Drobo 5D with BeyondRAID - Protected Direct-Attached Storage Made Simple
by Ganesh T S on April 25, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- USB 3.0
- DAS
- Drobo
- BeyondRAID
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
The single 120mm fan is a reasonable solution to balance the need to cool down five SATA hard drives while also maintaining an acceptable noise profile. We noticed many reviews online indicating fan noise to be an issue in the Drobo 5D. However, we had no such issues with our review unit.
One of the advantages of the Drobo 5D / BeyondRAID is that users can start off with just a single drive in the unit, and add more drives down the line. The RAID expansion / migration process is seamless and without data loss. The progress of this process can be monitored with the Drobo Dashboard. Similar to our NAS reviews, we first started off with one 2TB drive in the unit, and added a second one after some time. Since the unit was configured in single-disk redundancy mode, the unit took some time to ensure that the second disk could act as a protection disk. However, due to the nature of BeyondRAID, the addition of new disks (3 through 5) resulted in immediate expansion of usable capacity. We also tested out moving to a dual-disk redundancy configuration once the five disks were in the unit. This took some time similar to the shift from one disk to two disks inside the unit. The power consumption of the unit was also tracked in the course of this evaluation routine. The numbers are summarized in the table below. These numbers are without a mSATA drive in the cache acceleration bay.
| Drobo 5D - BeyondRAID Migration and Expansion | ||
| Operation | Time (hh:mm:ss) | Power Consumption |
| BeyondRAID SDR (1D) | - | 22.97 W |
| BeyondRAID SDR (1D to 2D) | 01:08:52 | 30.96 W |
| BeyondRAID SDR (2D to 3D) | - | 38.15 W |
| BeyondRAID SDR (3D to 4D) | - | 44.37 W |
| BeyondRAID SDR (4D to 5D) | - | 51.48 W |
| BeyondRAID SDR (5D) to DDR (5D) | 00:38:32 | 50.79 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, we must first give credit to Drobo for creating a really simple and easy-to-use product for the average consumer. The whole operation (from installing drives, to actually mounting the volumes on a computer) is very easy, and can be managed even by folks who are not particularly adept with computers. The mSATA SSD acceleration is very helpful for multimedia editing directly off the Drobo 5D, particularly for read operations. The effectiveness was brought out by using real-world storage benchmark traces from Photoshop and similar programs. The dual-disk redundancy configuration benefits more from the SSD acceleration compared to the single-disk redundancy configuration.
There are a few points that could help Drobo expand the reach of units such as the Drobo 5D:
- Thunderbolt support in Windows (if not for the 5D, at least for future products which integrate Thunderbolt support)
- Support for data recovery by the end-user
To expand upon our second suggestion, it is well known that disks making up RAID volumes in commercial off-the-shelf NAS units can be mounted on a PC to access the data. We would like Drobo to provide a software program that can mount Drobo volumes if the disks used in a Drobo device were to be connected directly to a PC. This would go a long way in clearing the air of distrust that many tech-savvy consumers have when considering proprietary data protection schemes like BeyondRAID.
The Drobo 5D is currently available on Amazon for $615. The price is not a surprise, given that the product's features (Thunderbolt support) and operation make it attractive to people in the Apple ecosystem. As a Thunderbolt / USB 3.0 device with a novel and easy-to-use data protection scheme, the pricing is reasonable. However, from the viewpoint of a PC user, it is just a USB 3.0 device. There are many hardware RAID solutions with a USB 3.0 port that provide much better performance. But, there is definitely a segment of the market that doesn't mind paying a premium for Drobo's simplicity and 'it just works' aspects.
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SirGCal - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Seagates: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/thun...Assuming I googled the right ones obviously. Simply put, while much rarrer for windows, they have been around. And for quite a while. I think the Intel driver is from 2014 or something for W7-8.1
tuxRoller - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Ganesh, is there a possibility that you could look at snapraid? I'm curious to see how it performs relative to the other solutions (like unraid, for instance), especially when it comes to bit rot and disk loss.I know that their are tools that are designed for the fs devs that will stimulate various behaviors (bad cables, bad controller, etc) which would make this test easier to perform.
One more fs you might be interested in is bcachefs (written, mostly, by former googler Kent Overstreet). To my knowledge, it's the only fs written outside of the filesystem layer in Linux (it works below the fs layer in the block layer). Its got a number of fascinating features and its design is extremely unusual.
https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
Navvie - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
Don't hold your breath. Won't even cover ZFS despite lots of comments on the NAS reviews saying the ZFS is a better solution.Can't upset those hardware vendors or they might not send review samples.
ganeshts - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
ZFS is simply not ready for *consumer-level* use unlike traditional RAID.Call me when the flexibility, performance and low-power nature of traditional RAID (both mdadm and hardware vendors) is matched by a ZFS system.
Pretty sure btrfs has better chance to replace traditional ext4 RAID in consumers from COTS vendors rather than ZFS for *consumer* use. Enterprise is a different story.
It is a matter of how much time you can invest in a review and return on that investment. The vendors play no role here.
I bet you didn't see this review of a DIY NAS: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9508/asrock-rack-c27...
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
Performing further tests with that hardware would be great.I'd love to see how various setups perform (that is, it'd be nice if you imaged Linux, *BSD, and windows to test how their solutions compare.... including robustness, as I mentioned). It would be a big undertaking but I've not seen anything like that before and it seems like AT's audience would be interested.
rrinker - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
The outside access stuff has been turned off by Microsoft dropping Windows Live several years ago.None of the other options that are current offer everything WHS does, the backup being key. I have an unlimited Crashplan account so I COULD back up each machine individually, but that means a lot more bandwidth utilization from the way it is now, which is the WHS backing them all up and deduping the data BEFORE it goes to Crashplan. And the recoveru is not nearly as convenient - with WHS you can mount any selected backup as a drive and just copy files off it. All backups are incremental and it automatically links them together so you just pick which date you want to recover from and you see the state of the whole drive as of that date, even if on that actual backup, it only backed up a tiny fraction of your files. My machine is more than capable of running Server 2012 R2, but no version does what I need (and WHS was cheap - definitely worth paying for). I could theoretically run WHS in a Hyper-V VM under 2012, but that makes doing the drive pool much more complex. Maybe VMware with passthru storage with all my storage drives.
HideOut - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
So it says daisy chaining only works under macs? WTF? Do they not support the massive windows user platform fully?tarasis - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
I've had 2 Drobo units (both 4 Bay, 2nd and 3rd Gen), and generally speaking I've had a good run with them. The 2nd Gen was horribly slow, but then I wasn't putting stuff onto it that needed fast access. I was backing up (with an external single disk as an extra paranoid backup) data and videos, and streaming those videos off it. When the fan died and the cost of getting an out of warranty repair was nearly as much as buying a new 4 Bay drobo, I opted to get the 3rd Gen which is much faster be it over Usb 2 (that my server has) or USB 3 which my Hackintosh has.I like the Drobo because it is easy to mix and match drives and slowly increase the size over time as disk prices come down. IIRC (this was prob late 2007 or 2008) it was the easiest option for setting up an expandable backup/storage. I am a computer techie (and programmer by profession) but was also a stay at home dad of a 2 and 1 year old at the time who didn't have the time to look into building my own backup solutions with RAID or windows server or anything like that. I just wanted something that was fire and (mostly) forget.
Their SW is pretty poor and I miss the old version which updated the menubar icon with the actual disk state rather than a static icon. HW wise I've only had two problems, the first was on the new 2nd Gen, the power supply was borderline sufficient and under strain would cause the Drobo to reboot. They sent a new power supply out quickly and it was sorted in a couple of days. The second was that the fan was dying and very loud on the 2nd gen, but it had been going for 6 years well. I may yet try and replace it, I had found a blog where someone else had done it, but its not particularly a user replaceable part.
alanc - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link
Don't believe a word Drobo say. Their devices are just USB-bridges. They are dumping a load of flawed devices. Their support is the worst i have encountered in 35-years working in the field of IT. Their software is written by a blind-baboon, their quality-assurance staff were either bribed or drinking Tequila all day long. Their senior staff are insolent, argumentative and down-right jerks in many cases. Don't give these idiots your money.You have been warned..
zaphoddd - Wednesday, May 4, 2016 - link
I've a couple Drobos and would like to chime in.1. Have not had to use support (they have just worked for the last 4-5 years).
2. I can replace a bad drive without reconfiguring, managing, the box. Pull drive. Replace and it rebuilds. IIRC not necessarily the case with the others. Many require backing up, and rebuilding the volume.
2. I can pull drives from one drobo, and put them in another and my volume just shows up and works. IIRC thats not an option on most raid boxes
3. I can change the size of the volume on the fly. I can add bigger drives, and the volume knows what to do.
Things may have changed but the last time I looked at raid boxes - to change the setup, meant wiping the array, which means moving (and having a spare place to move) a dozen or so terabytes of files, and then moving them back. That's a no.
I connect one via USB, and one via FW800 - neither is a speed demon, but not noticeably slow by any means. File transfers speeds are comparable with standard drives. Newer models have a SSD cache.
I'm just a dude, with lots of data, and its been safe for years on my 2. I've had 1 drive failure, and after replacing the drive, it rebuilt just like I expected it to. Just replaced the drive and let it be. Lights turned green, volume was rebuilt.
I'm surprised by the strongly worded protests. Interesting.