Drobo Pro - useable for R3D files?

[Michael Baldwin]

Looking forward to hearing your impressions when you hook it up to the i7 Mac Pro. I'm also curious... what sort of switches and networking cable are you using on your network?

Thank you.

Just hooked up my new Drobo Pro with 4x Seagate 1.5TB drives and ran some file copies... impressive for the price. 70-80MB/s write and 80-90MB/s read over iSCSI. That was on my office network too, to a Macbook Pro no less.

CPU usage seemed high (a kernel task, which makes me think it's the iSCSI connector) which might be a problem in an editorial scenario. I'll hook it up to a new i7 Mac Pro next week and see what it does.

[Trevor Meier]

what he said. PAINFULLY slow.

Ya, the original Drobo's were awful: 15-20MB/s was the best I could coax out of four, 1TB Seagate ES.2 drives in a gen-1 enclosure.

This new Drobo Pro is a nice product though, if what you're looking for is safe, cheap, and big... and all you need is 70-80MB/s.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

and all you need is 70-80MB/s.

That's the catch.... For editing / transcoding, this 70-80MB/s would be painfully slow for me. And I'm just a one-man-show with one or two part time helpers.

Keep in mind that the RED Drive offloads at about 75MB/s. And, IMO, it's way too slow and cumbersome to seriously work off of.

...Kinda fits with the old "reliable, fast, cheap. Pick any two"

[Scott Roberts]

Anyone here using an external eSata (SATA 3 Gbit/s)? With actual speeds of 300 mb/s, it should be a solid choice.

[Jonas Bendsen]

Beyond the complaints of sloooooooow, the Drobo also uses a proprietary system for it's "magical" RAID, so if the system goes down, data recovery is EXTREMELY painful (if not impossible).

[Meryem Ersoz]

I don't care how fast or slow the damn thing is, what they really need to change is the name. Drobo, indeed, who wants to own a product named Drobo, it even sounds slow...

[Martin Weiss]

Trevor, did you find out anything more about the high CPU usage?

[Emery Wells]

I've never understood why anyone in the professional community would even look at a Drobo. Might be nice to use as a storage device for your finished projects, but if you are storing anything high quality like 1080p uncompressed you can forget about playing back off of a Drobo.

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

I've never understood why anyone in the professional community would even look at a Drobo. Might be nice to use as a storage device for your finished projects, but if you are storing anything high quality like 1080p uncompressed you can forget about playing back off of a Drobo.

I agree with that. I have a DroboPro myself, but every tool for its own purpose. The DroboPro is a terrible editing RAID, you couldn't edit off this thing honestly, that'd be painful. But it's a great backup for finished projects. Honestly who cares how long it takes to transfer data to the thing? If I'm transferring a finished project for long-term backup (and it's great for that, dual redundancy, I have mine loaded with 8 x 2 TB drives), I don't care if it takes all night to transfer to the thing. Doesn't make any difference to me. I have my feature film backed up on the DroboPro, also in other sources, but that's one of the backups.

For editing, I use my much more professional and exceptional HDOne, which has great service from those guys, it's extremely fast and advisable to use for editing directly off it (much faster than one hard drive on your computer, which is unacceptably slow), and I have mine loaded with 8 x 1 TB drives with one redundant drive. One time, my HDOne was having issues connecting to the computer, it was apparently a problem with the unit itself and the power supply in it or something. In any case, the guy at CalDigit was awesome. He told me to remove my drives, send them back the HDOne unit, and they'd send me a new unit immediately. The unit arrived *the next day*, without them having even received my unit yet, and I was back up and running that fast! It was totally awesome and made me realize why you pay a premium for professional service and professional products. I can't say enough about what a great product they made and their fantastic service.

[Alex Hastings]

Just found out about the Drobo Pro (http://drobo.com/products/drobopro/index.php). We have a first gen Drobo from before (and use it to backup all R1 footage), and are very happy about its concept and ease of use - but it is slooooow, especially on a Mac.

Now, the Pro has not only 8 bays, but features a port I have never heard of before, called iSCSI (http://drobo.com/resources/iscsi.php), which works over ethernet.

Has anyone tried using the Pro with R3D files. Obviously not meant for heavy editing, but for longer-term storage with the ability to pull files off rather quickly?

I have had the unfortunate nightmare of working with the DROBO. It was a horrible experience and I hope no one else has to work with DROBO. No one should ever CHOOSE to use the DROBO on purpose.

If you like cursing a lot, making sure stuff is always failing, having hard drives disapeer, having weird buggy software and horrible patches. If you want to feel like you are using a HASBRO PLAYSCHOOL BLOCKS to build a real HOUSE, then use the DROBO.