 "Almost Perfect!" | 2009-11-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3G27420TXDE5U |
I love my drobo pro. The drobo people are taking a play from apple's playbook and really presenting a unique unboxing experience.
The packaging is very apple'esque. The box's insides are painted all black, all high density foam inside is black. The bits and pieces box is on the very top says "Welcome to the world of..."; very cool.
Setup was seamless. I have loaded this thing with 8 2T drives.
Con: The Ethernet on board is for iSCSI only, AND it will not work with a droboshare device! That is the only ding I have for this product. For the price a droboshare should really be added in to the product. |
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 "Disappointed" | 2009-07-01 |
| - Reviewed By lexansystemsllc |
I've heard good feedback on Drobo products but after trying a Drobo Pro we had a lot of problems. The first unit we tested performance was 20-30mb/s with frequent "freeze ups" where it would drop down to 5mb/s. Local storage on this same box gives 130mb/s with single raptor drives.
We got a replacement unit that was completely dysfunctional, it rebooted continuously and was not functional. The third unit a technician received and tested before sending to us. We managed to get 90MB/s out of it for about 5 minutes, then the device dropped down to 60Mb/s on average, still with random drops to 5mb/s (although not nearly as often as first unit but still frequently happens coming out of drive spin down). These tests are with 256K block size, I always test with 32K block size, but when using 32K block size, performance was really low (6-8Mb/s or so). This is tested with 8x Western Digital Black Dual Processor Drives w/ 32MB cache. The tech I spoke to only had odd drives like old 40GB drives to test with and did not have any reasonable performance drives in the lab.
The first device was extremely difficult to use, if for whatever reason you put the unit in standby you can fiddle with it for 15 minutes before it would eventually come online, many times only with a reboot. The new unit seems more reliable in this manor, but still can be quirky.
The software is super easy, and it is really designed to be dummy proof, but not as much for VMWare, Multiple Servers, or anything performance sensitive. It typically performs slower than an average single sata drive. Although they are marketing it for VMWare and corporate environments. A big part of this is due to the 256MB memory on the device, where only 64MB is reserved for write-cache. With capacity of over 8TB, 64Mb isn't going to do anything and using RAID5/6 (they use a priority system, but it is basically raid 5/6) write-cache is critical to having acceptable performance rates. The unit does not support jumbo frames, which is a big concern when using Gbit iSCSI. It seems to perform better with Jumbo frames, but after mixed messages from tech support, we finally were told to turn off Jumbo frames as they are not supported.
All and all it is not a system I could recommend or sell to my clients (the reason we tested the unit) as even using windows software stripping across two USB external drives would perform better, not that I ever used such a configuration, our experience seems to put it in that category. The unit is inexpensive as an iSCI SAN but the performance issues makes it unpractical for use as a SAN.
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| "Fast, easy to use" | 2009-06-27 |
| - Reviewed By User: A393ARHEDUWNYN |
Dead simple to use compared to any other RAID-ish system I've seen, and more flexible. You can mix drive sizes and it (usually) makes good use of the space (be sure to prototype your configuration first using their online drive calculator). Plus you can replace small drives with larger drives on-the-fly. Rad.
The network iSCSI connection is more than fast enough to edit several simultaneous streams of video.
Some issues:
1. It only supports HFS+ volumes up to 16TB. According to Apple's Technical Note TN1150, HFS+ can technically support volumes up to 8 Exbibytes, so this seems like an arbitrarily low limitation on the part of the DroboPro. I'd rather just create a single humongous volume, and keep expanding actual capacity as larger drives appear, instead of creating multiple 16TB volumes...
2. It doesn't perform Data Scrubbing. So if data gets silently corrupted by bad harddrives, I probably won't know about it until it's too late -- whereas with proactive Data Scrubbing (like that provided by ZFS, for example), inconsistent blocks could be automatically blacklisted.
With these two issues solved, the DroboPro would be perfect. |
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 "The most exciting storage product at this price point." | 2009-06-20 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1P3DDFL423B3C |
Storage innovation has been ongoing over the years, but there hasn't been a whole lot of "new stuff" lately, and at price points like this, there hasn't been much change at all. Traditionally if you wanted to buy a cheap disk shelf, you'd be looking at something from Apple (discontinued), Promise, possibly Adaptec, NetGear, Iomega for a cheap 1u-style NAS head--at perhaps 4x-8x the price of this Drobo Pro.
But this isn't a NAS head, and it contains 8 drives (though it works fine with fewer). Instead, you're buying a block device that you can use over iSCSI, FW800, or USB.
The key benefit Drobo is selling is the zero management of RAID and volumes and the Drobo Pro delivers on this in a massive scale. Growing a volume is as simple as adding another disk (or swapping out the indicated disk with a larger one). The concepts of RAID-5 or RAID-6 need not be understood or considered by the user other than a checkbox of "do you want this thing to survive two concurrent drive failures?". Rebuilding is taken care of.
Drobo comes with a simple GUI to monitor capacity, show overhead for protection, configure email alerts. I did run into an issue where Drobo wouldn't work with my internal mail server due to a TLS problem, which I haven't debugged much--the mail server supports TLS, so I am not sure what the problem is. The iSCSI set-up was dead easy for me--I plugged in the Drobo with USB (just to get it configured), set the iSCSI IP address, moved the Drobo to the network closet and plugged in Ethernet, and the Mac automatically found and mounted the Drobo volume.
The construction of the unit is solid. It weighs a beefy 20 lbs (empty), and the fit and finish is superb. The drive trays are easy to work with--no screwing drive sleds onto drives or dealing with a flimsy aluminum chassis per drive. This puppy is solid. It comes with all the cables you will need (GigE, USB, FW800, power). I have some enterprise storage systems in the closet along with the Drobo, but none of them intrigue visitors the way the Drobo Pro does. Plus, the Drobo is practically silent with 8 drives in it--No 1u or 3u enterprise system is this quiet.
Performance is very good for the price point--I can do 100 MB/s in test I/O very easily. Xbench shows far better I/O scores than an Apple software RAID, and, mostly, better scores than a single SATA drive. There does appear to be some overhead for the data protection, but it's marginal and beats out cheaper RAID options.
I am mostly using the Drobo Pro for test storage for software I am writing but I am seriously considering buying another Drobo Pro for real live storage for my workstation and reducing the local SATA and FW800 storage.
For the price, there's nothing else out there like this. Sure you can buy some NAS systems from various vendors, or some big honking RAIDs from California Digital or other vendors--but no one bridges the management gap like Drobo does.
Some notes: I have only used the Mac software; I have no idea how Windows support is. I also have been looking into the Linux side of things, where it gets a little more complicated, and the documentation isn't there yet--but Drobo does note Linux is beta at the moment.
The Drobo Pro is well worth the cost for anyone who needs iSCSI or bigger capacities than the regular Drobo affords. Sure, there's just one Ethernet port, and only a single power supply, but this puppy is silly cheap for what it is. Higher end features will mean a higher price, but not everyone needs those features for small office products. For me, this is a winner. I hadn't owned a Drobo before this, but I expect I will be buying more Drobos in the future.
UPDATE 28-Sep-2009: Note that this is a block device. Some other device has to provide and manage the filesystem. If you plan to use this with multiple computers over Ethernet to the same volume, that's not going to fly so well--though the DroboPro should be able to serve up separate volumes (LUNs) to different hosts (haven't tried this myself). iSCSI is just a way to serve up blocks, not provide a shared filesystem. If you are looking for a shared filesystem, you either need some other device/computer to provide NAS (e.g., CIFS or NFS services) with the DroboPro or buy something else. The appeal of iSCSI over Ethernet is cheaper cabling and simpler infrastructure vs FibreChannel. Hope this helps. |
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