Drobo, just good for backups, giving up on online usage

My Drobo 2nd generation is just too slow. I have it hooked up with FW800 to my iMac and it's just painful. My daughter complained once again the other day that iMovie was not working. What she meant was it's too slow to be useful.

At that point, I decided to move iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes on to a 1Tb drive (USB 2.0). I'm using Drobo purely as a time machine drive now and for archiving stuff. I made a 2Tb limited bundle in to which I put the time machine backups. I copy the external USB drive and internal drives to time machine backups.

This should be and is a lot faster than before. To put it in perspective. A single external USB 2.0 drive is faster in all circumstances than a firewire 800 attached Drobo 2nd gen with 4 drives inside. So much for an array being quicker. It's a consumer device and they saved too much money by not putting enough processing power in the unit. The new Drobo S is 800 dollars instead of 400 but apparently, it's not much faster than the current unit even on eSATA.

Comments

[Jim Sherhart]

Billy - I've been following the blog posts on your Drobo and am sorry to hear the performance is not keeping up with your demands. You did mention on an earlier post that you were seeing ~30MB/s with 4 drives using FW800. In our internal performance testing, we have seen a range of 32-49MB/s depending on benchmark used, average file size, and reads vs. writes. Your experience is definitely on the low end of what I would expect which leads me to believe that something is not right. Have you been in touch with support? I'd be happy to put you directly in touch with one of our L3 specialists to see if they can suggest anything that might help speed things up.

Regarding the Drobo S, it has a faster processing engine so we have seen ~20% boost using FW800 and 70-90MB/s sustained using eSATA, so it is significantly faster than the Drobo 2nd Gen. We are running customer loyalty deals right now if you are interested in a Drobo S.

Regards,

Jim Sherhart
Sr. Director of Marketing
Data Robotics
www.drobo.com

[Billy Newport]

I have not been in touch with support, I do read your private support forum and everybody has the same problem as far as I can tell.

It's a consumer device that my mother should be able to use. I think it's not just a throughput problem, it's an I/O ops per sec problem also which again is amazing given the number of drives inside. I have a stock iMac running Snow Leopard which is about as standard as you can get and Drobo does not perform well at all on that setup. I don't think it's a tuning issue, it's a product issue. If I was using a home brew PC wit h some weird configuration then maybe, but it's an iMac with the Drobo attached directly with FW800 running the latest Snow Leopard. Exactly, what in my setup could cause it to be so slow. It's a cookie cutter configuration. This should just work.

I'll do some application benchmarks showing iPhoto libraries on both and iMovie. I think you guys need to expand your benchmarking efforts to be more real world.

[Michael Forte]

I have the same problems. I put my iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes files on my DROBO. On my new 17" MPB at 3.0GHz it took no more than about 10 seconds to start iPhoto locally. It now takes at least 5 minutes from the DROBO using Droboshare over a Gigabit ethernet home network with no other users.
It just shouldn't take this long. This straight comparison tells me the data is not getting out of the DROBO fast enough. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about drives so I can't go into much more detail than this.

[Michael Forte]

I should also add that my drobo is formatted using EXT3 and 2-2TB volumes so I can back up multiple Macs using Time Machine and BackMyFruitUp.

[Dave Sadler]

Unfortunately, I too am having Drobo regret. I've got 4 1tb drives installed and had it plugged directly into an iMac(xmas08) via firewire800. iMovie was all but unusable with constant playback pauses. I've attached the overpriced droboshare to it and plan on using it as a time machine since apple's time capsule has proven itself to be unreliable. Looks like it's time for a usb2 drive on the kitchen counter... I was sooo hoping to keep it minimal up there.

[Billy]

To add injury to insult, I opened a ticket with Drobo and attached a diagnostics file as the same time. They ignored the diagnostic file and asked for some rote information probably part of a quality workflow or something. In doing so and not actually looking at the diagnostic report they didn't tell me that two of the drives were reporting errors so how would I be supposed to know this and replace them before data loss occurs? Absolutely crazy.

[Manoj]

I am glad that I found this blog. I have been considering a Drobo S for use with iMovie and iPhoto. With all of my family memories building up and using tons of space with the HD camcorder, I have implemented a multi-factor backup strategy that involves Time Machine and manual raw backups of the FW800 drives I am using.

I wanted to add a RAID solution into the mix to further secure the data, but it seems like there are performance issues still.

Are there any recommended products out there that have blazing performance?

[John Huang]

Believe or not. Using FW800 connection is almost 4 times slower than the USB one on my 2nd gen. of Drobo. The latest firm ware does not help either. It time to shop real solution. Very disappointed drobo user.

[Mike]

Am so glad I found this thread, feels more honest than normal product bashing forum posts.

I was literally about to buy a Drobo S for some large iMovie, iTunes & Lightroom libraries, but am now reconsidering.

Does anyone have any recommendations for another solution for my MBP?

[Billy Newport]

I'd buy a qnap if I were you. Thats my next purchase OR buy a mirrored 2 x 2TB setup which would be a lot cheaper.