID 1 which is simply a matter of reading and writing to multiple disks (no parity bits to calculate). Maybe you should speak to the Freenas guys, or Windows Home Server, or ZFS folks just to name a few....

 

[OmegaRed1723]

I love/hate my two Drobos. They're both 2nd generation 4-bay models connected via FW800. On the one hand they are dead simple to use, and for bulk storage of media read/write speeds don't really matter all that much. But the rebuild speed of the older models is atrocious. I literally just finished swapping in 3 new 4TB drives in one of them; each rebuild took roughly 140 hours. This means the entire array—with over 8TB of data—was unprotected for nearly 18 days. The data also gets backed up to a couple of 4TB external drives so a drive failure wouldn't have been catastrophic, but it has made me think about moving to a different setup in the future. I will certainly look at this new model, but will remain skeptical until I see some real-world use cases.

 

[bwillwall]

OMG someone didnt like theirs, so lets poo on the company.

I own 2, ordered a 5D on Monday. Never had an issue. I have 3 friends that have them, and never an issue either.

Lets all hang them...

omg one person likes theirs so they must be perfect huh?

 

[Digital Skunk]

about RAID 1 which is simply a matter of reading and writing to multiple disks (no parity bits to calculate). ....

Which means everything you say and this conversation moot. Once you put three drives in the Drobo it's at RAID 5 with parity.

So like I said, you're trying to compare Apples to Oranges while mentioning how you don't like fruit.

Oh, and let me know when ZFS actually hits the Mac officially, since it was mentioned twice and still has no bearing on real world usage of a Drobo from users that want a stable reliable system.

----------

The creators of ZFS would like a word with you.

I am sure they have bigger problems to take care of.

 

[paulrbeers]

Which means everything you say and this conversation moot. Once you put three drives in the Drobo it's at RAID 5 with parity.

So like I said, you're trying to compare Apples to Oranges while mentioning how you don't like fruit.



Oh, and let me know when ZFS actually hits the Mac officially, since it was mentioned twice and still has no bearing on real world usage of a Drobo from users that want a stable reliable system.

----------



I am sure they have bigger problems to take care of.

Seriously you must have a hard time comprehending.... In all my examples I pointed out how a simple enclosure using RAID 1 with larger hard drives is cheaper than RAID 5 with smaller drives by the time you factor in savings of the higher cost of drives is more than offset by the cost of the enclosure AND is much more "portable" since it can be moved to ANY enclosure. I'm trying very hard not to get into name calling, but it's clear you haven't been paying attention.

Oh and ZFS is very much alive on the Mac via 3rd party tools. Just because Apple hasn't implemented it natively doesn't mean there aren't a vast number of Mac users using it....
https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/

Just because almighty Apple doesn't include it in their OS doesn't make it any less "official".... With that logic then I guess no one should use ANY 3rd party Applications, hardware, System Tools etc on a Mac eh?

 

[iPadPublisher]

oooh USB 3. Ground breaking.

After the problems I had with DROBO I'll never deal with that company ever again. Off'd the piece of junk on eBay and never looked back.

Synology has done me well since then.

 

[kaltsasa]

I will certainly look at this new model, but will remain skeptical until I see some real-world use cases.

In my experience they have consistently gotten faster each revision and new model release, but as I've said before, theres so many options on the market now.

My 2nd gen served it's purpose, but when I replaced the 500s with 2TB drives the amount of time to restore from a backup was staggering. The Synology box I got is probably overkill for my needs but it's fast, stable, and has way more options than Drobo. I mean I've got Crashplan running right on the box! How sweet is that.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Seriously you must have a hard time comprehending.... In all my examples I pointed out how a simple enclosure using RAID 1 with larger hard drives is cheaper than RAID 5 with smaller drives by the time you factor in savings of the higher cost of drives is more than offset by the cost of the enclosure AND is much more "portable" since it can be moved to ANY enclosure. I'm trying very hard not to get into name calling, but it's clear you haven't been paying attention.

Oh and ZFS is very much alive on the Mac via 3rd party tools. Just because Apple hasn't implemented it natively doesn't mean there aren't a vast number of Mac users using it....
https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/

Just because almighty Apple doesn't include it in their OS doesn't make it any less "official".... With that logic then I guess no one should use ANY 3rd party Applications, hardware, System Tools etc on a Mac eh?

Which is fine, but we were never arguing that point. This all started with you asking why someone would get a Drobo over the other options.

We got started talking, and you digressed into mentioning why some other product that serves some other purpose is better than the Drobo which server an entirely different purpose.

Then you mention claims that I've rebuffed with proof, instead of just anecdotal evidence.

You can resort to name calling if you'd like, but that's not because I don't comprehend, I understand fully well . . . . . as I've said, you're arguing Apples and Oranges while standing the meat section.

Lastly, it's not that ZFS is 3rd party, again, I am not talking about tinkering or IT wet dreams, I am talking solid performance in the real world . . . . and no one would want to build a 48TB multiple redundancy DAS RAID with software RAID . . . unless their work was just not important.

Again, bringing up RAID 1 performance vs RAID 5 performance is moot. RAID 1 will obviously be faster, but you're not going to tell anyone with half a brain let alone full knowledge of the industries these are marketed for that an off the shelf Taiwan hand me down is going to be more reliable than:

- CalDigit
- G-Technology
- Sonnet
- Pegasus
- Drobo
- LaCie
- Facilis
- Avid
etc. etc. that all use RAID 5, hardware RAID controllers and NO ZFS 3rd party, software plugin to get their filesystems up to spec.

 

[poloponies]

It's obvious that some people will never buy a Drobo no matter what, just like some people will never buy a Mac or a (fill in whatever). As a Drobo owner (both at my home and at my office) it's given me great reliable service and it fits my needs. To get an updated one with a better processor, battery back-up and better speed (that I can instantly migrate my drives to) is a no-brainer for me. For what it's worth, I have several colleagues who also own Drobos with no complaints.

 

[Yahooligan]

I just wanted to follow up here with my experience with the Areca 5026.

HOLY !@#. I couldn't be happier. Ok, maybe if it were a little more quiet but it's not bad. A little louder than my Synology DS1511+ was.

Before I ordered the Areca, I decided to give a $350 Dyconn Quartz 5-bay USB 3.0 HW RAID enclosure a try. Miserable. Barely over 200MB/s with all 5 bays full and RAID 5. And that was purely sequential read/write with no other I/O. Throw anything random at it and it falls on its face, performs worse than a single USB3 HDD.

I was hesitant to go with the Areca 5026 because it's "only" 4 bays and I really wanted 5, but the choices were 4 or 8 and the 8 was more than I wanted to spend.

So, I put 4x3TB Seagate Barracuda drives into the Areca, told it RAID5, 64KB stripe size, write-back cache (Connected to a UPS).

Blackmagic reports 612MB/s write and 483MB/s read. AJA is also in that ballpark. That...that's faster than my SSD!

Some things to note with the Areca:

The RAID configuration is saved on the disks and NOT the controller. This means that you CAN move all of the drives into a new enclosure in ANY order and it will bring the array back online. The manual specifically mentions this in case there is a fault with the controller and it needs to be replaced. This is great news.

There is also online RAID expansion and conversion, it's just not the same as the Drobo thin provisioning. The RAID expansion would be if you had 2 drives and added a 3rd drive or more, then you could add the new drive(s) to the existing array and expand it out.

I know this thread is about the Drobo, but I wanted to follow up on my previous post(s) as well as address some potential confusion or misinformation about some hardware RAID solutions out there.

 

[danny_w]

Wow! No wonder they can charge so much for those boxes! The cheapest I have seen that box (diskless) is $879 compared to $699 for the Pegasus2 R4. But the RAID 5 speeds that I have seen posted for the R4 are in the 250/350 range, nowhere near the 612/483 speeds that you list (and btw don't you have read and write speeds reversed? read should be faster than write). Anyway one reason that I went with the Drobo over the R4 (besides easier availability) was that the R4's 250-350MB/s speeds didn't seem all that much better than the Drobo's 180-220MB/s speeds for real everyday work. Getting the Drobo cheap didn't hurt either; at $555 it was over $300 cheaper than the Areca.

But man, those speeds!

I just wanted to follow up here with my experience with the Areca 5026.

HOLY !@#. I couldn't be happier. Ok, maybe if it were a little more quiet but it's not bad. A little louder than my Synology DS1511+ was.

Before I ordered the Areca, I decided to give a $350 Dyconn Quartz 5-bay USB 3.0 HW RAID enclosure a try. Miserable. Barely over 200MB/s with all 5 bays full and RAID 5. And that was purely sequential read/write with no other I/O. Throw anything random at it and it falls on its face, performs worse than a single USB3 HDD.

I was hesitant to go with the Areca 5026 because it's "only" 4 bays and I really wanted 5, but the choices were 4 or 8 and the 8 was more than I wanted to spend.

So, I put 4x3TB Seagate Barracuda drives into the Areca, told it RAID5, 64KB stripe size, write-back cache (Connected to a UPS).

Blackmagic reports 612MB/s write and 483MB/s read. AJA is also in that ballpark. That...that's faster than my SSD!

Some things to note with the Areca:

The RAID configuration is saved on the disks and NOT the controller. This means that you CAN move all of the drives into a new enclosure in ANY order and it will bring the array back online. The manual specifically mentions this in case there is a fault with the controller and it needs to be replaced. This is great news.

There is also online RAID expansion and conversion, it's just not the same as the Drobo thin provisioning. The RAID expansion would be if you had 2 drives and added a 3rd drive or more, then you could add the new drive(s) to the existing array and expand it out.

I know this thread is about the Drobo, but I wanted to follow up on my previous post(s) as well as address some potential confusion or misinformation about some hardware RAID solutions out there.

 

[Yahooligan]

Wow! No wonder they can charge so much for those boxes! The cheapest I have seen that box (diskless) is $879 compared to $699 for the Pegasus2 R4. But the RAID 5 speeds that I have seen posted for the R4 are in the 250/350 range, nowhere near the 612/483 speeds that you list (and btw don't you have read and write speeds reversed? read should be faster than write). Anyway one reason that I went with the Drobo over the R4 (besides easier availability) was that the R4's 250-350MB/s speeds didn't seem all that much better than the Drobo's 180-220MB/s speeds for real everyday work. Getting the Drobo cheap didn't hurt either; at $555 it was over $300 cheaper than the Areca.



But man, those speeds!

Nope, speeds aren't reversed. The AJA graphs tell the tale, I believe the higher read speeds shown by Blackmagic are due to higher initial write speeds due to the cache on the RAID controller. Once the cache is full the write speeds drop down to about 460MB/sec or so. I'll post up the screen caps of both tests later today. Definitely very happy with the results, though.