To Drobo Or No Go

Posted by: Mr Underhill on 19 April 2012

To Drobo or Not to Drobo

Thought I'd document my experiences with a Drobo, what it is, why I chose one, and what I now think of it having had a play.

Why did I buy the box?
I have been toying with ripping my DVDs for a few years, but have felt no real need, and so have been using an old PC as my NAS for my music files, with a couple of external USB HDDs; but whilst fitting a couple of lights in the house a fortnight ago I turned off the power, and the old PC refused to wake back up, RIP.

With a dead DELL Desktop the issue of getting a one box replacement, in the form of a NAS, raised its head - but if I was to rip all my DVDs I needed a significant amount of storage, and so was looking for a minimum of 5 slots, for fitting 3TB HDDs.

I wanted to spend about £300. Looking around there where a few 4 disc options, but then noticed the Drobo FS, and its 5 slots; for slightly more than the assigned budget.

What is a Drobo?
Drobo is a company that specialises in storage that uses what it terms as 'Beyond RAID'.

Beyond RAID is a neat piece of thinking, and I believe is common to all the Drobo products.

When you buy a NAS, or any raided solution come to that, do you want to buy all the HDDs at once? Do you have a choice?

Want to use parity? Need at least three discs. If you decide on a mirror, as you only need one disc's worth of resilient storage, but then you run short of space, now what? Buy a third disc ....and.

Drobo takes this problem and kicks it into touch.

Buy a Drobo and two discs, it will set up a RAID 1 mirror for you. Later slot in a third and it will reshuffle the data, giving you a parity set, with no user intervention.

Bloody good stuff.

On top of this the Drobo report any share you set up as 16TB, what they call Thin Provisioning. So as the space in the Drobo increases you do not have to do explicit work within the hosting operating system to accommodate the changes in real disc size, this is abstracted.

What attracted me to this is that I can buy my storage incrementally, as I need it; and Drobo claim that they will be able to host HDDs of any size, as long as they are SATA - many NAS are constrained in the size of HDDs they can address.

I manage real storage in my data centre at work, using proper storage that I will never need, or buy, for home use. I have used many storage solutions over time, and the last thing I want is a busman's holiday when I come home, I want something that allows me to simply get on and achieve my goals - and they are?

My Requirement
1. Act as a Share and a Store for my Naim NS01;
2. Allow me set up a backup area for my wife and daughters;
3. Give me space to start storing my ripped DVDs;
4. Command line SSH access;
5. Direct file manipulation using standard Linux tools;
6. Load various additional pieces of software, as required;
7. NFS, to allow me to experiment with using the Drobo FS as a store for VM Machines;
8. Rsync, to allow me to set up auto backup of the various laptops round the house;
9. Load and run upnp server, so that I don't have to run a separate PC with this Daemon.

So, does it work? Are there any issues?
As a product I would say that the Drobo attempts to major on usability. As such it seems to me that it needs to work in the same way as Apple products are reputed to do, supremely well designed; yes, you pay a premium, but what you get is a seamless user experience. Does it measure up?

Setup
The box is very well packaged, and reminded me of the Oppo in this respect, and the build quality is very good.

As I do not use a dhcp server getting a static IP address onto a box is always a bit more awkward, but this was actually very straight forward, and a lot better than Naim, as long as you have a Windows or MAC machine handy.

Having got the box I slotted in two 3TB discs and waited as it booted, BOTH the discs reported as being defective.

I took the discs out, put one back, no good; tried picking different slots, no good; tried ....you get the picture!

To cut a long, and boring, story short - it was the firmware, needed updating. OK, things do move on, but 3TB discs have been around for a while, and I would have thought that Drobo could include a comment to check on the Firmware in their setup instructions, wasted 40 minutes of my life.

The Good
Beyond RAID
--Seems to work. As discs are added it segues between RAID 1 & 5, and just makes a pool of storage available.
Thin Provisioning.
--Any share reports as being 16TB - even though my box currently only has 6TB on it. No need to manage partition sizes etc on the target OS.
SSH access
--Yep, but see 'The Bad'.
Backup Storage for family laptops.
--Works as expected
Naim
--Streams and rips as expected
DLNA
--I am running MediaTomb that is serving up my MKV files very nicely.

Additionally from a Linux POV the shares can be easily mounted and exploited. In fact when I first was setting up the DroboApps it was easy to copy the required files onto the DroboApp share from Linux, whereas Windows XP kept on giving my a share error, despite the Drobo Dashboard saying it was locally mounted.

The Bad
Drobo Dashboard
--Hate this. Why, with a NAS would you NOT make the interface available via http? Why should I need a Windows or Mac to run a standalone .exe!
Droboapps
--Like all NASes that I have used this thing is based on Linux, but has bad useability.
--Why would you NOT build in NFS, Rsync, CRON, SSH and UPNP from the off - in addition to samba that is there?
--It feels like they didn't want this getting out to users, but have bowed to pressure. I suppose in this they have been more graceful than Apple, and
--have tried to turn it to a positive.
--That said there is no official support, and you need these to load SSH, Rsync and NFS, amongst others.
Available interfaces
--Only RJ45. I would LOVE there to be USB as well, to allow fast time data movement.
User Security
--Manually set up local users giving them either no, full or read-only access.
--This is shared using SMB via SAMBA. If I was going to use this in any professional sense I would want to see if I could hook this into some form of Domain Security - without minor, let alone major, surgery.
DLNA
--The upnp server you can load are fuppes, MiniDLNA and MediaTomb.
--Tried fuppes, had a tendency to crash ungracefully.

The Indifferent
Data throughput.
--Read a number of comments that the data throughput is slow.
--Testing it with iperf indicated 97Mbps, on a 100Mbps network.
--But i would like an alternative, faster route for large data movements.

Untested
NFS
RSync

Both loaded via DroboApps - neither used in anger - yet.

DLNA

You can also load MiniDLNA, which does have transcoding, but reportedly stutters. The Drobo has a single core ARM chip with 128MB of RAM. That said I also have TvMobili loaded on a DELL Laptop with a Dual Core 2.16Ghz processor & 4GB RAM, and that sucks with transcoding via VLC.
Interestingly TvMobili on the laptop works well with the USB HDDs, with network shares, on the Drobo, it seems to be having issues; but this is probably a generic issue, not Drobo related.

The Conclusion
Let's look at my requirement again:

1. Act as a Share and a Store for my Naim NS01; YES
2. Allow me set up a backup area for my wife and daughters; YES
3. Give me space to start storing my ripped DVDs; YES
4. Command line SSH access; YES
5. Direct file manipulation using standard Linux tools; SOME
6. Load various additional pieces of software, as required; SOME
7. NFS, to allow me to experiment with using the Drobo FS as a store for VM Machines; Loaded & UNTESTED
8. Rsync, to allow me to set up auto backup of the various laptops round the house; Loaded & UNTESTED
9. Load and run upnp server, so that I don't have to run a separate PC with this Daemon. YES, but no transcoding.

Well, I do like the easy flexibilty of adding on discs and knowing that no surgery is required to make the space available.

I can stream all the content I want to multiple locations concurrently.

The DroboApps comes over as a sticking plaster to me, and the OS has been truncated. Knowing the sort of use this is likely to be put to I am surprised various software tools were not loaded as standard. This is hardly the seemless user experience I was hoping for.

I think as a home NAS the Drobo does have a lot going for it and overall I am not unhappy, but I would be more circumspect in a professional setup.

M

Posted on: 19 April 2012 by garyi

I had a drobo, in the 9 months I had it 2 harddrives failed bothj new for the task.

The drobo was slow slow slow

The dashboard/apps affair at the time was just appauling, I only hope thats improved.

All in all, nice write up, but I wouldn't touch one with yours. I had Zero confidence that my data was safe, constant constant permissions errors, multi mounts under OSX made it an extremly frustrating enterprise, and its proprietory software is at the minimum a concern.

Coupled with the fact they don't want you looking at your own logs, and that you need to own the equipment to use their forum, I am very glad I got out when I did.

I got a QNAP with the money I sold the drobo for with change left over, and its a whole different experience, none the least of which was a three times speed increase.

Good luck with it, but in my experience don't trust it with your data, like all raid you need to back up obviously. But in nine months I had to start again three times.

Posted on: 19 April 2012 by Mr Underhill

Hi Gary,

I was waiting for you to chip in!

I'll be backing my files up to external USB HDD for my off-site backups - so will have a DR. In the meanwhile I'll see how it performs over time - if I echo your experience it will be gone, but I will be saddened, as I think the idea of 'Beyond Raid' is very good.

Posted on: 19 April 2012 by garyi

I am not against it either, but in the end much preferred the open standard of a linux platform, and yes being an apple fan bois the irony is not lost on me.

Posted on: 19 April 2012 by Mr Underhill

Posted on: 19 April 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk

I like the idea of Drobo, but a good friend of mine who is very Mac centric had terrible data reliability problems and corruption with OSX. I hear it works better with MS, but reading the 'net performance is a real issue especially when getting full. Also you can only access (or used to be able to only access) the user support forums when you are a registered customer.. It kind of suggested to me what are you trying to hide?? I have decided not to go down the Drobo route, but do like the idea.

Simon

Posted on: 20 April 2012 by Mr Underhill

Hi Simon,

Haven't tried to go on their support, although I have registered the box.

As I put in the review: ..iperf indicated 97Mbps, on a 100Mbps network.

I have streamed movies from it to three different clients at the same time - and the NS01 works very happily.

That said I was conscious of Gary's reservations, time will tell. Hopefully I won't be back with my tail between my legs.

So far so good, only twenty floors to go!

P.S. Ordered a third 3TB disc today.

Posted on: 20 April 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Hi Mr Underhill, I wish you good luck, let us know how you get on, I might yet be tempted.....

Posted on: 20 April 2012 by garyi

Are you sure of your figures?

if you are actually achieving 9MB/s of a 10MB/s network, thats impressive, not so much for the drobo but for your network

I suspect your network is gigabit, ie. 100MB/s, in which case the drobo will be hitting about 10% which fits what I was getting.

Or, put another way, shit.

The QNAP that replaced my drobo, is no where near the top of the range and I get average 35MB/s for lumpy files 50MB/s

So against drobo, around 3 times faster. But thats only where it starts. I am not showing off about qnap, just trying to explain the limitations of drobo. They stick the crapest hardware on there man!

Posted on: 28 April 2012 by Mr Underhill

Hi Gary,

Not ignoring you - just had a laptop failure last Friday, from which I have been recovering.

My network is 100Mbps

In terms of real life experience:

I moved a 26GB file from my NEW laptop to the drobo last night - it took 46 minutes.

The best I could have hoped for is about 37 minutes, so not too shabby.

That said, that i using NFS, and that IS significantly faster than SMB.

I am currently backing up 1.3TB from the drobo to a USB HDD via an XP laptop in the loft, and that is 1.5 to 2 x slower.

Did try loading Cygwin and using Rsyncetc, but suspect this just proxies into the standard Windows network stack, anyway it was no faster.

Upside:

Added a third 3TB disk on Friday - worked as advertised.

Downside:

Drobo using a non-standard RAID solution means that should (when) a failure occur you cannot use any standard recovery tools, so making sure I have my backup plans in place and automated ahead of time.