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Drobo or......?

R

Resist

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 15, 2008
3,003
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I don't have a backup solution and have wanted something for years. I have several computers, Mac and PC. I have been thinking about a Drobo for the redundancy, but am not sure if it will address my needs. It has to work with my home wireless network that uses a Linksys wireless router, so it can backup all my household computers.

I saw something that said the Drobo was rather slow as wireless backup, but I can't get anyone at the Drobo site to answer my questions to confirm this or not.

I had thought about replacing my Linksys with an Apple Tiime capsule but I really don't need another wireless router and it doesn't have redundancy.

Any suggestions?
 
I took a good hard look at the Drobo a few months ago and decided that although its dead simple to setup, it was just too slow at transfers (forget about over WiFi backup or hosting my movie collection!). I ended up dropping my desire for a backup system at that time, but before I gave up my search I was on the path towards getting a dual HDD SATA enclosure with 2x2Tb drives in it. The G-Tech is what I had my eye on though its price was a bit high :(

Would be best to get yourself an enclosure with eSATA or FW800 on it.
 
Good god not a Drobo. Their "Pro" series might be faster but I had nothing but trouble with my home/office model. I went with a replacement Synology DS411j and I absolutely love it. I wrote about my Drobo troubles HERE and a review about the DS411j HERE.

It quite speedy and includes Time Capsule support without having to do custom sparse bundles. Initial investment if you populate all 4 drive bays would be about $150 more than a 2TB Time Capsule. Figure 350 for the unit, and 4 2TB drives@$75. Total would be about $650 and a new 2TB Time Capsule would be $500. If you put 4 2TB drives into the unit, you'll have 1.86GBx3 actual free space available for use after one drive lost to redundancy and space misadvertisement.

Edit: If this is too steep at the beginning, they do sell a 2-bay model for $200, or you can just put 2 drives in the 4-bay and have future expansion options. See HERE for a model comparison. And the common ones are available on Amazon. And also, if you're going to be doing wireless transfers, make sure that you have an N router. G would be terrible if there is more than one computer accessing any NAS at the same time.
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Would be best to get yourself an enclosure with eSATA or FW800 on it.
Click to expand...
The backup has to be accessible to all my home computers wirelessly. I have an Linksys WRT160N router with all but one ethernet port being used.
 
Last edited:
blevins321 said:
Good god not a Drobo. Their "Pro" series might be faster but I had nothing but trouble with my home/office model. I went with a replacement Synology DS411j and I absolutely love it. I wrote about my Drobo troubles HERE and a review about the DS411j HERE.

It quite speedy and includes Time Capsule support without having to do custom sparse bundles. Initial investment if you populate all 4 drive bays would be about $150 more than a 2TB Time Capsule. Figure 350 for the unit, and 4 2TB drives@$75. Total would be about $650 and a new 2TB Time Capsule would be $500. If you put 4 2TB drives into the unit, you'll have 1.86GBx3 actual free space available for use after one drive lost to redundancy and space misadvertisement.

Edit: If this is too steep at the beginning, they do sell a 2-bay model for $200, or you can just put 2 drives in the 4-bay and have future expansion options. See HERE for a model comparison. And the common ones are available on Amazon. And also, if you're going to be doing wireless transfers, make sure that you have an N router. G would be terrible if there is more than one computer accessing any NAS at the same time.
Click to expand...

+1 on Synology ds411j
Very happy with mine.
 
I have a LaCie Network Space 2 and I'm quite happy with it. At a modest price, it more than surpasses others in the same price range including models from Western Digital, Buffalo and Seagate. One differentiator? It powers itself back on after loss of power (unlike all but WD). Another? It includes FTP without paying a monthly subscription (unlike Seagate).
 
It powers itself back on after loss of power
Click to expand...

As do all the Synology NAS. They also support Time Machine, web cams, power on/off schedules, one button USB photo transfer, LAMP and all sorts of stuff.

Just got updated too!
Version: DSM 3.1-1742

(2011/06/08)

New Features

AirPlay Support: AirPlay support in Audio Station's Media Renderer mode allows you to stream music from your DiskStation to any AirPlay device which could be either a TV or stereo set in your living room.
iOS Apps:
DS audio is now enhanced with media renderer support helps you remotely control the music playback from DiskStation to Airplay speakers or any compatible media renderer.
DS file is now enhanced with iPad-specific UI design.
DS photo+ is now enhanced with AirPrint support to print photos wirelessly.
Android Apps: DS file allows you who own Android powered mobile devices to browse the files on your DiskStation via WebDAV, and download/upload files from/to your DiskStation. You can also manage – copy, move, rename or delete - your files while you are away from your office or home as long as the Internet connection is available, off-line browsing for your favorites is also supported in case of the unstable wireless connection.
VPN Center Package: VPN Center is an add-on package that enables your DiskStation to become a VPN (virtual private network) server, allows DSM users over the Internet to access resources shared within DiskStation's local area network. VPN Center supports both PPTP and OpenVPN service.
Click to expand...
 
blueroom said:
As do all the Synology NAS. They also support Time Machine, web cams, power on/off schedules, one button USB photo transfer, LAMP and all sorts of stuff.
Click to expand...

One cool feature regarding power outage support is that they support USB input from a limited number of UPS's. Mainly APC but it also reads from my Geek Squad (rebranded CyberPower). Can do autoshutdown when the battery reports as low.
 
Okay so it sounds like a Synology backup is the way to go. Other than its speed, why is it better than Drobo? I thought Drobo had all these special features others don't have.

Now to try and figure out which Synology backup to get.
 
I'd go for the Synology. I'm a Drobo owner and was dragged in by the cool expandability features etc So far i've had 4 replacements for one Drobo version 2, all with serious faults. such as:

- Incorrectly detecting bad drives
- Displaying incorrect drive capacities
- Bad fans and thermal control
- Broken drive doors and dusty enclosures

Great idea in theory, but in my experience poorly put together.
 
I purchased a Synology DS1511+ a few months back and very happy with its performance. My friend has a DROBO and he says it's very slow.
 
Resist said:
Okay so it sounds like a Synology backup is the way to go. Other than its speed, why is it better than Drobo? I thought Drobo had all these special features others don't have.

Now to try and figure out which Synology backup to get.
Click to expand...

Drobo doesn't really have many special features. I guess it was the first among many to support a "hybrid RAID" setup that lets you use drives of different sizes, brands, etc... instead of the normal RAID that requires similar drives. Synology (as well as QNAP and others) quickly created their own version of the technology. Synology has the added benefits of a killer UI and great server features included. They update their software quite often, too. :)
 
Personally I would go with the QNAP TS-419P+ for a ready made NAS. After researching the topic thoroughly this is the best ready built NAS for the money. The QNAP's have a faster file transfer speed than the Synology.

Advantages of QNAP
- Hot Swappable Hard Drives
- Faster CPU
- More RAM
- Dual Gigabit Ethernet (supports teaming)
- Lower Power consumption
- eSATA
- RSYNC Servere/Client
- More robust software feature set so you can have business class features in a home NAS.

Disadvantages
- Price
- No Airplay support (yet)

Also buy Enterprise class hard drives. They are designed for RAID environments and will be more reliable in that purpose.

True it is more expensive than the Synology. But once you include the cost of decking them out with hard drives the percentage difference becomes much less for a faster more robust device.

If you want a cheaper solution you can get the TS-219P+ which supports two hard drives. You can also get the slower TS-410 or TS-412 which all over virtually the same features they are just slower.

Personally I would build a FreeNAS device. So that for the price of the TS-419P+ I could have something that performs on par with the TS-459 Pro II.

One of the biggest speed problems you will have is the wireless backup if you have a lot of data. I have never seen an instance where even on an 802.11n network with devices three feet from the router that performance even came close to that of 100mb Ethernet. Let alone a gigabit connection. The first backup will be the worst. After that it shouldn't be bad unless you are creating a lot of media files.

If you really want speed. Buy a Gigabit switch and wire your house up with Cat 6 cables.
 
I have a Drobo 2 connected with FW800 and a Synology 411slim (uses 2.5 inch drives and is absolutely silent).

The Drobo is slow as external drives go. I don't think wireless specifically is the issue, it seems like the disk I/O is slower than most devices, probably because it's all software RAID and has to take into account that it supports mixed drives.

All of the Synology devices use the same software (at least all of the #11 models) and it is very nice. A bonus is that they have iOS apps to allow direct access to shares. The downside of the iOS apps is that they don't work all that well with iTunes, and if you use an iDevice, iTunes is king.

For these devices, speed is relative to your usage. I have used my Drobo as a TimeMachine Target while connected to an AirPort Express via USB. I found its performance perfectly acceptable for that purpose. WHile connected in the same way, I was trying to rip DVDs encoded in Handbrake directly to the Drobo and its performance was a big problem there. I ran my iTunes library from the Drobo for a while (direct connected, not throur the AirPort), and had no issues with performance. It's fast enough to stream media, but transferring a large library takes longer than it might form a different device.

The benefits that I see in Drobo are:
Super simple to set up
Use any combination of SATA drives (size, speed, make, model can all be mix & match)
Makes it very obvious if you need to do something - like replace a faulty drive or add an additional or larger drive.

Downsides for Drobo:
Not fast (but still OK for most purposes)
Difficulty restoring data in the event that the enclosure dies - this may have changed, but last I checked, you would have to send your drives off to Drobo and they would be able to restore them into a new unit - just plugging the drives into a new unit yourself would format them.

The Drobo is not a bad device for someone who doesn't know or care about RAID. Barring a failure, "It Just Works". If you are interested in high performance and know about RAID, you can do much better with different devices. If you how to build a FreeNAS server, the DROBO is not for you...
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
I took a good hard look at the Drobo a few months ago and decided that although its dead simple to setup, it was just too slow at transfers (forget about over WiFi backup or hosting my movie collection!). I ended up dropping my desire for a backup system at that time, but before I gave up my search I was on the path towards getting a dual HDD SATA enclosure with 2x2Tb drives in it. The G-Tech is what I had my eye on though its price was a bit high :(

Would be best to get yourself an enclosure with eSATA or FW800 on it.
Click to expand...

Drobo is ideal for movie collections. It is fine for streaming video and audio, it is not good for speedy file transfers. If you have lots of data to movie, then you should be getting something with thunderbolt.
 
Resist said:
So can the other systems drives be replaced on the fly while running a video file without any hick ups or downtime, like the Drobo?
Click to expand...

The 411J that I have doesn't support hotswapping, so you have to turn it off to put a new drive in (but it takes minutes). The higher Synology models support this, though.
 
I went with an Infrant (now NetGear) ReadyNAS with 4 drives. It has gigabit Ethernet and I've been happy with it so far. I've had it for 4+ years.

For its replacement, I went with a QNAP TS-459. Yes, I still like the ReadyNAS, but QNAP looks much better now (on paper). I will have my QNAP in a few days and I am extremely happy with everything I have read about it.
 
I have an HP Media Smart Server. Yes it's based on windows, but it's an easy to use NAS that can also be used for Time Machine backups. It doesn't provide anything like RAID 5 though which is the biggest draw back. It can also do windows backups too.
 
Resist said:
So can the other systems drives be replaced on the fly while running a video file without any hick ups or downtime, like the Drobo?
Click to expand...

The QNAP supports this. With RAID 6 you can even pull two drives at once. With RAID 5+ there is a hot replacement sitting there. So if a drive fails it will immediately start rebuilding the array while you order a replacement for the failed drive.
 
I have a Drobo "FS" for about 1 1/2 years now and had ZERO problems at all with it. It works quite well, runs fairly quiet and has no issues. Also, I can access files both on my Mac and PC just fine too.

The software may be updated a bit less than others for new features, but I have no complaints. Plus, with the "FS", you can setup so there is protection against 2 HD failures so the likelyhood of 2 at the same time is very rare. I have not had any service issues and it has performed well.

In terms of speed, yes, it is a little slow for wireless transfer, but for wired Gigabit Ethernet it works VERY well. I have no trouble streaming from it to my Apple TV.

Best of luck in your shopping.
 
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