Drobo experience?

[yrh0413]

Hi guys,

Currently my workhorse is a Mac Mini Server with specs as follow:
- C2D 2.66GHz
- 8GB RAM
- 2x 500GB 7200rpm drives on RAID0 (OS, LR3 catalog and CS5 scratch disk)

Storage:
1x 2TB 7200rpm in FW800 enclosure (as primary storage for photo archive)
1x 3TB 5400rpm USB2 drive (as Time Machine drive)
2x 320GB 5400rpm USB2 drive (to store movies/ installers)

Sad to say that I am running out of disk space, again. I have one more USB2 port on my Mac but I do not want to fill up my cabinets with power adapters and lengthy wires. Thinking of consolidating all my storage needs into a single box. Did some research and narrowed down to getting either a Drobo or a QNAP NAS.

My distributor was kind enough to send me a loan unit of a Drobo S for testing (which I have it on my desk for 2 days now). Pretty good although the speed is not fantastic. Transfer rate via FW800 connection is 50% slower than my FW800 enclosure but also 50% faster than my USB2 drives. Anyone has good or bad experience with Drobo? Do note that I do not fancy high speed connectivity as what I need is just a storage space. I am happy with even USB2 speed... anything faster than that is icing on cake.

thanks 'all

 

[Agetan]

Have Drobo for more than 2 years now.

If speed is not the priority, Drobo is great especially if you want to change capacity later on. It is decent speed for my usage anyway.

QNAP, I don't have experience on that but should do just fine. Just need to plan ahead and buy biggest HDD that you can afford for this.

Regards,

Hart

 

[yrh0413]

Hi Hart, thanks and I appreciate your reply. May I know which Drobo are you using and what connectivity?

Did you ever have disk failure on your Drobo? And how long it takes to rebuild with a new drive?

I am not too keen on getting a traditional RAID box because I need to fully populate all disk bays during purchase. High cost and not flexible.

 

[David Kwok]

Hi Hart, thanks and I appreciate your reply. May I know which Drobo are you using and what connectivity?

Did you ever have disk failure on your Drobo? And how long it takes to rebuild with a new drive?

I am not too keen on getting a traditional RAID box because I need to fully populate all disk bays during purchase. High cost and not flexible.

U also have Synology as your another equivalent consideration to qnap. Qnap is slightly more expensive than Synology, it must say it seems better on paper, since I haven't use it before yet.

What do u mean by need to fully populate all disk bays during purchase? Never hear of such requirement.

 

[yrh0413]

traditional RAID boxes requires one to fully populate all disk bays to get max capacity. Say if I have an 8-bay enclosure I need to fill it up and configure as RAID5 or RAID6.

Although technically it is doable with fewer drives as a start, outgrowing the logical drive means I have to backup the array to somewhere, slot in a new drive, and recreate a new, bigger logical drive. I have more than 5TB of data and I do not want to move my data around (waste of time and need temporary space to house the backups).

I have an 8-bay QNAP rackmount box in my office fully loaded with 2TB drives, using it as a file server and Hyper-V repository. Performance is good but not overly decent. Problem with these traditional RAID boxes again... is the inflexibility of upgrade when your drives are full. That is why I am looking at Drobo boxes as a start as I have a handful of hard disk (different sizes) on my table.

 

[David Kwok]

traditional RAID boxes requires one to fully populate all disk bays to get max capacity. Say if I have an 8-bay enclosure I need to fill it up and configure as RAID5 or RAID6.


Although technically it is doable with fewer drives as a start, outgrowing the logical drive means I have to backup the array to somewhere, slot in a new drive, and recreate a new, bigger logical drive. I have more than 5TB of data and I do not want to move my data around (waste of time and need temporary space to house the backups).


I have an 8-bay QNAP rackmount box in my office fully loaded with 2TB drives, using it as a file server and Hyper-V repository. Performance is good but not overly decent. Problem with these traditional RAID boxes again... is the inflexibility of upgrade when your drives are full. That is why I am looking at Drobo boxes as a start as I have a handful of hard disk (different sizes) on my table.

I don't fully grasp your terminology in "traditional". Unless you are talking about technology that only exist more than 30 years ago, if not, I have not come across these traditional raid boxes that set a requirement that all enclosures must be occupied before you are use it. I have a Synology RAID NAS which I only use 3 bays of 2TB HD each instead of the total of 5. I can at anytime expand the RAID 5 which is currently what I am using after I place in an additional hard disk of at least 2TB in size. Expanding a RAID setup do not need to backup the array unless this is a precaution that you would like to have, which is highly recommended in a production environment because failures happens all the time at the most inconvenient moment.


I have deal with simple software RAID, hardware RAID in systems via H/W RAID card, and meanwhile Standalone NAS boxes and have never come across such limitation. Performance wise, the consideration is always the H/W or S/W RAID capability along with the inbuilt system running the RAID operations, the cache for the H/W RAID, the capability in terms of Seek Access, Rotational Speed and technology of the Hard disks. Performance of NAS system is more than just the disk and raid system. It also highly depends on the usage pattern, load and network provided.


I'm not sure what kind of good performance you are looking out for. If it's high throughput, these NAS are good enough for multiple video streams running concurrently. If your are looking for high IOPS, then make sure you use really high speed hard disk such as WD Raptor running on 10,000rpms, if not you are always consider SSD. For file servers, normally the setup is going for high throughput and capacity, hence they are often not configured for performance. When we want performance in a highly loaded environment with concurrently active 100+ users, then we go for large disk array setup in counts of 100 disks. We also don't build 1 single RAID and single mount point depending on the usage pattern and design requirement.


When your drives are full, there are numerous way to upgrade the disk. The simplest and low cost approach is one by one change the hard disk to higher capacity drives such as from 2TB to 3TB. Each change, wait for a rebuild which can take hours or even days, depending on the RAID system capability. When all are the disk in the RAID array are changed, good RAID software normally allow for expanding the filesystem to occupy the new space available. This is evident in Synology and QNAP, have you look into these system in detail ?


Looking at the price range and offerings between Drobo, QNAP and Synology. It will range them in order of complexity and sophistication as such QNAP > Synology > Drobo.


I'm not sure how you come to such a conclusion, but my experience in this area will tell you, likely you are on the wrong track with the wrong assumption. I hope these information helps.

For more information to your misunderstanding about performance
My Synology DS1511+ running on 3 x WD Green 2TB hard disk, giving my approximately 3.75TB on RAID5 offers around 110MB for write access which is the slow operation for RAID 5. My network is on 1000BaseT(aka 1Gbps) cabled network, theoretically maxing at 125MBps. I see most likely my NAS is not saturated, but rather is the network. My NAS offers Aggregated Ethernet bonding via IEEE 802.3AD, which means you will need a switch capable of such setup, in theory can ride up to >160MBps(write), provided you fully trust Synology advertising. Also the box offers 2x eSATA external expansion boxes that offers up to 15bays. Btw I keep my box on 24by7 over a APC UPS to ensure high electrical tolerance and protection, which only cost me a mere 30W during standby meanwhile.

If you want highly redundant protection to your data, NAS is the way to go.

 

[yrh0413]

Bro as mentioned in my 1st post I just need the flexibility of increasing my disk space in the easiest way and performance is not s key factor (I'm happy with USB2 speed).

My experience on my office's QNAP NAS:
- all disk needs to be of same size, preferably from same manufacturer and even same model. Of course higher capacity drives can be inserted in future but I lose out on space since the extra disk space are wasted on an existing RAID array.
- RAID expansion = adding more drive to my array. If I have a 4-bay box with 3x 1TB drive on RAID5 I get 2TB usable. Add in a 4th 1TB drive I get 3TB usable. Now even if I change all these existing drive to 2TB each I still get 3TB usable because the RAID was built originally with 1TB drives.
- it is very very slow in RAID expansion on my QNAP box.

As said, I just want to gather user feedback on Drobo devices as most of the online reviews gave pretty bad remaks especially on its throughput. If I need performance I would have upgrade to a MacPro and go for e-SATA.

 

[Achim Reh]

I run 2 small Qnap 209 pro. They are up and running without any problems for around 5 years now , maybe even longer ( and this is in a non aircon environment at 30 degrees/ 90 % humidity. It's not lighting fast, but reasonable fast for storing pictures. I also use one of them as a media server, streaming movies over network to a media player, and the Qnap is still fast enough.
However, a friend of mine has a 4 bay Qnap and he keeps replacing hard drives like underwear. Probably some thermal issue with the 4 bay .

 

[David Kwok]

Bro as mentioned in my 1st post I just need the flexibility of increasing my disk space in the easiest way and performance is not s key factor (I'm happy with USB2 speed).

My experience on my office's QNAP NAS:
- all disk needs to be of same size, preferably from same manufacturer and even same model. Of course higher capacity drives can be inserted in future but I lose out on space since the extra disk space are wasted on an existing RAID array.
- RAID expansion = adding more drive to my array. If I have a 4-bay box with 3x 1TB drive on RAID5 I get 2TB usable. Add in a 4th 1TB drive I get 3TB usable. Now even if I change all these existing drive to 2TB each I still get 3TB usable because the RAID was built originally with 1TB drives.
- it is very very slow in RAID expansion on my QNAP box.

As said, I just want to gather user feedback on Drobo devices as most of the online reviews gave pretty bad remaks especially on its throughput. If I need performance I would have upgrade to a MacPro and go for e-SATA.

Up to now, still making no sense seriously. What I can't help is tell you what drobo can't do because I don't know when I haven't use one. But what I can help is tell you where your assumptions with regards to Synology NAS can do but u have misunderstood.

All raid works on all disk has to be the same size. It is a fact, but Synology offers hybrid raid that allow u create raid partitions across unused space on non homogenous hard disk array such as an array of 2x 2TB hd and 1x 1TB hard disk. This means you can setup 1x raid 5 using 1tb space from each hard disk and 1x raid 1 using the remaining 1tb from the 2 remaining 2tb hard disk. While this setup is possible, most will not recommend due to performance degrade which I will not explain deeper. Now in comparison to drobo, can drobo do better than this? Enlighten me.

Your second claim shows u have little understanding about filesystems, partitions and expansion feature of raid systems. You have only discover partial about raid design and implementation. You have not consider expanding the filesystem which will then make use of the new extra space, which is already a well solved problem in raid system. The next better question is does drobo does it better that Synology doesn't do, because it has already been implemented in Synology and I am quite sure so is for qnap.

Expansion is slow. Yes, it is a well known fact across all raid systems even in enterprise grade raid system costing millions. So the question again is does drobo does it faster?

Now the part on macpro or a better system to mean better performance for the io is a pure fallacy. Your disk io will not give you miracle performance when you upgrade your processors and memory, so this discussion can keep this claim out of the equation.

So it is a popular claim that drobo gives bad performance because I have read about it way back when I choose my nas system. It has also been mentioned in clubsnap before. Reading the offerings by drobo doesn't impress me either.

At the end of the day, I am giving you information of what I knew about the actual implementation of nas that may or may not help u depending if u take it seriously.

If you want ease of maintainence, you definitely have it in Synology, qnap perhaps because I don't operate it. Drobo perhaps because I don't operate it either. But so far, for Synology I don't find it difficult when it is just clicking buttons and removing hard disk from the bays. Question is when you feel Synology and qnap is inadequate, does drobo makes it easier.

 

[Agetan]

Hi Hart, thanks and I appreciate your reply. May I know which Drobo are you using and what connectivity?

Did you ever have disk failure on your Drobo? And how long it takes to rebuild with a new drive?

I am not too keen on getting a traditional RAID box because I need to fully populate all disk bays during purchase. High cost and not flexible.

I had the original 4 bays version using FW800 connection.

So far, I havent had any failure yet. (finger crossed)

It is still better to use similar size HDD as it will be slower if u use diff capacity although ok for drobo if speed is not a priority.

Hart

 

[yrh0413]

Thanks Hart, I'll be getting the same Drobo (4-bays) next week. =)

 

[yrh0413]

Hi David I truly understand what you are saying (I am in the IT industry like you). I take care of my company's server equipments and I have experience setting up and maintaining both SOHO and enterprise storage boxes like Dell MD3000i, IBM DS3512, and QNAP 859-RP.

The reason why I decided to go for Drobo is the flexibility of mixing drives of different sizes as throughout the years I have gotten myself a lot of individual drives ranging from 80GB to 2TB. It is getting very messy on my table if you know what I mean...

I was held back after reading through Drobo reviews but gladly my distributor was kind enough to send me a loan unit for testing. I am happy with the loan unit's performance: better than USB2 slower than FW800 but this is still acceptable to me; and Hart has provided me valuable positive feedback in terms of real world usage and my concern on its reliability.

Both QNAP and Synology has a lot of fancy features but I am just looking for a simple storage box... those extras are not important for me.

 

[qystan]

yrh,

I'm not an IT industry person but just ok with the stuff.

After reading your posts I wonder if I missed something in my conclusion when I chose mine. It's no fancy qnap or synology just the Buffalo Quad.

My conclusions then, plse tell me if I got any or all if them wrong.

Firstly the driver for wanting a NAS.
1. More storage ( of course )
2. Backup place
3. Raid 1 for added backup. Raid 5 would be nice, but considering that there's only 4 bays.
4. I was using freenas for a while but with 8, it didn't support squeeze server, so I had to look for something while they figure that

1. Like you i have a bunch of hd. Decided against using them as they are but old, 1 yr n on. New hd don't cost much, why have old units.

2. The raid is expandable by changing 1 hd at a time as described by Kwok, so I'm not 'stuck'

3. Using the other 2 bays will result in a second volume, not necessarily a bad thing

4. Hd are cheap, replacing them periodically at 1-2 years is not unreasonable. At each replacement, go up 1-2 sizes depending on the price movements. Of course there's a limit to what the box can handle. By then, might be timely to change the box. I assume that unless you can get the same box, the data will not be recoverable (without getting some recovery service to help), so why wait for that. Change the box at intervals.

 

[David Kwok]

Hi David I truly understand what you are saying (I am in the IT industry like you). I take care of my company's server equipments and I have experience setting up and maintaining both SOHO and enterprise storage boxes like Dell MD3000i, IBM DS3512, and QNAP 859-RP.

The reason why I decided to go for Drobo is the flexibility of mixing drives of different sizes as throughout the years I have gotten myself a lot of individual drives ranging from 80GB to 2TB. It is getting very messy on my table if you know what I mean...

I was held back after reading through Drobo reviews but gladly my distributor was kind enough to send me a loan unit for testing. I am happy with the loan unit's performance: better than USB2 slower than FW800 but this is still acceptable to me; and Hart has provided me valuable positive feedback in terms of real world usage and my concern on its reliability.

Both QNAP and Synology has a lot of fancy features but I am just looking for a simple storage box... those extras are not important for me.

Well if it works for you, I am it will be fine. Just that when you mention drobo can handle mixed drive, I am rather skeptical how is it different from what Synology and qnap does. Not unless u meant jbod which is no redundancy,

 

[yrh0413]

Hi qystan,

I have not used the Quad model but I used to have the Drivestation Duo. The Duo only supports RAID1.

If you are on RAID1 on your Quad and if the firmware is the same as my Duo, you do not end up with increased disk space after you replace a higher capacity drive. Say if you have 2x 1TB drives as RAID1 on your Quad you end up with 1TB usable space. Swapping one drive with a 2TB drive doesn't grant you 2TB free space as your RAID was built with 1TB as foundation.

Say if you have RAID1 on 1x 1TB and 1x 2TB drive, swapping out the 1TB drive with a 2TB drive (that means you have 2x 2TB) doesn't give you 2TB disk space as again your RAID was built on 1TB. The only way you can get more disk space is to delete the old RAID and rebuild a new one with 2TB drives.

As far as I know Buffalo drives do not support RAID expansions... QNAP and Synology do, so is Drobo. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

[yrh0413]

Well if it works for you, I am it will be fine. Just that when you mention drobo can handle mixed drive, I am rather skeptical how is it different from what Synology and qnap does. Not unless u meant jbod which is no redundancy,

Mixing different drives on the same RAID array is the key selling point for Drobo, in fact that is the only selling point for Drobo. :sweat:

 

[David Kwok]

yrh,

I'm not an IT industry person but just ok with the stuff.

After reading your posts I wonder if I missed something in my conclusion when I chose mine. It's no fancy qnap or synology just the Buffalo Quad.

My conclusions then, plse tell me if I got any or all if them wrong.

Firstly the driver for wanting a NAS.
1. More storage ( of course )
2. Backup place
3. Raid 1 for added backup. Raid 5 would be nice, but considering that there's only 4 bays.
4. I was using freenas for a while but with 8, it didn't support squeeze server, so I had to look for something while they figure that

1. Like you i have a bunch of hd. Decided against using them as they are but old, 1 yr n on. New hd don't cost much, why have old units.

2. The raid is expandable by changing 1 hd at a time as described by Kwok, so I'm not 'stuck'

3. Using the other 2 bays will result in a second volume, not necessarily a bad thing

4. Hd are cheap, replacing them periodically at 1-2 years is not unreasonable. At each replacement, go up 1-2 sizes depending on the price movements. Of course there's a limit to what the box can handle. By then, might be timely to change the box. I assume that unless you can get the same box, the data will not be recoverable (without getting some recovery service to help), so why wait for that. Change the box at intervals.

Some of the points might not be entirely incorrect, but here is my understanding for your review.

Raid is not backup, redundancy means harder to fail or attempt to avoid single point of failure as much as possible within your budget. If you accidentally delete some data from the raid system, you wouldn't get it back even with raid. Same goes for data corruption of either application or system failure.

Raid 5 or raid 6 offers redundancy with more capacity for data and less for parity. For large setup will offers better data to parity ratio, that is the plus point. Raid 1 is for simple setup of 2 bays. More bays it will be too expensive off the useful capacity ratio, but of course it offers the best performance in a degraded situation.

While hd is cheap and can be replaced periodically, one must also consider the cost to replace a failed box. Also ask yourself, if the box failed and the manufacturer stop manufacturing it, how are you going to retrieve the data? Remember for most consumer, there are no SLA involve. Good nas such as Synology and qnap offers alternative approach on how to retrieve the data should the box goes down, using linux usually and a recovery software. But unless you are tight on budget, it is also possible to consider changing the box to a newer model should the current one goes obsolete and unsupported. Nonetheless less alternatives approach are valuable. Companies goes bust overnight too, such economical concern is also part of your evaluation for data protection.

At the end of the day, the so called protection to your data can be merely a fallacy if one did not think properly on how to recover from failure situation. It is not rocket science, but it isn't trival either. While there are numerous options available in the market for data protection, not a lot of them can really keep up with the protection claims advertised or perhaps consumer assumed. If hard disk is your only concern of failure, then you are only partially protected from a technical point of view. Of course we haven't even consider hazards such as lightning and fire.

 

[David Kwok]

Mixing different drives on the same RAID array is the key selling point for Drobo, in fact that is the only selling point for Drobo. :sweat:

Like I have mentioned in my previous posting. That is no exclusive feature at all and since you are a IT manager, you ought tot know there is no magic to raid. You can't use different sizes hd in raid without leaving unused spaces. Synology and qnap also have them and they will allow u to reuse them by setting up more raid volumes. I don't believe drobo does it better or differently in concept.

If cost is your main concern for choosing drobo, then I see no further to discuss. If it is for ease of operation, I believe it wouldn't have not occur to u, such hybrid raid setup is a nightmare for maintainence and in for big downtime, hence I never adopted it either. Seriously if you are concern about safety of your data, you might wanna think a tad deeper than just space and configuration. If not, it is purely a fallacy.

 

[yrh0413]

Like I have mentioned in my previous posting. That is no exclusive feature at all and since you are a IT manager, you ought tot know there is no magic to raid. You can't use different sizes hd in raid without leaving unused spaces. Synology and qnap also have them and they will allow u to reuse them by setting up more raid volumes. I don't believe drobo does it better or differently in concept.

If cost is your main concern for choosing drobo, then I see no further to discuss. If it is for ease of operation, I believe it wouldn't have not occur to u, such hybrid raid setup is a nightmare for maintainence and in for big downtime, hence I never adopted it either. Seriously if you are concern about safety of your data, you might wanna think a tad deeper than just space and configuration. If not, it is purely a fallacy.

Hi David, you might be interested to read up on how Drobo works: The Drobo FS in-depth, Part 1: what it is, how it works. It seems to me that you might have assumed that Drobo is just another manufacturer for RAID boxes, it really isn't that simple.

In a RAID array there is always overheads for parity bits/ redundancy; Drobo is no magic but it has it's own proprietary RAID technology to have a logical array consisting of different-size hard disks. Like I said I have configured QNAP NAS before and I truly understand what you said in terms of RAID expansion and RAID migration. Drobo's implementation of RAID is different, no hocus-pocus here but it is different.

Cost: Drobo has high upfront cost on the enclosure, but in long run it will be cheaper as I can increase its volume anytime.
Ease of use: Drobo wins hands down. Nothing to configure, just pop in the drives and it is usable in less than 5 minutes.
Data safety: no data recovery out there can perform data recovery on Drobo boxes. Backup is a must for any form of storage.

 

[qystan]

yrh,

I'll have to try the disk swap to be sure. The documentation isnt very clear but there are forums that state this. The rep at the last pc show also mentioned the possibility. With hd prices today, will have to wait.