Data Robotics DroboPro review
The distributor for Data Robotics in Singapore, Cathay Photo was so nice to loan me an unit of DroboPro with 4 1TB harddisks to do some iSCSI testing. For the uninitiated, Drobo is a data storage solution that provides enterprise level scalable architecture and data protection with their BeyondRAID technology. It combines a straightforward user experience and easy configuration. Please note, this is not a NAS device. Its a Direct Attached Storage.
Unpacking the box, reveals the DroboPro in a black colored fabric bag and a box of accessories. I would say it’s very well packed and protected for shipping. Below are some pictures of the DroboPro.
The rear panel of the DroboPro consists of the standard 3-pin AC outlet next to the power button, 2 FW800 1394B ports, an USB port and a Gigabit Ethernet port for iSCSI. It’s disappointing there is no eSATA ports. With a throughput of eSATA at 3Gbps, it would have been a big challenge to iSCSI.
Opening the magnetic front panel shows the 8 hotswap harddisk bays. Behind the front panel is a handy chart of what the lights below the harddisk means. In case you need to know why there is a red light on one of the HDD, you can always refer to the chart. For those in who work with enterprise storage, the color coding of the lights are the same as the industry standard. Red for failure, Orange for rebuild or redundancy loss and Green for all ok.
For initial setup, you will have to pop in the included CD in the computer and install the Drobo Dashboard software. After installation, we will see the following screen telling you that Drobo is ready for connection.
At this instance, just plug in the USB or FW800 cable from the DroboPro to your computer. Drobo Dashboard will automatically detect the device and tells you how much capacity is available.
The Drobo Dashboard is a very easy to use application. If you are familiar with harddisk setup, the following screenshots should be quite self explanatory.
In the Advanced Controls of the Dashboard, there extra settings for DroboPro only. These are settings for Dual Disk Redundancy, Disk Drive Spin Down and iSCSI settings. By default, Dual Disk Redundancy is unchecked. Checking it will enable the DroboPro to sustain up 2 harddisk failures simultaneously. This is the best feature of DroboPro. No other product in this price range gives you Dual Disk Redundancy or RAID6. This is key for storage devices that have capacities in the terabytes. To rebuild a volume of 8TB is going to take some time. The probability of another HDD failure during this period increases with the number of harddisks and capacities. If another disk fails during rebuilding on Single disk redundancy mode, all data is lost.
The other feature, the Disk Drive Spin Down is sort of a power saving feature to put the HDD to sleep when not in use. The drawback is it will take a while to spin up the HDD if you need to access the volume. For better performance, switch it off.
The other option is the iSCSI tab. There are just 2 settings to config. Automatic IP or static IP. The iSCSI interface is enabled by default, no need to manually enable it. All DroboPro needs is an IP address for it to talk to any iSCSI Initiators. For this test, I set it to static IP. It’s always a good practice to set static IPs for network devices such as servers, storage and printers as it will be easier to manage in the future.
After setting the iSCSI, we are good to go. Remove the USB/FW800 cable and connect the DroboPro on a CAT6 cable to a gigabit switch on the network and launch the iSCSI initiator on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Note that Windows XP will require you to install the iSCSI Initiator. It does not come with it. Just do a google for it. Setting up and configuring the iSCSI Initiator is pretty straight forward. I will leave this for another post. After mounting the volume, you will be able to treat it as any other HDD connected to your PC. All disk operations on the Disk Manager can be done on the DroboPro volume.
With the volumes created and partitions defined, it’s time for the interesting stuff. Performance. Benchmarks on HDTune was ran on the following configuration.
Test Machine
- Intel Core2 Duo E6300@3.2Ghz
- ASUS P5WDG2-WS Pro Workstation Motherboard
- 8GB RAM
- HP Smart Array P400 RAID Controller
- 2 x 160GB HDD RAID1 for OS
- 5 x 500GB HDD RAID6 for Storage
- Windows Vista SP2
The benchmark targets are the following.
1. Vantec USB2/eSATA External HDD Dock with a 750GB WD Green HDD
2. HP Smart Array P400 RAID Controller with 5 x 500GB Western Digital 2.5” Laptop HDD running on RAID6.
3. DroboPro with 4 x 1TB Seagate HDD in Dual Disk Redundancy mode.
First up is the USB test. This shows us the limits of USB2.
Vantec on USB – Average 30MB/s
DroboPro on USB – Average 30MB/s
As you can see, USB2 is clearly too slow for even a single HDD solution. Not to mention an array of multiple disks on the DroboPro. One thing to note on the DroboPro is the access time of 1.3ms, could be some caching happening there.
Next up, you will see the benchmarks for the Vantec on eSATA, the HP Smart Array controller that’s inside the test machine and the DroboPro connected via iSCSI to the PC. I did not test the FW800 connection as the test machine do not support the FW800 1394b connection.
HDTune Benchmark
Vantec eSATA – Average 63.3MB/s
HP Smart Array P400 – Average 64MB/s
DroboPro – Average 45MB/s
It seems like the DroboPro is a mediocre performer in this HDTune Benchmark test. The speed of 45MB/s on the DroboPro is equivalent to roughly 360mbps. Not anywhere near the performance of gigabit ethernet. With this, I did some more testing using the file benchmark. Setting the benchmark to 16MB file transfers, I got the following results.
Vantec eSATA – File Benchmark
HP Smart Array P400 – File Benchmark
DroboPro – File Benchmark
This benchmark shows a much better picture of the performance of all the 3 devices. Clearly, nothing beats the internal RAID solution of the HP Smart Array RAID controller. Next up, the DroboPro at the maximum speed of 100MB/s is around the theoritical max of Gigabit Ethernet while the Vantec was limited by the HDD as shown on the graph tapering off at 80MB/s.
To further confirm the performance of the DroboPro, I did a simple file copy test of a 7GB ISO image and a bunch of Nikon RAW files from the Smart Array to the DroboPro.
DroboPro – Filecopy 7GB ISO
DroboPro – Filecopy 24GB of Nikon RAW files of 12MB each
Looking at the numbers, the DroboPro is fast as an external storage solution. If it is running on 8 harddisks, it could saturate the whole Gigabit Ethernet connection.
Lastly, I did what normal users will not do. unplug on the the HDD while the DroboPro is online to simulate a disk failure. This was done on single disk redundancy mode.
The moment I unplugged the 3rd HDD, the green lights below the other 3 harddisks immediately turned orange to signal degraded mode. The Drobo Dashboard software immediately popped up a notification on the lower right corner.
Opening up the Drobo Dashboard, it shows the degraded array and says “Data Protection in Progress”
I did the same filecopy test of the 7GB ISO file and got a reduction in transfer rate as expected.
After this test, I slotted back the 3rd HDD to let DroboPro rebuild. Note the rebuild time for an almost empty 3TB Volume of 26min. As capacity gets bigger and more files are stored in the Volume, the rebuild time will increase and if another HDD fails before the rebuild is complete, all data is lost.
After rebuilding, the Drobo Dashboard will return to normal state again.
In conclusion, DroboPro makes life really easy for anyone looking for a extremely easy to set up Direct Attached Storage solution with great expansion capabilities. Having dual disk redundancy gives it an edge over most solutions in this price range. The performance on iSCSI is very good if you have the right infrastructure setup. One gripe is the lack of an eSATA port. It’s ablity to accept 3.5” HDD up to 32TB per HDD makes it very future proof. The data protection features work as advertised. As of now, Data Robotics is on the way to getting DroboPro certified on VMWare ESX and other virtualization platforms. Check out this link for more info on this issue.
The future of this relatively inexpensive device can only get better.
This site is brought to you jointly by Robotech and PiG. Here, you would find travelogs of our phototrips, technology reviews and some photography related articles.
Comments
I have a question/concern. There have been some reports of failing Drobo units – which is fair enough. Nothing’s indestructible. However, from the (admittedly limited) reading that I’ve done, it would SEEM that the warranty period can only be extended within the first 3 years of purchase.
Now, if I were to spend around $1500 on the DroboPro (the larger unit), then it would be very costly if it broke in the 4th year or beyond, as I would have to replace the entire thing outright.
Now, my issue is this: 3 years ain’t that long. If I want to replace drives and continue using this device for the foreseeable future, then that 3 years peace-of-mind is going to seem very short.
For a proprietary device which I would be completely dependent on – and is pitched as something one can use almost indefinitely – the means to extend the warranty considerably beyond this period would mean a lot. I would even go so far as to say that hardware manufacturers that are very secure in their products are often willing to provide a lifetime warranty.
Any thoughts from anyone? Am I incorrect about the limit on warranty extensions?
That is a very valid point you raised there. Other more expensive SAN or NAS products do have yearly renewable hardware maintenance contracts like HP Carepaq that you can buy at a certain fraction of the cost of the product. But often, hardware after 3 years are not really worth purchasing hardware support for as the cost of the maintenance contract is very high.
From my experience with storage products on the SAN and NAS arena running 24×7, the component that fails first are usually the harddisks. Very rarely will the controller or enclosure fail. I would say, if there are any problems with the DroboPro itself, it would happen within 3 or 6 months from installation.
From my knowledge, there are no storage devices available in Singapore that gives a lifetime warranty for their products. Not to mention, it’s pretty standard for only a 1 year warranty across the board for most electronic products.
Beware to OSX users that run PPC based machines. iSCSI currently has a “known issue” that makes it unusable. If you try to use it on a PPC machine you get a kernel crash. They don’t make this info very easy to find, you have to dig through the knowledge base to see that this problem is known.
Without using iSCSI this unit is extremely underperforming. I have USB external single drives that are almost twice as fast even with this unit using FW800. I now have myself a big black (incredibly slow) lunchbox.
Trackbacks