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Drobo or promise 2?
- Thread starter raw911
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I think the T3 looks great as well. But are you just trusting them that it will be quiet? It has a little fan, which concerns me a little.
Did you also consider the G Tech G Drive EV? Having portable hot swappable drives seems sweet. Did the storage capacity and flexibility of the T3 sway your decision?
I'm deciding between the T3 and G Drive.
Personally I went with the Drobo the second time I purchased a Thunderbolt enclosure, I did this to avoid the massively overpriced storage that Promise shoves down your throat.
Happy with both solutions, the Drobo is by far the better deal in my opinion, both are quiet enough and preform fast.
Happy with both solutions, the Drobo is by far the better deal in my opinion, both are quiet enough and preform fast.
apple now has a diskless version of the promise pegasus enclosures, cisco. Showed up in the store at the same time as the nMP, and so far the apple store is the ONLY place you can find a pegasus that isn't pre-populated with drives. $699 for it.
I've got 2 pegasi running on mac mini servers at work (one's an apple software update server, the other is a casper JSS with the casper distribution point housed on the pegasus) and they've been super fast and rock solid.
I've got 2 pegasi running on mac mini servers at work (one's an apple software update server, the other is a casper JSS with the casper distribution point housed on the pegasus) and they've been super fast and rock solid.
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I'm going with a 4 bay pegasus2. Too many people have recommended against the Drobo for me to be comfortable with it. A friend has the 4 bay pegasus1 and he's been pretty happy with it.
I buying the diskless version as I have a couple 3TB drives bought in the past year. I'll add 2 more 3TB drives and I'm good to go.
I just took a look at the G Drive EV. It looks very nice, but only 2TB for the same cost as 6TB in the T3.
G Drive EV review:
http://www.macworld.com/article/2047746/g-dock-ev-review-thunderbolt-speed-compromised-by-docks-slow-hard-drives.html
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Can you boot from it? Is it quiet?
http://www.macworld.com/article/2047746/g-dock-ev-review-thunderbolt-speed-compromised-by-docks-slow-hard-drives.html
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Can you boot from it? Is it quiet?
Noise Level: 17.0 dBA
It says in the specs. That's whisper quiet.
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G Drive EV works with only G tech's drives where I can plug all my drives with the Caldigit. That's a big no no for me. I have around 30 HDD's lying around, with data scattered to all of them. So I need a system where I can swap drives in and out constantly.
I have a Drobo gen 2 and it's painful slow under fw800. I use it just as a time machine archival box.
If you look at any promise enclosure reviews you'll see they are consistently the fastest external enclosures you can get spanking the others in I/O performance. (Drobo, gtech... )
It really comes down to your price vs. performance needs/wants. You can setup a Drobo mini for cheaper, but you'll get about 1/3 the read/write speed of the promise. Gtech is somewhere in the middle of all this I think - not the cheapest, and not the best performer.
I am hoping working from a promise2 feels basically no different then working off the internal pcie ssd.
If you look at any promise enclosure reviews you'll see they are consistently the fastest external enclosures you can get spanking the others in I/O performance. (Drobo, gtech... )
It really comes down to your price vs. performance needs/wants. You can setup a Drobo mini for cheaper, but you'll get about 1/3 the read/write speed of the promise. Gtech is somewhere in the middle of all this I think - not the cheapest, and not the best performer.
I am hoping working from a promise2 feels basically no different then working off the internal pcie ssd.
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I've got a drobo 5d as an archive (it does around 230mb/s) and a Pegasus r6 for actual work at 700mb/s . I'd say it depends on your needs! the drobo is way better than those old 2nd gen drobos, but still slow compared to a Pegasus.
Damn now I'm tempted to sell my drobo and get this empty enclosure from the apple store...
Damn now I'm tempted to sell my drobo and get this empty enclosure from the apple store...
Its not quiet but I wouldn't say its noisy either if that makes sense.
I hear the fans going all the time, sometimes they ramp up and it does get louder.
Tbh, I've all but blocked out the sound until you mentioned it. My Qnap is just about as loud fan wise but the drives are even louder.
I've been eyeing up the T3 but I just can't bring myself to believe that. Maybe it means at idle?
I like drobo more than promise but unfortunately promise is the only one offering thunderbolt 2 disk.
Probably at idle, but the fan is running still, at idle. So if that's the fan noise, drives won't be adding that much more.
It may be a while before we see any drobos with TB2. We just started seeing more devices for thunderbolt and now they're moving on to TB2 - I'm not sure how quickly companies will be embracing that.
The drobo mini is decent, I was getting fantastic performance numbers at first but they settled down to what others were getting, at least in reviews. Since I'm using 2" laptop drives I think that is a major bottleneck.
The other drawback is the fact that drobo uses its own propriety RAID setup. They're not alone because Synology does this as well.
As I posted I'm happy with the drobo but its not a perfect device.
Anyone know if the Pegasus2 will work with my existing WD Red 4TB drives? They aren't on the compatibility list.
When it comes to RAID. (especially high performance Thunderbolt arrays).. I personally would only use drives on a compatibility list. Pegasus uses a good RAID controller to get the performance up... and they generally need drives with specific characteristics (such as QoS and queue depth). A lower performance RAID device (ex: a NAS) is often less dependent upon which drive is used... especially those that allow mix-n-match of different drives such as Synology and Drobo. They have their own drawbacks... but allow a variety of drives.
I have a Pegasus R4 that I bought stock. At the time, it was the only option available. Now I understand that they sell bare enclosures. It will likely be the last RAID box that I ever buy, as I am not a huge fan of RAID for consumers. At the enterprise level, RAID works fine. However, most consumers are not going to by matched spares etc.. like an enterprise would do to keep them running over time.
For just sheer capacity... I would probably recommend single spindle drives attached to an OSX server with a good backup plan.
For anything requiring performance (ex: databases etc)... I would recommend just using SSDs. HDDs will provide only about 200-300 IOPs. An SSD will probably give you 20,000 - 30,000. That is a 100X speed improvement. Very noticable.
/Jim
I've been looking into this for a little while. I am moving soon and need to consolidate my accumulation of drives and media. One looming issue with current prosumer Drobo products is that they do not allow you to configure them in standard raid arrays like Raid 5,6 and 10. They use a proprietary "Beyond Raid" instead. This means if your array's controller fails, you need another same or similar model to read the drives.
I prefer to have arrays that can be migrated or recovered without proprietary soultions.
I'm also not too fond of La Cie, as they only support using their drives in their enclosures (or very very specific models in those raid boxes).
Besides, their drives have terrible thermal behavior and heat death is common.
I prefer to have arrays that can be migrated or recovered without proprietary soultions.
I'm also not too fond of La Cie, as they only support using their drives in their enclosures (or very very specific models in those raid boxes).
Besides, their drives have terrible thermal behavior and heat death is common.