Filed under: Accessories, Peripherals
New, improved Drobo
For those of you who were waiting to buy a Data Robotics Drobo, wait no longer!Data Robotics announced the release of the second iteration of their 4-bay expandable storage solution, Drobo. Many potential buyers were aghast at the original version's lack of FireWire, so the company added FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 compatible) ports to the original USB 2.0 connection. Transfer speeds with FireWire 800 are expected to be about double those of the USB connection.
The new Drobo also has improved software. The old model would see a drop in performance after the array reached about 50% of capacity. With the new software, performance remains steady regardless of how much data you've packed into your Drobo. Data Robotics says Mac users can expect a performance increase of 10 - 200%.
When new, higher-capacity drives become available, you'll be able to expand the capacity of your Drobo to up to 16 TB. That should be enough to handle all of my TUAW comment email! The second-generation Drobo becomes available in about three weeks, and the original $499 price tag is still in effect for an unpopulated box (no drives included).
Updated to note that no FireWire 400 ports are included. Thanks to Neg and See3Pio for the heads-up!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
see3pio said 11:50AM on 7-09-2008
New Drobo has one USB 2.0 and two Firewire 800 ports, no Firewire 400.
Says "Hello Firewire 800" right on the main drobo.com page
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Thistledown said 12:13PM on 7-09-2008
While it doesn't have a FW400 port, you can easily convert from FW800 to FW400 with a cable.
scot copeland said 11:50AM on 7-09-2008
People, don't crucify me for asking this potentially dumb question, but why do you think eSATA is not an option on this new version? eSATA is faster than FW800, so wouldn't it be a natural fit for this device?
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eddyb64 said 12:30PM on 7-09-2008
Tom Loverro (the boss man apparently) said they researched eSATA and found it little used, has compatibility issues and would be expensive to implement, and even Apple haven't used it yet in Mac Pros. Source is Macworld UK news.
Brandon Martinez said 2:54PM on 7-09-2008
Hasn't eSATA been found to actually be almost comparable to Firewire 800 in benchmarks? The spec is faster, but not the actual throughput. I'll have to see if I can find it...
Until then, this is pretty interesting:
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6437950
Petros Kolyvas said 3:22PM on 7-09-2008
I agree. eSATA is key, especially for those of us with workstations that already use Firewire for audio.
Get with it Data Robotics (and stop calling it a storage robot - netgear sells a similar X-raid device and doesn't pretend it's a "robot.")
Neg said 11:51AM on 7-09-2008
Theres no firewire 400, only USB2.0 and FW800.
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kris said 12:00PM on 7-09-2008
Yeah, so that's your cost estimate – but that may fluctuate 10-200% or so.
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Andrew Hamilton said 12:08PM on 7-09-2008
Drobo's page says that it is Firewire 400 compatible. I'm guessing that means you can use an adapter to convert one of it's 800 ports for use with a 400 port. Personally, that's good news for me bc I don't have an 800 port on my macbook.
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eddyb64 said 12:24PM on 7-09-2008
Didn't say that earlier today - I trawled the site, support notes and all, and there was no FireWire 400 comment. Nice to know that it can be used with FW400 only Macs.
My research suggests a 400 => 800 cable is needed. I'm in as soon as it's available.
Jörg said 12:18PM on 7-09-2008
So how does 16TB in a 4-bay-Drobo work? Do they mean a daisy chain or are talking about future 4TB harddrives?
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caleb said 12:23PM on 7-09-2008
Yeah - Basically you'll be able to continue to add higher capacity drives until you reach 4 x 4TB drives.
teddie said 12:21PM on 7-09-2008
No word if the firmware update to up mac speed works on the older drobos?
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jeff said 2:00PM on 7-09-2008
Seems like a useless purchase because if you want to use this networked- the bottleneck is USB 2 speeds until they update the network adapter. Other products with the same or lower price point include networking/other ports
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robb said 7:26PM on 7-09-2008
If you want a NAS, this perhaps isn't the best choice for you. I've yet to find a consumer-priced NAS that can give decent sustained transfer rates though, so I just hook up drives to a Mac mini server. It works great, and the Drobo is pretty much perfect. Plus Firewire 400 is usually pretty close to the same speed as GigE and 800 is usually faster.
Reg said 2:27PM on 7-09-2008
The real question is whether or not it supports a 64bit file system structure allowing for Drobo to have volumes larger than 2TB. Currently, the Drobo is limited to 2TB volumes. If you add more than 2TB to the current Drobo, what you actually get is two volumes that show up. So, even though you can have more than 2TB in the unit, you have to manually spread out your data to multiple file system volumes once you hit the 2TB volume limit.
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Reg said 2:32PM on 7-09-2008
Nevermind my comment. It appears as though this new Drobo's Thin Provisioning system allows for 64bit file system support, allowing for you to have a single 16TB volume if one wanted. That was the biggest reason that I haven't purchased one yet (as the unit is going to be used for media storage). Now, I will.
robb said 7:26PM on 7-09-2008
The Data Robotics page on the new Drobo says "supports up to 16TB on a single volume as disk sizes increase."
So it looks like they're using a 64-bit filesystem.
Data said 2:42PM on 7-09-2008
This sounds like the new file system , that is coming to Snowleopard aswell, atleast on the server side, ZFS i think it's called. RaidZ/RaidZ2
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Reg said 3:47PM on 7-09-2008
Well, not really. Drobo is basically using a system that is being utilized by a few SAN vendors (Compellent comes to mind here) known as storage virtualization. Essentially, the system is striping multiple raid sets across all of the drives virtually, allowing for you the ability to grow and better protect your data by simply adding more drives. In addition, data can be moved between the raid sets (scrubbing) on the fly as you add or remove drives from the system automatically without any type of user intervention. Plus, with the use of thin provisioning, the system can display to the OS a volume of whatever size you want, even if you do not have the storage to back it up. This is how you are able to add more storage by simply adding larger disks. On a 64bit OS, you can basically tell your system that you have attached a 16TB unit even though you only have 1TB of space in it. Thin provisioning prevents white space from consuming raw space so you can add files and folders to the unit without the unit complaining of running out of space. When you reach the limit of your physical storage, you simply add more (or a new) space to the physical unit and keep on going. To the OS, the size of the volume never changed. It is still 16TB as far as it is concerned.
The Drobo does not have a file system. It works with raw data blocks. The file system comes from the OS you have attached the unit to (i.e. a PC or Mac). My comment was more of a technical limitation that used to exist with the old Drobo's. On the old system, you could not present a volume larger than 2TB to the OS (64bit or not). This was a limitation in the units software (some said that it was a USB issue). It appears as though this new unit no longer has this issue.