Shownotes:
If you’ve been watching GeekBrief.TV for a while, you’re familiar with my love of Data Robotics, the company that made Drobo (the first storage robot). Their newest edition is the Drobo Pro. Data Robotics makes data redundancy easy. Shortly after I fired up my first Drobo, I asked them for a Pro version (http://m.podshow.com/media/13917/episodes/91078/gbtv-91078-12-14-2007.mp4) with double the drive bays. Two days ago my wish to have a Drobo Pro came true. I had 13 external and internal drives with GeekBrief.TV related files, and it took about 40 hours to get everything transferred due mainly to three drives that only had USB ports. Here’s a look at the read/write speeds we got with Drobo Pro.
USB
Read: 15.8 MB/second
Write: 13.8 MB/second
Firewire 800
Read: 53.4 MB/second
Write: 43 MB/second
iSCSI
Read: 73.6 MB/second
Write: 78.7 MB/second
We used a free application called AJA System Test to get these results. You can download here.
For photographers, video professionals, small businesses, or anyone with a large amount of files that need to be in one location, the Drobo Pro is a great solution. It will certainly help us at the GBTV Studios be more productive and more efficient. The cool thing that’s already happened is that I’ve found photos from the early days that I thought were lost forever.
In the episode I mentioned Taylor Mark. It’s a company owned by a friend of ours that specializes in Mac repairs and hard drive recovery. I’ll be taking my failed WD MyBook drive to Mark next week to see if he can recover the missing GBTV episodes stored on that drive.
UPDATE: (Some additional information from Data Robotics…)
DroboPro can be easily connected to a switch, so host machines do not need to have multiple Ethernet ports. Simply connect the DroboPro to the host using the USB port, assign a fixed IP address using our Dashboard management utility, disconnect the USB, and connect the DroboPro directly to the switch using the Gigabit Ethernet port.
DroboPro adds support for dual drive redundancy, so users can protect their data from either a single or dual drive failure. The great thing about our implementation is that users can switch between single drive and dual drive redundancy on the fly, so they can start with single drive redundancy when their dataset is relatively small and then switch to dual drive redundancy as more data is added to the DroboPro.
DroboPro adds another feature called Smart Volumes (TM) which are essentially virtual volumes that DroboPro supports through the use of thin provisioning. Each DroboPro can support up to 16 x 16TB Smart Volumes. This feature not only allows users to create volumes that can accommodate larger hard drives as they become available, it also allows multiple hosts to share a single DroboPro when it is attached to a switch.
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July 12th, 2009 at 2:25 am
All those drives… Yummy !
And redundancy, good too…
But… What about the backups, in case of disaster ? A good (but expensive solution) could be to have 2 equally sized and equipped Drobos. They would be synced on one site… then one of the Drobos would be taken elsewhere, far away enough (or in another room, in a fire/flood proof safe) and would constitute a backup copy, synced via Internet or episodical “on one site” syncs.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:23 am
I’ll 2nd the backup. Drobo Pro is great for instant recovery of mass mass storage. But it still doesn’t eliminate the need for a backup in case say, power surge blows the whole thing out.
As for the fiber channel speed.. that was definitely an over oversimplification I think. When you’re at that level, fiber channel starts at 4Gbs vs 1Gbps for iSCSI (basically NIC speed). Depending on what you’re doing, “just as fast” might not be the wording to use. It’s more like fits most needs for a fraction of the cost.
After you use it for a while, could you maybe give some feedback on heat and noise? I’m really looking at this for a cheap backup to disk option, and wondering how much heat it can handle (I’d like to stick it on a rack)
July 12th, 2009 at 6:33 am
I’ll third the backup issue as well… the pro sounds perfect for eliminating a bunch of smaller drives (not that I have anything close to Cali and Neil’s 13 drives) but relying on one drobo to keep all that and to have the house burn down would be a horrible nightmare.
I am trying to keep one drive off site at a relatives house updated every couple of months for my critical files… all these drives/files are driving me crazy LOL
July 12th, 2009 at 6:33 am
I have a question. I use iSCSI “daily” over the Internet from my [hacked] MyBook WEII. My initiator systems are Windows, including 7.
What’s special about the Drobo Pro iSCSI implementation that it can’t be used over a network? A handy feature of iSCSI is that you can have your NAS at home and still access it while traveling. Don’t they CHAP auth connections or some other security reason?
Also, if it’s not on a network you can’t have multiple initiators using it. This would be unfortunate for SOHO sites.
As for backups, get a SAS LTO4 tape drive (maybe in a changer?) and set up a reasonable backup plan. You’d be already doing that with discreet disks, right?
July 12th, 2009 at 10:33 am
I hope those Seagates 7200.11 you had ready for DP back in Episode #554 don’t cause you problems. I told that in the comments section in EP#554
This is serious, lots of problems/failures/horror stories reported due to Firmware Bugs with that series of drives. Verify the serials numbers with Seagate website.
Even with the updated ones I don’t trust them.
July 12th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Yay! It’s a boy! :) Congrats on your new baby… hehe
July 12th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Cali,
Are you able to edit footage off the drobo pro? If so which formats / codecs do you find works the best. I know you listed the data transfer speeds for the hard disks, but I was curious if the drobo partitioning / stripping interfered with certain codecs or decreased playback of ProRes files or multiple tracks of hd p2 or xdcam footage? Thanks for your feedback!
Greg Wilson
July 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Just a quick question, if you had 13 external drives, and at least three were 0.5Gs, how have you only used up 2Gbs?
July 12th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Here is the real question that I will also find out here in a few days as i am hooking mine up and getting my new backup stratagy in place..
If you use an offsite backup solution like I do – is an iSCSI drive looked at like a standard HD or is it looked at as a NAS.
If it is looked at like a standard HD – then the Drobo Pro with an offsite solution is the ticket as that offsite solution will just backup the Drobo.
July 12th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Fast Question: How noisy is that thing?
July 12th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
The Drobo solution + an off-site backup system are great, but what happens when both fail? One way to get around this is to add another layer of backups with something that doesn’t rely on power: Blu-Ray or some high-capacity disc/drive/whatever that doesn’t require power at all to retain it’s information. Granted, a disconnected hard-drive (that’s only connected to take a backup) works just as well.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
peterbokunet, I think Cali might be mistaken, I meant to post on that too. I was under the impression the drobo pro not only increased capacity, but basically added the “drobo share” portion of the original drobo, thus making it an iSCSI device on the network.
And just to point out, I’m looking at the drobo pro as a disk based backup system to be coupled with tape. I’m not sure if it’s reliable enough though for where I want it. Alternatively, it can make for a cheap tertiary solution for us. I have a SAN I want data portions backed up, and it makes 0 sense to have anything close to that for backup purposes.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I was a beta tester for the DroboPro and I’ll attempt to answer several of the questions above based on my beta unit. I have not gotten my hands on a production unit yet.
– The iSCSI implementation that was in my beta unit, and as I understand it is also in the currently shipping version, does not support any of the normal iSCSI authentication methods and does not support multi initiator. They have stated that a future version of the firmware will support multi initiator but to my knowledge they have said nothing about authentication.
– The “it needs it’s own ethernet port” is the super-simple (idiot-proof) method that they like to suggest. However, using the Drobo Dashboard you can assign an IP address of your choosing and then you can use it over a network like other iSCSI devices. You can also have more than 1 DroboPro on a network by assigning unique IP’s to each one. (Not that I got to test that as I only had one unit.)
– The DroboPro is NOT a NAS. They did not just add the “Drobo Share”. If you want to share it on a network as if it were a NAS, you’ll need to put a computer between it and your network and that computer will do the network sharing. That computer could connect to the DroboPro via USB, FireWire, or iSCSI.
– An iSCSI mounted device shows up as a physical disk to the computer it’s attached to. After mounting it via iSCSI, you partition and format it like any other disk.
– I didn’t measure the sound pressure level of my unit, but it was entirely acceptable sitting next to me on my workbench. I was surprised that it was as quiet as it was.
– Most of my testing focused on speed and less popular operating systems with a particular focus on using it in a small business as a shared SAN between 2 VMware servers. Due to limitations of the beta unit I had, I didn’t have a great deal of success. However, I think it has a good future as they upgrade the firmware. I’ll try to answer other questions if I can.
-Farren
p.s.: Nice t-shirt Cali…. (re: your Tweet)
July 12th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Cali, you are of course AWESOME, but its TAYLORMARK not Taylor Mark. ( I know, i know, just a detail… my name is Douglas Mark Taylor… yes, its all very confusing, and a otherwise perfect for those (unlike yourself) who know the company and don’t know me personally.) Thanks for the mention! Did I mention your awesome? Yeay! Hope your in the 85% success rate (fingers crossed). See you soon! =)
July 13th, 2009 at 1:38 am
Drobo drobo ,couldn’t take my eyes of that awesome t-shirt got Cali all over it ,want one to ;) where do i get one.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:06 am
Anything other than a Woopra t-shirt gets my vote!
July 13th, 2009 at 7:21 am
Drobo Pro seems a bit expensive for what it is. For $1200 you could have 2 FirmTek SeriTek/5PMs with a RocketRaid 2314 eSata card. Write speed maybe a little slower (with RAID 5), but read twice what you get with Drobo Pro. And the enclosures are very solidly built, and with good cooling.
July 13th, 2009 at 7:28 am
I would love to see a head to head against some of the competitors in this same market. I am in the market for a solution like this, but I would like to see how it compares to the others like ReadyNAS NVX, LaCia’s 5BIG, Seagate’s BlackArmor NAS, WD’s ShareSpace, and Buffalo’s TeraStation.
Thanks and great show!
July 13th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Did you need to copy your files from an external drive to the Drobo or can you just remove them from there current cases and stick them in the Drobo?
I understand that they need to be compatible with the Drobo first.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am
We received our Drobo Pro about a month ago but it has been on hold while we waited for a firmware update to allow it to handle (actually simply ignore) MPIO. So far it works great. We use to as an inexpensive solution for allowing archived issues to remain online without taking up disk space on the high-end expensive SAN system.
Presently there are about 150 Mac users who can access the Drobo, there are almost 5 years of 15 of our magazines online – allowing our editors quick access to past issues without us needing to go back to the tape backups.
I plan on buying more of these!
July 13th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
A Disclosure here. I think Cali is a spokes person for the Drobo so the review is a bit biaz. That part should have been disclosed.
One thing that is not talked about is it’s fricken expensive and way over price. The original Drobo should have gigabit Ethernet.
July 13th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Love the Drobo Pro
July 13th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Cali, I told you…you can Read this Tweet from a DRI employe about the Seagates drives. http://twitter.com/markfuccio/status/2625304130
July 13th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Some answers to all the questions coming up soon! Just a quick comment to John:
I’m actually not a spokesperson for Data Robotics. When they first announced their product, the USB Drobo, I loved the product and talked about them on GeekBrief.TV. Later, they became a sponsor and I created a video for them. They are currently NOT a sponsor.
As for the price, it’s dramatically less than any other product you can buy that does the same thing.
Again, more answers coming up!
July 14th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Sent you this in email, but forgot you preferred comments, so here goes:
Hi, Cali.
Hey, Josie and I just watched your Drobo Pro unboxing episode, and we’re glad that they finally listened to you and produced the pro version!
Had a question for you, though. From what I can tell, you’re using a RAID 5 setup instead of RAID 1+0. (Your 8 1TB disks yielded 6.2 TB of storage rather than the ~3.5TB you’d probably get out of the latter config.) If I’m right and you’re using 5, was there a reason you decided for it? I know you get more storage that way, obviously, but what about the performance and redundancy concerns? (Or does Drobo even support 1+0 or 0+1?) So many geeky questions — so little time!
Just curious. Have a shiny, happy week…
–
Sean <
July 14th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
One more question: Is your blog is set to Pacific Time for some reason? (My last comment just leapt 2 hours into the past!)
July 17th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Just watched this episode; a lot of catching up to do. It’s a bit of a set-back considering how much more expensive the Drobo Pro is compared to the regular Drobo which I already have.
As with that WD drive failing, I had 1 fail and 2 currently failing (they don’t work sometimes). Luckily I’ve already backed those up.
@Shawn: Drobo uses a hybrid RAID 1 and 5 setup which they call BeyondRAID; what that means in layman terms is if the Drobo were to ever decide to go back in firmware or programming, it is possible to corrupt your data; since the redundancy scheme is proprietary you could potentially lose all your data and it not be recoverable. Also RAID 5 give you about 93% space (that’s 7% for parity), while on the Drobo gives from 50% to about 70% based on your drive mixture. For example on my 4×1.5TB for 6TB, I only get 4.1TB of usable space.
I’d to further support the idea to back up all your data off-site as well.
July 17th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
So are all the old drives or the enclosures going on eBay? I could stand to pick up a few of those.
July 26th, 2009 at 8:25 am
Hi Cali,
Thanks for the review of the Pro. I’m thinking this isn’t the right solution for me. I am dual platforms (OSX and Vista (sigh)) and FAT32 as the only option for both to be happy doesn’t work. Back to looking at NAS solutions I guess? Any recommendations for NAS with the iSCSI speed???
August 1st, 2009 at 11:02 am
I have a question/concern. There have been some reports of failing Drobo units – which is fair enough. Nothing’s indestructible. However, from the (admittedly limited) reading that I’ve done, it would SEEM that the warranty period can only be extended within the first 3 years of purchase.
Now, if I were to spend around $1500 on the DroboPro (the larger unit), then it would be very costly if it broke in the 4th year or beyond, as I would have to replace the entire thing outright.
Now, my issue is this: 3 years ain’t that long. If I want to replace drives and continue using this device for the foreseeable future, then that 3 years peace-of-mind is going to seem very short.
For a proprietary device which I would be completely dependent on – and is pitched as something one can use almost indefinitely – the means to extend the warranty considerably beyond this period would mean a lot. I would even go so far as to say that hardware manufacturers that are very secure in their products are often willing to provide a lifetime warranty.
Any thoughts from anyone? Am I incorrect about the limit on warranty extensions?
August 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Beware to OSX users that run PPC based machines. iSCSI currently has a “known issue” that makes it unusable. If you try to use it on a PPC machine you get a kernel crash. They don’t make this info very easy to find, you have to dig through the knowledge base to see that this problem is known.
Without using iSCSI this unit is extremely underperforming. I have USB external single drives that are almost twice as fast even with this unit using FW800. I now have myself a big black (incredibly slow) lunchbox.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
“its a boy” =DD
October 23rd, 2009 at 5:11 am
Farren,
If you can assign a fixed IP address to the device, how do you not share it on the network?
If the IP address is part of the LANs subnet, then any computer on the subnet would be able to access it?
Can you please explain how a computer with a single GigE port could simulataneously connect to the DroboPro and the LAN?
I don’t see how a switch helps you…
October 24th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I have some figures using 8x 1.5 TB Seagate Baracudda’s using dual disk redundancy.
Using the same AJA System Test (thanks for the link BTW), I got the following figures averaged across all the file size tests.
All using iSCSI.
Write: 46.6 MB/S
Read: 73.75 MB/S
I think these are more accurate since anyone using > 1TB drives really needs to be using dual drive redundancy.
Why?
Because as disks get bigger in capacity the rebuild time of the array gets longer and the risk of two drives failing within the rebuild time of the first increases.
ET
January 10th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I’m not sure if I agree with everything written but this was definitely informative and written nicely.
February 23rd, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Any updates on how your drobopro is working. I’ve been having issues with mine through USB. I can’t get more than 5MB/s transfer. Before with firmware 1.0.3 i got full 30MB/s but one drive seemed to fail. After update to 1.1.5 all drives were green but my transfer dropped to the above mentioned 5MB/s. Data Robotics support said that after a firmware update the Drobopro had to rebuild itself. A week has passed and no change. I followed their instructions to set the spin down to never and to not turn off my pc. But still no change in the transfer rate. Anyone can help me? Their support kind of sucks.