Drobo Benchmark: How Fast is the Drobo?
If you do much with computers, you might have heard of the home backup solution Drobo, which offers a redundant storage solution with striping and mirroring without any of the pain of a RAID array. Their cute devices take in four drives, use the space of one for redundancy, and give you protection against a single drive failure.
I wondered how fast it actually is, so I ran HD Tune, which measures the read speed of the drive:
On average, you’ll get 16MB/s out of the drobo, which is equivalent to probably half the speed of any of the drives you put into your Drobo. Maximum PC has a review in which the tried a Drobo with 1-4 drives, and they got an even 15.5MB/s in each configuration.
Update: I have several seagate drives in my Drobo, which come by default with a jumper limiting them to SATA I (150 mbs). After I removed the jumper so they could use the faster SATA II, benchmarks gave me an average read speed of 16.3 MB/s. Reports indicate that the write speed may be faster, but I haven’t confirmed this.
Update: On Windows 7, and using the latest in firmware, I get 19.3MB/s average rate, 24ms average access time. On my other Drobo, I get 20.1 MB/s and 28ms access time. I can’t say whether it’s windows or the latest firmware, but it’s nice things are getting faster!
| This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is tagged with seagate drives, hd tune, redundant storage, raid array, drive failure, home backup, storage solution, maximum pc, access time, backup solution, drobo, nice things, mbs, jumper, redundancy, benchmarks, benchmark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
Did some further benchmarking at http://randomspitting.net/gobbets/random/drobo to figure out the impact of DroboShare
NOTE: This is for the USB ONLY version. This benchmark is not for the firewire version.
OK, but USB 2.0 is capable of 60MB/s, so I don’t really blame that for the performance I measured.
60MB/s out of USB 2.slow? You’ve been reading Intel’s marketing materials again. I’ve never seen a USB 2.0 device give me more than 20MB/s in any real world test. Firewire 400 is twice as fast, in the real world, and Firewire 800 twice again as fast.
The USB 2.0 speed you got out of your Drobo is about what I’d expect out of a typical USB 2.0 device.
I’d love to see a benchmark of the FW800 version of Drobo, just to see if it really is slow, or if it’s just the slow USB interface.
The benchmarks on this forum seem to indicate that the Drobos are limited not by USB or Firewire but by the first gen and second gen devices.
The benchmark here is a Drobo 1, probably the 2nd gen one is significantly faster.
Thanks for the info.
This Roboshare doddad sounds more like something for the really cool Mac and Linux users to install and brag about rather than anything useful. You can get raid and mirroring for free with most current OS's and pay less of a performance penalty.
I really don't understand why so many of the cool people constantly push poor technolgy solutions
[...] For $999 you get 4TB of storage (2.66TB actually free w/ RAID5), sluggish transfer speeds (10.5MB/s writing and 12MB/s pulling data), three USB ports, and Gigabit ethernet. You could get a faster Drobo for $100 more. And, in my tests, the better looking Drobo gets 16MB/s, and is also hot-swappable. You can buy the enclosure and put in 1.5TB drives to get a 6TB rig if you are so inclined, something that’s less possible with the prepackaged WD NAS solution. [...]