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Triple the Original Storage


SpiceWare

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My Drobo 5D is now set up and works quite well. I've migrated all content to the Drobo (before TV recordings were stored on the internal drive while iTunes content was on the FireWire drive). While performance isn't the reason I bought the Drobo, I did a few tests with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test as I was curious - it's a bit faster:

 

Stock mini hard drive (2.5" @ 5400 RPM):

  • 48.1 MB/s Write
  • 47.7 MB/s Read

LaCie D2 Quadra (3.5" @ don't know RPMs, but based on this, 85 MB/s is the max transfer rate for the D2 Quadra when using FireWire 800):

  • 77.5 Write
  • 85.4 Read

Drobo (3.5" @ 5400 RPM):

  • 117.5 MB/s Write
  • 121.5 MB/s Read

When you set up the Drobo the Drobo Dashboard defaults to creating a volume with the maximum size allowed by the file system. For HFS+ on the Mac that's 16 TB of storage. The reason it uses the maximum size is so that the computer doesn't have to resize the volume when drives are added to increase the capacity. The Drobo reports maximum size to the OS so Finder shows this:

blogentry-3056-0-89472000-1365267547_thumb.png

blogentry-3056-0-23748600-1365267562_thumb.png

 

17.59 TB for capacity, instead of 16 TB, is due to the difference between using base 2 and decimal for reporting storage capacity. The change to base 2 was due to lawsuits filed over "lost capacity" due to the drive manufacturers marketing drive capacity in decimal while the operating systems reported it in base 2. Western Digital and Seagate both settled.

 

To view actual usage you have to use the Drobo Dashboard. I have three 3TB drives installed, so get 3TB of storage due to using Dual Drive Redundancy (2 drives can fail without incurring data loss).

blogentry-3056-0-86620200-1365267614_thumb.png

 

The Drobo also has a row of indicator lights across the bottom to show percent usage:

blogentry-3056-0-05099400-1365270605_thumb.jpg

 

One nice feature, since the Drobo is in my living room, is you can control the brightnes of the indicator lights on the unit.

blogentry-3056-0-30888800-1365267659_thumb.png

 

 

While I don't normally use 512x512 icons, I was curious to see how detailed the icon for the Drobo was:

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Along with the Drobo I picked up a USB extension cable for the mini, so the project expense is now $2731 (up from $1441). I picked up the extension cable as the wireless keyboard was acting flaky at times and I thought it might be due to the receiver being behind the Mac mini that was stacked in the middle of all my audio video equipment. I relocated the receiver and the keyboard's worked fine ever since.

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Technically speaking I have quadruple the original storage; however, I'm only using 27 GB of the internal 1 TB drive to hold the OS and programs. I don't plan to put anything else on that drive.

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I noticed this on the Drobo site

Number of Drives – In all storage arrays, the more drives installed, the faster the performance.

So I ran Black Magic Disk Speed Test again and got these results:

  • 117.8 MB/s Write
  • 142.3 MB/s Read
The difference in writes with the fourth hard drive is negligible, but the reads are now 17% faster.
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