Drobo or other options..

[dawks]

I've been looking for a long time for a good large, redundant storage system. The drobo has really got me interested but I've been concerned about performance.

Has a site done a comprehensive review of the various units? Or is there a page with some well done benchmarks? I keep googling, but I'm not finding much info.

I see the original drobo is only doing ~20meg/sec. I'd like to see something closer to 70-90meg/sec. Any suggestions?

How about a Drobo S with a eSATA PCIe card? And whats a fast but cheap eSATA card (no RAID needed obviously)?

Any word on the speed of the Drobo FS with its single gigabit ethernet port?

Thanks

 

[Mark R]

Drobo claim 30-40 MB/s for the drobo FS.

That's a lot better than many other cheap NASs, but you'll probably still be dissapointed.

If you are sharing to multiple PCs then you need something with more CPU. These CPU limited NASs lag catastrophically when one client is writing - so badly that other clients may time out.

If you can afford a more powerful NAS, then I'd suggest the QNAP x59 series units. Dual core atom CPU is plenty powerful for 90 MB/s with lots of CPU spare for installable modules.

 

[Mark R]

Dp

 

[pjkenned]

How large and what's your budget

 

[dawks]

How large and what's your budget

Less than $1,000 with 2-4 drives

 

[pjkenned]

Ah ok. One thing to think about would be a HP MediaSmart WHS. They have great backup software, great other software (WHS specific plus... it is windows so you can get almost anything to work easily). I think they hold 4 drives but the newer models support eSATA + port multipliers so if you ever wanted to expand you could.

I'm not sure if they do 100MB/s like my WHS does over a single GigE link... but generally they are pretty fast.

 

[Emulex]

WHS can read from two drives in a filesystem level raid so it can make some speed happen. it may not be 100mb per connection but say two people read the same file - each could get 100mb assuming enough drives and DFS-R action.

why don't you just stick some drives in a cheap celeron boxen - even a single core celeron 420 or dual core celeron-D with 512 of ram probably run ZFS pretty fast- openfiler works great - old copy of windows 2000 works Excellent too if you can get one for free and need some active directory and true ntfs love.

win7 works fine within the confines of the limit of 10 connection limit.

you can find really old windows 2003 storage servers - rock those - nfs/iscsi(solid)/smb/full active directory 2003 support, DFS,etc. someone probably bought an old ml110 storage server from hp and doesn't want it any more - guess what the license sticks with the machine that $2000 machine thats 3 years old now worth $200 and throw some drives/controller and rock out.

also hp storage servers can do print services or anything else - the nfs part sucks(ballz) but the iscsi is quite decent and very solid. the smb is very solid. the active directory - 2003 level nobody touches that - ntfs native so you can keep hierarchical permissions preserved.

if you have technet - you could use that 2008 storage server iso - but that would not be legal - on any pc likewise. or to trial it.

kind of nice to have a bunch of old crappy boxes boot usb to ESXi and use iscsi. on the same filesystem that you have nfs for mounting datastore iso's and smb for some share files.

 

[pjkenned]

WHS can read from two drives in a filesystem level raid so it can make some speed happen. it may not be 100mb per connection but say two people read the same file - each could get 100mb assuming enough drives and DFS-R action.

A single 7,200 rpm drive can sustain 100MB/s fairly easily these days in sequential reads. I have a WHS test Hyper-V VM that does it using a single pass-through disk.

 

[Emulex]

that is 1 user defragged. try 4 users - 3 writing and 1 reading and let me know what your sequential read speed is. heavy fragmentation will occur when you have many people writing at once - i schedule backups to happen non-overlapped. results are files with 30-40 frags rather than 60K per file. no joke.

 

[pjkenned]

Well there's always DiskKeeper My largest drive that gets backed up is 250GB total (<50&#37; free) none of the others are over 100GB (all drives are SSD's). Most of my files/ reads tend to be several GB so that is probably the reason I'm not used to seeing fragmentation happen too much... well that and on my main WHS I have a big Areca Raid 6 array so 100MB/s isn't a limiting factor. Good point on the fragmentation though.