Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I found a product video. The DroboShare for setting it up on your network sounds cool.

http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx

Yeah, I told my bro-in-law and colleagues that every man for themselves and ordered two separately as well. Thanks for pointing out the HDD deal SD!

My Drobo arrived today .. yay .. but I have to wait for the two hard drives to arrive .. hopefully tomorrow.

NICE! I'm curious how it handles large PS files.

I would be so all over this, if it weren't for the fact that you need a separate device to get network connectivity on a drobo. Having to pay an extra $100-150 for a $5 NIC chip is silly.

No argument there that the Droboshare attachment is a bit pricey, however it's a bit more than just a gigabit ethernet adapter. It will let you connect two Drobo's together, and since one Drobo can handle up to 16TB, you could get 32TB of storage on a single Droboshare.

But if you look at other relatively good four-bay NAS (ie.: from <a href="http://infonec.com/site/main.php?module=catalog&catID=1666&ParcatID=156">Infonec</a>) the price of the Drobo + Droboshare isn't all that far off from some other good four-bay NAS.

I created a 500MB Photoshop file and it took about 30 seconds to write the file to Drobo. Not a great performance, but acceptable.

Thanks for doing a test GummieBear.

My pleasure!

Thanks for the info, Tanner. I didn't realize the extra capability that Droboshare provided. I personally have always seen the extra value in a Drobo from the live-swap features, etc much more so than the fact that it's a 4-bay enclosure; though that too is a valid point.

Still waiting on the hard drives One is saying it's in transit since yesterday and the other one is still in production. Anyone get their hard drives?

Same here. My two orders have said "Shipped" since yesterday. My coworker got his Drobo in yesterday. Hummmm....

You guys see this?

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/product ... u=A1607346

I would check the transfer speed before buying. My Western Digital World Edition 1T Network version averages 7MB/s over a 1GB LAN. Hardly fast enough as a primary storage. Newer NAS are probably faster but better check first.

Hooray! My drives just arrived. I'm going to pick up that Mediasonic eSata RAID enclosure.

To be honest, that doesn't seem like a good deal at all:
http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.ph ... id=NTW.791

One of my NAS units at home is a D-Link 323 with a couple of drives in it and it's about $100-$200 cheaper to set up than the Netgear one from Dell.

These two devices are in a different class of NAS. The D-Link 323 is a simple no frill storage and does not support local connection (if I read the spec correctly).

The Netgear will outperform the DLink easily.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/componen ... temid,190/

None of these NAS will support local connectivity. You configure network shares and use them over the network, you can't access these network shares over a USB/firewire connection.

FYI, one hard drive arrived today. Stilling waiting on my last one.

That's strange. I get pretty well 10MB/s over a 100Base connection to my D-Link DNS323 with a 1.5GB Seagate. I suspect that there's a bottleneck somewhere other than the HD.

Don't confuse megabits and megabytes here. 10 mebgabytes per second on a gigabit network is about the max you'll get. Factors that prevents reaching this speed includes network overhead and hardware limitations, especially the cpu horsepower when reading and more so, writing data to the drive (assuming here if you are using two or more drives for redundancy).

Got my Mediasonic RAID enclosure and installed the two drives. So far all's good. I'll test it out with some large PS files when I get home (if I get home) from work tonight.

The enclosure's instructions isn't the greatest I might add...

Couldn't wait for the second drive so I picked up another one at CanadaComputers. This Drobo is really plug and play. It does come with software but it's really for monitoring. So far so great. Feels good to know that my pictures are 'safer' now.

I'm wondering now if it may be worth it to by a PC Card with a firewire 800 port on it to benefit from the increased performance? I have a 4pin firewire port built into my laptop but as I understand it this would decrease the performance by half. Or should I just stick to USB 2.0?

I was using USB 2.0 and then bought a FireWire 800 card for the PC. Did not notice much performance gains by this doing this. Your mileage may vary, though.

There's a transfer rate chart on DROBO's site.

http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

Thanks for the info.

Best is to run the performance test yourself and compare it to what drobo has mentioned. Vendors will never claim it can actually do that speed, hence the "read up to xx MB/s".

If you're on windows, you could use a command like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy">robocopy</a> to copy over a folder with a bunch of file to and from the device and after the copy job is done, it'll tell you the throughput.

I initially used USB 2.0 and I thought the FireWire800 is claimed to be so much faster by DataRobotics so I bought an FW800 card, and well, I saw not significant differences. The FW card I have runs on PCI-64 bit, not PCI-e so that may make a difference, but according to the card manufacturer, it shouldn't. So I don't know.

That is pretty much the theoretical maximum of a 100Mbps (100/8 = 12.5MB/s max).

I get around 20MB/s (160Mbps) running over a Gigabit LAN writting to my DNS-323 with two drives configured in a RAID 1 config. I have read that this is about the maximum speed for that device for reasons that Tanner mentioned above. I work locally and syncronize to the NAS as a backup platform.