Droboshare experiences
Sunday, May 3, 2009 at 9:04AM This post is basically an email I received from John Sammons following his experiences with the Droboshare. He purchased one as part of the same bundle I did but decided to experiment further. I've not had chance to replicate this on my system but the results he came up with were very interesting. I've reproduced his email in full below with his permission.
Thanks John....
Got the Drobo and am very pleased with it. Interestingly I have found that a bit of time with DroboShare pays dividends in the performance stakes.
I used the HD Benchmark program linked within your blog and found pretty much the same result as you. When I linked the Drobo to the Time Capsule via USB I got slightly improved network share performance but was concerned that the Airport Utility was reporting it as a 256GB drive instead of the current 2TB/16TB drive it should be.
My next test was to download the JumbShare application and configure my MacPro to use Jumbo Frames. This proved to give some improvement in Droboshare but not great when connected to my netgear Gigabit switch, approximately 15% more. Then came a rather outstanding discovery. I was never sure if the Netgear, being a cheap 5 port device, supported all the Gigabit ethernet standards. So I tried connecting both the MacPro and Droboshare to the Timecapsule Gigabit Ethernet as this as my most up to date switch. Wow.... this made a bit of a difference, see below.
I have run the test multiple times and with different file sizes and seem to consistently get between 92MB/s and 102MB/s, thats at least 3 x FW800 performance! Checking the Drobospace forums did not seem to give the impression this was a fast device but the results show otherwise. I also confirmed this with Disk Bench as I was so sure it was a rogue set of results.
My Drobo versions are:
Drobo Firmware: 1.3.0
Droboshare Firmware: 1.1.1
I have also moved the Drobo back and forth to the Droboshare/Direct connect with no problems. The key seems to be putting it in standby first to ensure a save transfer.
I also managed to get my Drobocare uplifted to 2 years which is the EU warranty, I had to exchange several emails with Data Robotics to get them to acknowledge that it should be a 2 year key from 1st May, I don't know if you have done that but its worth it for 2 years piece of mind.
Feel free to blog any of the above if it is of interest to anyone.
Reader Comments (6)
That's impressive - I was running the test on my local disk on my MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz with 4GB ram and only got ~40 MB/s - that does not sound right does it?
Don, as a quick aside, nice utility! I've been using Disk Speed Bench X, but it's nice to see one that shows what video you can safely use on what drives.
@Klaus - That does sound correct, unfortunately. In fact, it almost seems a bit high, but you have a rather impressive machine running. I'm only getting about 10MB/s more than that on a striped 0 RAID that I use for my scratch disk and that's on FW800. (But an older Intel iMac.)
Where can I find this Benchmark software?
I'm considering buying a droboshare but these results sound too good to be true. USB 2.0 (which is the connection between Drobo and Droboshare) usually tops at 30 / 40 MB/s while FW800 would achieve may be 60 MB/s.
Could it be a confusion between MBytes /s and Mbit /s ?
Klaus, I have a Raid 0 array on my MacPro 4 x 2.8Ghz to get close to the 100MB/s, if it makes you feel any better my Macbook Pro gives 46MB/s with a 7200RPM drive, it is a 2.4Ghz model with 4Ghz ram. Laptop drives are slower.
The Drobo had 4 drives fitted to attain that speed and I suspect that the bottleneck over FW800 / USB became the bus speed with the Gigabit network solving that when passing the large packets that an HD video would need.
I have since reverted back to direct connection via FW800 as an SMB share causes too many problems with tools like SuperDuper and Time Machine. If they ever get a proper AFP share working then may use the Droboshare again.
Ofir: The software is linked in Don's posting below but also at:
www.unscale.com
Guys,
I am sorry, but either this test is flawed, or it's sorely mistaken results.
There is no way the DroboShare can pump out that kind of data rates (90MB/sec???) that is simply ridiculous for a product at that price point.
Droboshare does not have the processor capability to push anything above 20MB/sec. It's not meant to be high performance, even-though it's using a gigabit ethernet
I have access to a wide range of Mac hardware, from 2006 to the very latest. Perhaps you can point me to the Jumboshare software for the Mac, as well as which version/model of time capsule that you have, and I will do a test to simulate your setup.
FYI, I am getting 28MB/sec read and 19MB/Sec write, with 2 x 1TB WD 7200 drives inside the drobo, connected to a 4 core Mac pro (2.66), with 8GB of ram. Startup volume is a RAID0 software raid, with 2 drives, 500GB each, giving a 133-150MB/sec read, 80MB/sec write. HD Speed Test provide a sustained results of 138MB/sec. For comparison from HD speed test, the Drobo v2 gives a 18MB/sec sustained over firewire800.
Please provide link for the JumboShare software.
Thanks.