Drobo has announced that their new NAS box with ethernet connectivity, the Drobo 5N is very close to release. Full specs were not released, but the new NAS server should be replacing the Drobo FS. Hopefully, the new Drobo 5N will come through with higher performance than the relatively slow Drobo FS.
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My friend purchased the 5N since I have the FS (and have been happy with it) and I raved that they advertised speeds up to 5X faster with their NEW Drobo 5N. So we set him up with a similar config - dual disk redundancy of Three (3), 2TB WD "Green" drives, and he has a DROBO-recommended Kingston 64 GB mini-SSD installed @ the bottom of the 5N (their "accelerator" drive, presumably for read/write caching at faster speeds). However, in tests writing both TO and FROM the drive, my FS outperformed the 5D - CONTRARY to their marketing. I will contact DROBO tomorrow and will post my response. The file used for testing was a 4GB .tar.gz file (cPanel backup of a website).
ReplyDeleteHere are the times we got with dragging and dropping files and using my iPhone's stopwatch:
DROBO Write test (writing TO the DROBO)
from Mac to FS: 3m 12.6s
from Mac to 5N: 5m 55s
DROBO Read test (Copying file FROM the DROBO)
FROM FS to Mac desktop: 1min 17sec
FROM 5N to Mac desktop: 5min 48sec
In both cases, the hyped 5N underperformed substantially. I look forward to discussing with support how I can achieve their "up to 5x faster than the FS" claim. I am running on a Gigabit Ethernet with both DROBOs plugged directly into the gigabit router (as is my Mac). We never performed more than one action at a time (at to not skew results). We are running the latest Drobo Dashboard and Firmware on both DROBOs.
-Allen