Hard Drive Storage: Drobo

[mark-mvs]

A while back I posted with some questions about backing up footage redundantly and got a lot of great responses from you all. First, let me say thank you for your input, it was very helpful.

Wanted to let you all know that I ended up going with the Drobo S 5 bay unit and am very happy with it. Very intuitive and user friendly and does a great job of automatically shuttling the data around between the hard drives. I use it for backing up projects that I'm currently working on (as well as my internal hard drives.) Then when the project is finished I save it on a Blu-ray storage disk and remove it from my hard drives.

Now I actually sleep at night!

Thanks again,
Mark

[ampsonic]

What connection method are you using? Have you tested it as primary storage? I'm basically wondering if it is fast enough to edit off of?

[HankCastello]

Thanks for posting back with hands-on feedback!

[mark-mvs]

My pleasure Hank! Oh and to answer the speed quetsion, yes,  it's plenty fast enough. I got an Esata card and run the drobo into that and edit directly off the drobo no problem. My original intention was to edit from my internal hard drives and then just save the footage/current projects on the drobo for extra back up. However after reading the specs and consulting with a lot of video editors who told me they use it as their primary hard drive I figured "why not?" The Esata card was like $40. (Best $40 I've spent in a long time.)

[DavidPartington]

I also have a Drobo S that I use for offline / backup storage.   I edit on my internal raid then use the drobo copy function to sync the files to the Drobo S.   

I'm using the esata connection (via a plug-in card on my Mac Pro).  (see below for comments on main storage)

The Drobo has performed very well except for one glitch that took a while to overcome.   Basically, the Drobo will dramatically (and artificially) slow the write speed to the Drobo when it becomes more than 95% full.  I have 5x2TB HDDs installed and using dual redundancy mode this give me a little over 5.5TB to play with.  Over the summer, with all the weddings coming and going I was pushing that limit pretty hard and it started to slow.  Pretty darn useless when that happens (why 95% and not 99% ?).  So, I cleared off some projects to my LTO drive and that left about 30% free.  Unfortunately, Drobo did not go back to the original speed, so I called them.  They asked for the diagnostics file (which I sent them) and they then e-mailed to say they would replace the unit because they could see this one had crashed and they wanted it back for further diagnostics.  So....

They send a replacement unit.  I removed the 5 HDDs from my old one, plugged in to the new one in and everything came up fine.  However, next morning I came to it and the unit had unexpectedly shut down overnight.   I powered it on and it told me that the top drive was corrupt and needed replacing.   I popped the drive out and back in again (same drive) and Drobo dutifully rebuilt the drive and all was well..... until the next morning when the same thing happened.   I called Drobo and they sent me a third unit.   Having swapped the drives to the new unit, it rebuilt the top drive and all was well.... until the next morning!   So, while they wanted to send me a fourth unit (very good of them I guess) I said it was unlikely that 2 consecutive units would have the same problem, and it was more likely to be the external power supply at fault.  After a little back and forth they agreed to send a new PSU instead.  Now, if they had paid attention they would have sent me a PSU for the Drobo S and not the original 4 drive model, but they didn't.  Arrgghh!

So another call was made and they finally replaced the PSU with another Drobo S PSU and since then everything has been fine.  We'll never know if the PSU was the cause of the original speed problem, or the Drobo crashing, but at least Drobo covered all the shipping costs to/from Germany (I am in the UK) via UPS and other than being without my daily backups for about 10 days I am at least happy with the way they handled the problems and were happy to ship advanced replacement units.  Not every company is so willing to help.

In terms of using it for main storage, it's not something I would want to do for video editing, but I ran the Black Magic Disk Speed Test utility on all my drives and this is how they came out:

• Internal SATA (Main system drive) 75.2MB/s Read 74.5MB/s Write
• Internal RAID 0 (3x 2TB SATA) 315.5MB/s Read, 310.9MB/s Write  (THIS is what I use for video editing!)
• External Sata Dock (via same eSata card as the drobo) 51.8MB/s Read 43.5MB/s Write
• External FireWire 800 32.6MB/s Read, 24.2MB/s Write (this drive is almost full so it's not a good test - all HDDs are slower towards the center of the disk)
• External FireWire 400 RAID 0 (2 drives) 40.3MB/s Read, 39.6MB/s Write
• Drobo S (5x2TB drives with dual redundancy) 73.2MB/s Read, 48.8MB/s Write

So, on this basis, the Drobo is about as fast for reading as a single internal Sata drive, but writing is only about two thirds the speed.  Current drive usage at the moment is about 70%, so again things may be faster / slower based on how full the hard disks are at any given point in time.

[mark-mvs]

Wow David! You've got a lot of hard drives! I'm sorry to hear you initially had such problems with the Drobo S, maybe it WAS the power supply.

As for the speed testing, I've never tested my hard drives but I'm sure they are not as fast as yours! I edit HD directly from the Drobo and sometimes from my internal hard drives and everything works smoothly and perfectly. If I decide I need more speed in the future I might do a hardware raid 0 with 2 or 3 of my internal hard drives like you. BTW I heard that they've got 3TB internals out now and that the 4TB internals will be out next year. Have you heard similar stuff?

[DavidPartington]

The only reason the 3TB drives were held back so long was due to Windows incompatibility.   Not sure what changed to finally allow them to release them, other than labelling them as incompatible with XP and earlier versions. 

[mark-mvs]

Makes sense, sometimes the hard drive manufactures don't put in the time to make a version of their software that is completely compatible with Mac and another that is completely compatible with PC. They usually do a good job on one and a so so job on the other.

Oh and speaking of power supply, I meant to mention this in my previous post. Since I live in an area that often has power interruptions during heavy storm activity, I'm going to get an UPC unit with a big enough battery to power my Mac Pro, Monitor and Drobo long enough to properly shut the system down in the event of a power outage. I've experienced first hand how power interruption can cause data loss and data/file corruption. So I don't know if you ever have power outages where you are but if you do, you may want to consider this as well.

[HankCastello]

My area of the country might win a contest for the most and longest power outages.  A couple years ago, during an ice storm, we went nearly three weeks (I think it was 18 days) without electricity.  We have a generator just out side my office (office is converted bedroom in our home) and the lines come into the office and to two outlet bars next to my ups systems. 

During outages, I just start the generator, plug the ups systems into the outlet bars and continue working without interruption, but if the juice stays off more than a few hours, I have to power down two of my computers so we can hook up the refrigerator.