Updated: A new drobo firmware release now gives me ~7.5MBps on both download and upload through droboshare. Others have experienced problems with this release though so it should probably not be installed until these issues are resolved
I’ve seen very little posted online about Drobo’s (first version Drobo) performance so I decided I’d post my own. This graph to the right shows Drobo1’s sustained performance around 6.8 Megabytes (not bits) per second. This is on a 10/100 network using Drobo 1 and Droboshare with the latest firmware on both. It is a download transfer done on a Windows XP box from Drobo.
I’d be very curious to know what sort of speeds everyone else gets with their Drobos. I know mine will perform a lot better when it is directly connected via USB, but I don’t think it will go any faster over Droboshare.
The net monitoring tool you see is NetMeter
September 12th, 2008 at 08:34
I am also curious about the performance of a DroboShare connected to many Drobo’s and the transfer speed of a large amount of data over a 10/100 network.
As you’ve mentioned, it would be nice to see more posts detailing the differences between connecting a Drobo (or DroboShare with many Drobo’s) via USB to the host computer VS connecting the host computer directly to the network.
November 27th, 2008 at 07:18
[...] http://ifakedit.com/log/2008/08/13/drobo-performance-through-droboshare-with-graph/ [...]
June 25th, 2009 at 15:32
Graphs from Drobo: http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php
The DroboPro performance doesn’t appear as a good value compared to a home built Linux server with 4-8 disks. The DroboPro does remove complexity, but it doesn’t support JFS, EXT4 or XFS file systems which are used by many Linux systems.
August 9th, 2009 at 08:43
I got a drobo with 4*1.5tb inside, connected with firewire 400 to a Mca mini that shares the Drobo on the network.
I do not have any graphs or anything precize, but I can see I am using 9 to 10 percent of my gigabit connection when transfering data from or to it. a 6GB file takes about 10minutes to transfer.
I also did tweak the mtu a bit to get jumbo frames.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:13
Here’s to hoping you never have a drive crash. Drobo’s rebuild time can take weeks. In my case, with 900gb of data on it, it was going to take up to 4 weeks to rebuild!
http://galaxycow.com/blogs/vermyndax/2009/10/30/drobo-rebuild-time-and-your-sanity/