Quiet external RAID box?

I'm looking for an external box with room for two 3.5" SATA drives in a RAID 0 array. I had one of these. On the surface, it seemed like the perfect solution. Firewire 800, compact design, and sturdy. But, the fan is loud as hell and the external power brick died after less than 1 year of use.

I am looking for something similar, but with either no fan or an incredibly quiet one. Firewire 800 is preferred, but FW400 or USB2 is acceptable. I already have a Dlink DNS-323 doing the duty of the failed Galaxy box, but I don't entirely trust it and it doesn't appear as a local hard drive in Windows (important).

Any opinion of just using two individual external FW800 boxes and spanning a volume across the two drives in Windows? I have done this before in NT 4.0 and it seemed stable, but I don't know what the performance or data integrity issues might be. This windows box has a 2.4GHz P4 (non-hyperthreading) and 1GB of RAM.

The PC is compact, doesn't have internal SATA, and all expansion slots are populated. Bummer. The compactness is no longer needed, so it may be more realistic to just get a more up-to-date computer and stuff the drives inside.

I have been looking at the Drobo myself for a few months. It's pricey but the reviews I have seen say it's pretty quiet and fast. Also has the advantage you can scale it up with your future requirements.

Only problem is the cost of the unit, it's a little on the steep side

Cheers

Cris.

The drobo looks lovely, but it is incredibly expensive.

Some reviews say it's quiet, some say it's not. $450 is a lot of money to gamble with.

I think the early units had a noisy fan, but the newer FW800 boxes are much better.

They are closer to $600+ here, but it seems a great solution.

How about a DIY NAS Box ??? I use FreeNAS, and it has worked a treat for over a year now. I suppose the only problem there will be speed, even with Gbit Ethernet you won't be anywhere near FW800. But you would be able to select your fans etc... but I guess you may as well go with your own suggestion and build a new PC

I have never had much luck with anything with an external brick PSU, I just had the 2 I have fail on my mini ITX servers, I think they are flawed by design.

Cheers

Cris.

A friend of mine got a Drobo and ended up returning it because he felt it was unreliable. Dunno whether that was a fluke.

I've got two LaCie two-disk RAID gizmos that have Firewire and they've been pretty good to me over the past year that I've been using them -- one for all my bulk storage needs and the other as a TimeMachine backup. I never really notice the fan noise, although I do notice the noise of the disks spinning up when I sit down to use the computer. (Particularly since I'll type something like 'ls' and will need to wait ten seconds before the disk can respond.)

How about setting up a pc with some disks in it in RAID config, and then run OpenFiler on it? OpenFiler is free software based on Linux, and is capable of acting as an iSCSI target. You can then link to this RAID pc via your LAN. (iSCSI initiators are included even in Windows) The biggest advantage is then that this 'external' RAID setup will turn up as a local disk on your PC.

I have a NAS box now, but it's a Dlink DNS-323. It has gigabit ethernet, but I don't think the hardware has enough horsepower to even saturate a 100mbit connection. At least it feels incredibly slow with multiple disk operations going at once. It also sometimes won't detect my drives properly when booting from a power-off state. A reset always fixes that, but it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside... especially since I'm already taking a gamble with RAID 0.

I know I could build a NAS box, but until Archeon mentioned iSCSI, it didn't fit the strong preference that the array appears as a local drive within Windows. I will look into that a bit, but running another computer isn't really practical. There is a power draw and added noise concern.


Those do look nice and I am open to a pre-populated box, but I currently have two matched 750GB drives with no home. I would rather put them to use than get something like that if possible.

How about this case then? Based on Mini-ITX, so it's small (10.24" x 5.51" x 10.24"). It also uses an external power supply (like a laptop does). It can house 5 disks though (4 x 3.5 and 1 x 2.5). This should about meet your needs.

interesting....

Well, I made a quick decision and bought the Drobo with FW800. Let me tell you how I arrived at this conclusion...

The device is $450 here which is expensive, but it looks really sweet. Sweet enough that Cris is pining over one and his total cost is closer to $600. I will admit that I didn't do much research before pulling the trigger, but I felt like I had to act quick.

You see, I was reading through this thread on fatwallet earlier in the week. Basically, Microsoft is offering 30% cash back within 60 days on Paypal buy-it-now items on ebay purchased through a link from live.com. Luckily, I remembered this a couple minutes ago and went into hyper-spend mode before (with my luck) Microsoft pulls the plug.

It turns out I will be getting the Drobo for $339.98 after the $138 cashback from Microsoft. I figure that if the Drobo blows, I would undoubtedly be able to sell it for more than $339.98 in 60 days time. I also will have two more 750GB drives (total of four) if I cast the DNS-323 aside. Four 750GB drives sould yeild 2TB in the Drobo, so that's a plus.

I'll let you guys know how I make out.

Green with Envy

That's an amazing price, just short of £200 and they are £330 over here!

Will be very interested to hear what you make of it, I have read some very good reviews but you never know who to trust so a first hand account will be very interesting.

Cheers

Cris.

How are you getting on with the Drobo Rob ???

Cheers

Cris.

My Drobo-owning friend found non-trivial problems with the Firewire interface that wasn't present on the USB interface. The symptoms were consistent with slow memory leaks. It ran for a while then slowly ground to a halt. After making a stink, they sent him a new one, with some hardware revs in it.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, one of my two LaCie 2-disk striped RAID things stopped working. You'd hear one disk spin up while the other wouldn't. I did the LaCie tech support and they diagnosed that my external power supply had partly failed. They sent a new one, I swapped it in, and it's now magically working again.

What can I say: I'm impressed so far with LaCie.

I only received it this week. The build quality of the thing is very high. The actual function of the device is a little odd.

When setting up for the first time (in Windows), the software asked if I would like a maximum volume size of 1TB or 2TB. These two options were presented on a slider, but the slider had blank space for maybe 3 or 4 more choices. It looked like this:

I don't know if this is a limitation of Windows XP, but I would have liked to make a single volume the total size of the array.

So, I have four 750GB drives in the Drobo. This comes 2.03TB. Annoyingly, the extra .03 of a TB causes the Drobo to get assigned a 2nd drive letter. The 2nd drive letter isn't limited to 30GB though, it's listed as 2TB. I suppose this is reserved for future expansion. I have not done any tests yet to see what happens if I stick more than 30GB on the 2nd drive letter. My assumption is that the space will be made available as needed to either the 1st or 2nd volume.

If you do not use the Drobo agent software, knowing how much space is left on your Drobo would not be very easy:

This is the first 2TB Volume. Currently, all data is on this volume.


This is the second 2TB volume that was created due to the .03TB in my array over the 2TB limit. As you can see, Windows reports a 2TB volume.


This is the Drobo agent software. Although there are two volumes, it reports the space available in a single pie chart. An icon in the task tray also displays this pie chart.

The FW800 cable supplied with the Drobo is very thick and doesn't like to bend. I have another one around somewhere, but I (naturally) can't find it at the moment. The connector on the Drobo-supplied FW800 cable also doesn't "snap" into the Drobo or my FW800 card. So, I have 2TB of data connected with a cable that is merely laying in the ports.

The Drobo isn't silent, but it's not loud either. The drives will power-down after some idle time. The fan seems to cut off completely during this time and will cycle on and off when there is activity. When on, the fan is audible but not annoying. I can live with it.

The power-on sequence powers on each drive in succession about 1 or 2 seconds apart from each other. The Dlink DNS-323 did the same thing, but the Drobo is ready to go much, much quicker.

Data transfer with the Drobo over FW800 is dramatically quicker than the DNS-323 over Gigabit. I did not take any scientific measurements, but it feels like night and day. It's not the fault of the network connection either. Accessing the Drobo with my MacBook Pro (over 802.11n) is far snappier than accessing the DNS-323. It's safe to say the DNS-323 is not a speed demon.

Overall, I'm happy with the Drobo. However, I'm glad I didn't pay full-price for it. The agent software seems less developed than it should, considering the beauty and hefty price of the hardware. I'm not in love, but I think I'll keep it since it seems like the best option for me at this time.

The 2TB limit is the next major roadblock in the storage world, and it comes from several different issues. Under Windows, 2TB is the largest partition size allowed on those 1980's MBR formatted disks, with GPT formatted disks being the way to solve the issue. Various filesystems have had limits in the past at 2TB as well, but most have fixed these issues as enterprise storage arrays were hitting 2TB ages ago.

More info for various operating systems here.

Sounds pretty good to me, I better get saving!

I assume the 2TB limit is the same in OS X ???

I see they have started community development for it, so maybe some improvements will be made to the software there.

Cheers

Cris.

Depends. If you are running any of the past 4 major versions, 2TB won't be a problem when using HFS+. Other file systems will depend on the limits there (NTFS, FAT32, SMB, etc). For an Intel mac, the MBR limit still applies, so make sure to partition it using GPT and not MBR. I believe Disk Utility will default to GPT in Leopard.

Mac OS 10.4+ = 8EB - Holy crap. Just about 8 Million TeraBytes. In my world that's called "unlimited."

Mine arrived yesterday.

I ended up buying one after spotting amazon.co.uk were selling them for under £300, the price has since gone back above £400 ??? Drobo are also doing £35 cashback in amazon vouchers at the moment, so that seemed a slightly better deal than normal.

My first impressions are the same as your Rob, the unit is very very well put together. It weights about twice as much as it looks like it does. The fan is a little louder than I would have liked, but doesn't seems to come one at all during normal use and it totally silent when powered down, taking only a few seconds to come back to life when needed.

Data transfer seems high, I only have USB to try it on at this point. I have currently loaded it up with 2 1TB Samsung drives, they were good value at a little over £70 a piece and should provide enough space for at least a year. I think I have found my long term storage solution in Drobo, first impressions are good it's here to stay!

What is less impressive is the mac Dashboard software, and I would have liked some backup solution included for that price. Can anyone recommend a good solution for OS X ???

Cheers

Cris.

I actually have my Drobo connected via USB2 at the moment as well. There were some odd occurrences when plugged into FW800 that didn't leave me feeling secure. I believe these problems are related mostly to Windows and my (possibly) crappy FW800 card.

As for the Windows issues, Microsoft really likes making life more difficult than it has to be. I didn't realize the Drobo was acting slowly at first, because its primary function is acting as data storage. Then, I tried running a VM located on the Drobo. HOLY F***, was it painfully slow! That's when I stumbled upon the 1394b slowdown issue post-XP SP2.

I applied the patch (which wasn't needed in SP3), and then adjusted the registry settings. That worked to give me FW400 speeds, but why do I want that when I have FW800 ports?

So, in search of a solution, I came across UniBrain. They publish a freely-downloadable 1394b driver for Windows XP. In fact, TI (who made the chipset on my cheap card) suggests using the UniBrain driver for their chips. Unfortunately, the UniBrain drivers and the Drobo don't seem to get along. XP would see the two Drobo drives, but report a corrupt filesystem. That didn't make me feel too secure, so I'm running on trusty USB2 at the moment.

Another issue with Windows and the Drobo shows up when you boot Windows with the Drobo turned on. In most cases, Windows will not recognize the Drobo's 2nd drive without disconnecting and reconnecting after boot is complete. This is really silly and apparently not uncommon with FW devices supporting multiple drives.

Another problem which I can probably blame my cheap FW card on is shutdown. When the Drobo is connected and you attempt to soft-power off the computer, it will reboot instead. Really annoying.

Everything is working as it should with USB2, so I'm inclined to just settle on that connection. I may try FW800 again, but I will probably get a better card first.

Time Machine.

I've been using it on 4 Macs now, with all my home ones backing up to my ReadyNAS. Several times now I've also used various recovery options, and there hasn't been a problem yet. This includes just single file restores, and also complete system recovery after booting to the Leopard DVD.

It's simple, it works, and it's built into the OS. Really can't find a good reason for something else on OS X now.

I haven't upgraded to Leopard yet, I couldn't justify the cost for my old Macbook. I am sure Time Machine will be very useful if I get a new iMac in the new year

Until then, maybe I will have to stick with a manual backup method of some kind.

Cheers

Cris.

A Mac friend of mine with a Drobo on his Mac has reported Firewire problems as well, and is now using USB. I'm tempted to conclude that it's a Drobo problem, not a Windows driver problem.

Another update on the Drobo.

I decided that the fan was just too darn loud. I completely disassembled the thing (sorry, no pics) and installed this fan. The result is very good. Well worth the $15.99. I can now hear my PC over the Drobo.

I have another 1394b card on the way and will let you know how that goes.

The Drobo just doesn't seem ready for prime time, even though its in its second rev.

I can't get over the fact they offer Firewire 800 and Windows in all cases is unable to get any decent speed. With stock drivers you get at most Firewire400 speeds. Using Unibrain drivers with a supported card (perhaps their own would be best) people are getting higher speeds, but nothing to write home about. PLUS, the unibrain driver is limited to 2TB where I've read the stock driver isn't.

Moving over to the Mac you'll still find a lot of complaints about slow speed and disk corruption.

The idea is cool, but it just doesn't seem to work (at least not reliably), despite their marketing.

I'd love to move to a 4 drive box in the future - as early as spring. Right now I've got two 1.5TB Seagates with updated firmware in a RAID 1 box from NewerTech (Guardian Maximus). I'd like to get a Unibrain PCIe FW800 card so I can start using that instead of USB since it's connected to my Windows-based PVR which runs on a mobo without any FW ports.

I was very much looking at a drobo as a nice solution to having the disks externally in a small box instead of using an onboard raid controller. A bonus is that it supports 4 drives where most onboard controllers on workstation mobos only support 2.

The external RAID is currently being used to store media for my PVR as well as all the music for my SlimCenter. The idea of updating to 4 disks is so that I can also start using the same "box" for the TV capture/recording.

I seem to be having very few problems with mine. Admittedly I am no power user so I haven't even tested the speed over the USB on my Macbook, it's fast enough for me

The latest 1.3 firmware seems to have addressed a slight problem I was having with loosing the connection to the Drobo sometimes, and I have found that it is a little happier if it doesn't share a port on my hub. What product doesn't ship these days with the odd bug here and there, they are being addressed by Drobo.

The fan can be quite noisy I suppose, but most of the time when I am using it the fan on the macbook to spun up full anyway (running CS3 is enough to do that on it's own!) Thanks for the tip on changing the fan Rob, I may look at doing that myself ready for the iMac later in the year.

Cheers

Cris.

Here are the instructions I used to disassemble the Drobo:
http://mimbler.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-take-your-drobo-apart.html

Wow, that's more involved than I thought!

Thanks for the link.

Cheers

Cris.

I have one last update on the Drobo saga. It turns out that the SilenX fan I used to replace the stock fan was a poor choice. The drives ran noticeably hotter and I came home one day to my Drobo lit up in red lights. I presume this was due to thermal issues, but the Drobo really doesn't give any feedback about the fault.

I ended up re-replacing the fan with the Noctua NF-R8 that was used in the tear-down I posted earlier. The Noctua is only slightly louder than the SilenX, but the drives stay significantly cooler. After a month of constant access, the Drobo is humming along as happy as can be.

As for, Firewire... [rant]It's really shocking how Windows does not play well with Firewire at all. I put a card in with a completely different chipset and I got the same crap. The UniBrain drivers helped a bit with respect to Drobo, but they were completely useless for my Canopus ADVC110. I use the Canopus thing to import analog video as DV. Before I sold my MacBook Pro, it worked swimmingly. In Windows, it was producing flaky results whether I used the new or old 1394 card.[/rant]

I decided to just stick with USB2 for the Drobo and, for the price of a meal, I picked up a 350MHz PowerMac G4 from a friend. A 1GHz G4 upgrade chip is on the way, but even without it, the PowerMac just works. Someone got it right, and it was a long time ago.

Thanks for the update Rob. I've just scratched the Unibrain Firewire800 card off my shopping list for now. I have a RAID1 box connected to a Windows system right now with USB2 which I would have loved to connect with FW800. I'm not willing to put up with flaky access to the box though.

As for Drobo, I still love the idea, but I'm hoping they come out with something new that addresses the (low) speed issue in a meaningful way.

Whatever you do, don't try to put Leopard (10.5) on that PowerMac. While a lot of things work great with Mac OS, I do not recommend Leopard for anyone with a PowerPC system. Too many stability issues and absolutely nothing terribly worthwhile over top of Tiger (that actually works well on a PPC system anyway).

Just to be clear, I still really enjoy having the Drobo. Aside from the relatively slow performance, the device fits my needs exactly. Mine's populated with four 750GB drives now and I anticipate throwing a couple 1.5TB units in when the prices drop. I am somewhat concerned about the 2TB logical volume limit in XP-32 though.

Crap firewire support and the 2TB maximum drive size is making me question jumping ship to Apple for good. It's too bad I can't get along with Vista or 64-bit versions of XP. Perhaps Windows 7 will make things better, but it seems unlikely.

I really wish the reviews for Mac + Drobo were more encouraging. If so, I could see myself possibly getting an iMac right now. If only there was a headless Mac between the Mini and the Mac Pro, my decision would be that much simpler. If OS X could run legally on my relatively high-spec Dell box, that would be a no-brainer.

Thank you! I've been dealing with the exact same issue. I'm interested in going with a Mac, but my driving motivation is a desire to do heavy video editing, which just doesn't seem doable on a Mini. But if I go with a Mac Pro, the build I'm looking at (with only very minor upgrades and RAM purchased elsewhere) is going to start me at around $3000. And there's no reason for me to get an iMac when I have a 30" monitor.

So Apple's got me. I'm currently saving up, selling off some unused electronics, and even cashing in some 20-30 year old savings bonds to get a computer. Apple Wins. Ugh.

...I'm still going to put Windows on it, though

*edit*
Thanks for these updates on your Drobo, Rob. I've been very interested in getting one for quite some time now, but the cost is always so prohibitive. Newegg has a pretty good deal right now though, I believe it's about $380 for the Drobo 2. The fan noise would indeed bother me, though. I have two Western Digital MyBooks, and they are utterly silent. Very impressive. But I also have about 5 random SATA drives floating around unused, and even if they're only 250-350GB, they'd still be usefull in a Drobo.

If the rumour sites are to be believed there is an update for the MacMini coming very soon. And the legal case is ongoing about using OS-X on non-Apple hardware.

I have had my own Drobo problems this week. When upgrading the Macbook to Leopard (finally!) I left the Drobo plugged in. Big mistake. The permissions got screwed and the drive got locked. It was quite simple to solve in the end, just a few commands in Terminal, but Drobo's technical support was totally and completely useless. That was a real surprise. All they basically told me was I shouldn't have left the drive plugged in while upgrading the OS. I had kinda figured that one by myself at that point!

Also, when I purchased the Drobo I was promised cashback. This hasn't turned up after over 3 months and their customer service is also quite shocking. It's a shame that such a well made product isn't getting backed up with service in line with the price they charge.

Still love it as a storage solution though.

Cheers

Cris.

If you believe the rumor sites, it still doesn't look like a very powerful machine. Still great as a regular day to day PC, or as a decent HTPC, but not much of a workhorse. There's still a huge gap between it and the Mac Pro.

And shouldn't the Mac Pro be getting an upgrade sometime? I know it's hard to predict Apple's releases, but it seems that the Pro is almost as ready for an upgrade as the Mini.

All the desktops will be getting updates within the next few months. Guaranteed.

I do agree however. They need another machine that's not quite so Server-Class. Perhaps something in a smaller case with specs closer to their old 4-core (lower end) desktops. Something in the iMac price range but without a display. Something I've mentioned in other threads, but I have no idea if on their radar.

Indeed. new iMac and Mac Mini machines using NVidia chipsets are already in the 10.5.6 drivers. It's just a matter of time now. The Mac Pro is probably waiting on the Core i7 based Xeons to come out.

Matt, if you do go with a Mac Pro, make sure you don't gimp it somehow like taking one of the processors off the order. When I bought mine last year, going from 2 2.8ghz chips down to one would have cut $500 off. The Xeon processor alone is at best ~$900 today, and then add in the price of having to get the heatsink for the system.

Oh I definitely wouldn't take one of them out. The only changes I made to the base configuration was basically upgrading the video card, which brings it to something like $2949.

And I would love to know who buys extra memory from Apple. Those are the most absurd prices I've ever seen from a legitimate retailer. Frankly I'm a bit appalled by them, and that makes me wonder about the price of the entire system. I expect a certain amount of "Apple tax," but $500 for 2GB of memory is robbery.

The same applies over at Dell too. Look up a Precision T7400. It's basically a system that you could spec out similar to the Mac Pro. 2GB to 4GB of RAM costs $460, and thats for slower 667 ram that has been out longer then the 800 mhz sticks the Mac Pro uses. In the end, the Mac Pro still beats Dell on their prices even as the system is now a year old.

OEM memory is almost universally expensive.

... Something vaguely cube-shaped perhaps?

I still sort-of want a cube, really just as an objet d'art like my Mac Plus. Trouble is, so does everybody else, and they still go for real money on Ebay.

Peter

My company has an account with Dell, and it's ridiculous the discounts we get off of their list prices.

For example, the most recent quote I got from them was for an E6500 laptop. The quote was $1598.75. The same system configured with their online tool today is $2450, minus $300 "instant savings". That's either a 25% or 35% discount, depending on how you count the "instant savings".

Same. The fanless operation is quite attractive as well.

Trying to read Steve Jobs's mind, I'd suggest that there won't be a new Mac Cube or anything like it. Otherwise, they would have done it years ago. Instead, His Steveness wants to sell you an iMac as the standard desktop machine, a Mac Pro if you really want serious crunchies, or a Mac mini if you're a cheap bastard. That's it. If they released something akin to the $1000-2000 consumer PC line, it would cannibalize sales of both the iMac *and* the Mac Pro.

Which is precisely what is pushing me toward getting a Hackintosh desktop of some sort once 10.6 comes out.

Well no one will have to wait much longer to find out what's down the pipe. March 24th is the date being rumored by the blogs for Apple's next press event. I got confirmation fro a couple of sources today at lunch that it's the likely date as well. The rumored machines sound about right and I can say with near certainty there won't be any new stand-alone displays.

If true, it's a shame. The new Mini, with its alleged MacBook-like video guts, should be able to drive a 30" monitor, and the new MacPro tower should be able to drive several of them. It would make an awful lot of sense for Apple to release a new 30" monitor much like their recent 24" model.

The new MacPro tower, again based on questionable rumor blogs, looks like it's going to follow the current recipe of using high-end Xeon-class parts. Once again, Apple passes up the "standard PC" hardware class, which is precisely what I need at home (i.e., one Core i7 processor with 8GB of RAM and internal 4 or 5-disk RAID should be about right for my anticipated needs; you could build that with beige-box PCs for half of what you'd spend to do it with a MacPro because the beige boxes can't do multiple processor sockets).

(And would it kill Apple to do a 30" iMac? If they made one, it could become our standard desktop machine at work.)

I just don't see a huge need for that many internal disks anymore, unless your doing really large video operations. In that case, a Mac Pro would probably be well worth the price in encode time decreases alone. With a NAS, you can get quite a bit of storage in a nice compact box to shove in a closet, with files easily accessible to any desktops or laptops on the network. And even going direct attached, you can get 1.5TB with a single drive for around $1/10GB.

I also went into a local Apple Store today to check out the new 17" MBP in person... I'm really considering picking one up sooner rather than later. I played with it for about 15 minutes, mostly trying different things with the trackpad and making sure it felt as natural as I need it to.

Decent, but it's going to take a little getting used versus the older style pads on PowerBooks. My main concern is that I seem to be able to double-click faster on the older style button, plus the strange feeling when putting two fingers down on the pad and then clicking with my thumb (feeling the movement on my fingers is the strange part).

My biggest concern at this point is something I've brought up before. Mac OS just doesn't have a system-wide font preference, so it's impossible, through any system UI, to change the default font size of the menu and standard application fonts. I can understand the difficulty associated with bumping the default app font because it would cause applications to break without also fully implementing a scalable UI. But providing a control to adjust the size of the menu font seems like a pretty basic thing to do.

I also haven't seen any Apple applications that let you change the size of their toolbar buttons. Sure, many of them have a Large/Small check-box in their "customize toolbar" sheet, but they don't really resize anything but the text labels (which I don't display on apps I'm familiar with). And then only every so slightly. Safari (4) doesn't even have that check-box at all. Nor the ability to toggle text labels - they're shown in the customize sheet, but not in actual use.

These concerns are brought up of course because the new 17" model features a 1920 display and my eyes aren't getting any more powerful.

Engadget has a couple rumors up saying we might here something as early as tomorrow. Usually it's hard to believe rumors about Apple, but they've had far more leaks in the past year or so than they used to.

I'll be interested what the release price of that Mac Pro ends up being. Probably something obscene. I don't suppose anyone might remember what happened price-wise when the current Mac Pro replaced the old one?

The current and old Mac Pro were the same price. And the PowerMac G5 before the Mac Pro was about the same price. Apple tends to stick to the same price for products, and will just upgrade the specs over time.

Well Apple's online store is down at the moment for "updates", so I guess we will see what the new models are shortly.

Cheers

Cris.

Well, the US store is back up and we have new macs. Base Mac Mini with two display outputs and superdrive in the $599 unit is tempting me.

The top end iMac has gone up to £1800, that isn't so tempting to me. It is nice to see if you take the VAT (15%) off that you end up with the same price as the US version.

I am not sure if the screens are LED back lit either, can't find anything on the specs so I guess not

For £100 I could get the base Mac Pro and stick with the 24" monitor I already have. Would I see much benefit in performance going for the Mac Pro?

Cheers

Cris.

Everything has been put up in Apple's store today. I'm not sure what Apple are thinking however, making these announcements at the same time as PMA and Cebit. Their coverage won't be as uninterrupted as it would have been the next week or even the week after.

There's some sweet pricing on a lower end 24" iMac configuration. Lower pricing on Mac Pros thanks to the availability of a single processor (quad core) version again.

Only the Mac Pro is Core i7; all the others (oddly, IMO) are still Core 2. If what you want to do with your Mac is CPU-bound (or, especially, memory-bandwidth-bound), then even the cheapest Mac Pro will significantly outperform even the 3.06GHz Imac: by 50% per core, if you believe Apple's benchmarks, and of course you get twice as many cores, plus hyperthreading.

This also means that the new Mac Pro tops my own threshold of "a computer needs to be three times as fast before it's worth upgrading", but actually maybe it's that rule of thumb that's now wrong, 'cos there still seems to be plenty of go in my current one.

Peter

All this talk of CPU performance really makes me wish Apple has a version of the 17" MBP with Intel's quad-core mobile chip in it. All while maintaining an 8 hour run-time of course.

It will mainly be Lightroom and Photoshop work to start with, but I am hoping that video editing will become a much bigger part of my work than it currently is. Certainly there will be an increase in outputting video content to HD, DVD and Web. All incoming video will now be in 1080p from my new 5D Mk II, so I guess it'll be high bandwidth to start with.

Other than the CPU performance, I like the idea of being able to add more HD space easily. To this point I haven't had a Mac than can do that (Mac Mini then my current MacBook).

I have rung Apple, they have given me a lot to think about. Both machines specced up there is an approx £200 gap between the 2. I have a pretty decent 24" display already so I wouldn't need to buy that, and it would give me great flexibility for the future. Hmmmmm not an easy decision! Either way it's a hell of a lot of money! But If I think about it the MacBook was the last computer I bought, and that was 3 years ago in May. Both prices included the APP scheme too, I thought an investment of that order was worth protecting to some degree, is it worth it in anyone's experience?

Cheers

Cris.

The previous Mac Pro was also available with only one CPU. It dropped the base price to $1999 from $2499. To get it, you had to do a BTO order, since Apple only offered one standard config.

To go 8 core now, there is a bit of a price jump. Last time around $2499 was 8, now it's just 4, and $3200 is the entry level 8 core price.


It looks like Apple is continuing to use mobile or Xeon processors, and skipping the desktop processors. The Core i7 mobile CPUs aren't due out until later this year, so that left Apple the choice of trying to migrate the iMacs over to desktop CPUs or waiting. This is more of a small incremental bump for now for the Mini and iMac over the previous models, mostly to bring in the same NVidia chipset transition the mobile computers just recently completed.

It's not an investment. It's an expense.

But given recent performance of real investments, it could outperform those!

Yeah, I was a little sad to see that. So they can say that it starts at the same price, but it doesn't really. Oddly, $2500 gets you one 2.66GHz, and the $3200 gets you two 2.26GHz (and 6GB of RAM instead of 3). So it's hard to tell how much more you're paying for that second CPU.

Also, continuing with the Apple memory prices we were talking about before, notice that now you can upgrade the memory in the Mac Pro at around $150 for 3GB. Just two days ago it was $500 for 2GB. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that they're finally selling for close to market value, but this makes me wonder why Apple went so long without adjusting their prices on the old Mac Pros.

Question for you good folks: How easy would you expect it to be to add a second processor to the single-CPU model? I can get a 2.66GHz Core i7 for a mere $289 on Newegg, but I don't know what kind of Apple hardware I'd need to put the chip in.

Not sure about the "middle generation" Mac Pros, but my "first generation" Mac Pro uses FB-DIMMs, which even on the open market are more expensive than the normal DDR3 ECC SDRAM DIMMs in the Nehalem Mac Pros (although by less of a margin than when they first came out).

Peter

The Core i7s on Newegg won't work. You need a Xeon class processor for the Mac Pro still. Intel doesn't build the logic into the consumer CPUs to support talking to another physical chip, since in most cases it would be wasted die space.

And until the systems start shipping and people tear into them, noone will really know what is involved in upgrading them. Photos from Apple.com show the processor and memory on a removable board, so they may just plug in a single processor only board into the models with one CPU.

Also one correction above, the base price on the old 8 core systems was $2799, and removing one processor brought it to $2399. I may have been remembering my corporate discount prices instead of the retail prices.

I think you'll find it a real challenge to acquire the Apple heatsink/pipe for the second processor. But it might be worth a Google to see if anyone else has come up with a creative solution to that road.

From the pictures on Apple's site, it looks like each CPU is on its own (Apple custom) daughterboard along with its RAM slots. I'd imagine these boards can't be obtained separately. Plus, normal Core i7 won't do, they need to be Core i7 Xeons (55xx) to work in two-socket machines. Plus to that plus, Apple's site says that the Core i7 Xeon in the single-CPU Mac Pros is a "3500 series" Xeon, which the Nehalem Wikipedia page hasn't even heard of, and which might potentially have had its two-socket support nobbled.

Peter

I've bought the Applecare plan on every Apple laptop, and it's been well worth it. One failure, and the plan pays for it's self. I also recently bought it for my Mac Pro, as it was approaching a year old. Two tips I'd recommend. Don't bother buying it with the system, as it can be added any time during the first year. After a year, I have a pretty good feeling about how much longer the system will meet my needs. Also, buy the plans off eBay. A bunch of resellers are having pricing wars on them there, and buy it now prices are well below the retail, or even student prices Apple offers. My Mac Pro plan for example cost me $80, retail was $250.

All you have to do is find a friendly local Apple reseller that also does support, and is willing to order the parts. Of course, the Apple Stores are forcing some of these places to close down, but it's still an option.

Yeah, I figured that it's unlikely.


You're correct. That was the actual retail pricing.

Oh... If anyone is considering ordering from Apple online and you don't currently work for a company with an Apple corporate discount, send me a PM. I may be able to offer you some advice.

Those of you that can qualify for educational pricing however should probably look into that right from the start. I think the discounts are generally the same as the corporate.

Yes, good point!

I was just figuring that the APP could be a good investment to protect my £1900 expense

Cheers

Cris.

Thanks for the tip!

Apple quoted me £165 inc VAT, there is one on there for £95 inc postage. £70 back in the bank account!

The reason I was thinking about AAP is that I got an automatic extension on my MacBook warranty when I bought it, it was some kind of offer being offered to education buyers at the time, I didn't get the phone support but the Apple Store changed out my battery after 2 1/2 years almost without question.

Thanks again.

Cheers

Cris.

You'll be spending a lot of time transcoding if you use the 5D. While Final Cut Pro will change project settings to match the h.264 generated files, it spends 'ages' rendering every little change you make.

Unless you like spending several hours a day sitting in front of a progress bar you'd better buy the fastest machine.

I had my heart set on a shiny new iMac, the prospect of the Mac Pro was never in the equation. But it does seem to be a better idea. I think the 4 core processor should be more capable than the 3.06Ghz iMac, but as there aren't any speedtests out there yet for the 4 core Mac Pro it will have to be a bit of a punt.

I could wait of course, but I'm not good at waiting.

Cheers

Cris.

Like Tom says, it might be a good idea to check out the feasibility of adding another CPU later. We've found FCP threads very well unlike Avid. So we found it better/cheaper to have fewer faster cores on Avid workstations and a greater number of slower cores on FCP workstations.

One nice feature of the Core i7 is a dynamic clocking process. If it detects a core or two being pegged by a process, but other cores idle, it will turn up the clock rate a bit to speed up the cores in use, while shutting down the idle cores.

I'm not sure how well this works, but it's an interesting feature.

As for adding an extra processor later to the Mac Pro, odds are it will cost quite a bit more after the fact then just buying the dual CUP machine day 1. The cost a friend of mine was quoted for the Early 2008 Mac Pro CPU at 2.8GHZ plus Apple heatsink was $1100. The option to go from quad to dual quad was only $500 when the machine was being ordered.

Unfortunately, there is a nasty sting in the tale of the new "cheaper" entry model. Unlike the previous 4 core model the new one does not have a second CPU socket. The 4 core that is in my price range is what I will have to stick with, there is no question of me shelling out for the new £2500 8 core model. I am already pushing my budget well beyond what I have saved for this.

It's either the new 4 core, or an iMac for me. I have a fixed budget for spending on the new business and this will take every last penny of that. It will mean a few other ideas will have to wait for the business to actually bring in money. But the old MacBook is creaking under the pressure. I sorted and edited almost 500 photos via Lightroom and PS on Monday, I think it almost died on me! It's going to become a major bottle neck if it isn't replaced by the time I start shooting a few video ideas I have.

I have been reading a few of the Mac forums and there is a bit of bad feeling about the new 4 core being so expensive, as the CPU is relatively cheap compared to the 2 CPUs in the 8 core models. I suppose that doesn't really matter to me, as there is no chance I can afford the 8 core anyway.

People seem to be loving the new MacMini though, I find that hard to understand as the price has gone up to £500 here in the UK, and that's just the base model.

Cheers

Cris.

I have nothing but praise for the old Mac Minis. I've got 11 of them running FCP 6 quite happily and these are old 1.6 core duos with intel gma. I'd expect the new ones to simply fly.

If you're saying there's now no dual CPU upgrade path for the Pro. I'd say buy the tricked out iMac, you could even use your existing screen as a second monitor with it.

From what I can tell so far, there is no way to upgrade the new 4 core to an 8 core machine. But I think I would be unlikely to do that anyway, as Tom points out it could be expensive.

It's not an easy decision to make, The price difference between the top iMac and the base Mac Pro is only £100 now. I already have a good monitor, so it's not like I really need the iMac's screen, but a dual desktop would be very nice to have.

I think what I will do is to wait for a little while and see what Apple do. It will also be very nice to see some real life tests before blowing my budget.

Cheers

Cris.

Perhaps the software gurus will get around to using those 16/32 GPU processors for this kind of work, rather than having them mostly idle. The payoff could be even larger for a full size box with a higher end add-in card and 100's of GPU processors.

Not to mention the separate h.264 decoder circuitry.

Cheers

Apple's next OS update, SnowLeopard is going to provide a lot of support for GPU computing in the form of OpenCL. There's work under way for Windows support as well, but from what I hear, it's slower going without as concrete a timeline.

How that translates to computing cycles for applications like Lightroom remains to be seen. In theory, if they're using certain OS APIs (that are updated to use OpenCL) they may benefit without needing any updates. Fingers crossed.

One can count on Apple's own software to be optimized for OpenCL going forward. This should include things like FCP and its constituent applications.

I can't help noticing that the new Mac Pros are only available with furiously powerful video cards -- there isn't a fanless option like there was on the first generation. Which, unless they've got big plans for OpenCL, I find odd, as one of the valuable things about the Mac Pro to me is that it's so quiet in use for such a powerful workstation.

Peter

Like Cris, I'm debating between the different Apple models for my home and work needs, both of which are currently running older Mac mini's with very much older Cinema 23" displays (one of which is flaking out).

My temptation, for work, is to get a 24" iMac for me, and one for everybody else in my group. They do the job and they can reuse older monitors as second displays. The only real question is whether we should pony up for one of the models with the fancier graphics card. There could be some real payoff there, if/when OpenCL takes off.

For home, it's a harder decision. The home machine runs Adobe Lightroom and it's sluggish. I occasionally want to encode video with iMovie and it takes forever. I've got ~1.2TB of state, currently living on external Firewire hard drives. I'd like to migrate this to internal drives running ZFS, which should be entirely feasible on a MacPro. Maybe I should just wait for 10.6 to come out before pulling the trigger on that so I have a better idea what Apple's really up to. (Also, I may prefer to go the Hackintosh route, with a regular Core i7 desktop PC, presumably saving a non-trivial amount of money.)

Trigger pulled this AM. 2.93GHz 17" MacBook pro with anti-glare screen. Added a Canon Pixma MP480 to that, which will be a gift for my parents, at $29 after ($100) rebate. Purchase made with affiliate Employee discount which saved a few bucks.

Bought it with a CC that offers an additional year of purchase protection/warranty on top of whatever the manufacturer has by default. I may still buy Apple's 2-year AppleCare extension on eBay as suggested by Tom. This would overlap the CC's warranty extension though, so I'll only do it if I can get it very low priced (since it's only adding 1 more year in this case). If I had bought the AppleCare with the CC at the time I bought the computer, it would add a year to the AC's 2. AC was too pricy directly from Apple though.

On-topic for this thread, I might also pick up another Guardian Maximus RAID1 enclosure as a backup device. My current one is being used to store media on my Sage box right now. Ideally I'd like to connect this to a new Airport Express Extreme (another thread later) and use AirPort Disk with Time Machine.

The Airport Express can only share printers, not disks off the USB port it has. The Airport Extreme and Time Capsule have the disk sharing features. They also added a handy feature yesterday, allowing remote disk access via MobileMe, similar to Back to my Mac.

Yeah I wrote "Express" by accident. Too similar (to my brain) to "Extreme"

I'm not in as much of a hurry to get the new access point as the machine, so I thought I'd wait until someone gets it and performs some benchmarks.

I'm also curious how much functionality I'll be losing from the Tomato firmware I'm using on my WRT54G.

Some extra features I'm using:
-QoS to make sure my VOIP adapter has priority over everything else.
-Bandwidth logging to a remote machine (CIFS share) so I can see how much data is going up/down per day, monthly, etc.. I have a capped net connection so this is rather important.
-Static IP addresses for specific machines on the LAN

Just a quick heads up for anyone who is thinking about the new Mac Pro as I am. I have just had a quote in writing from Apple that included a discount of just under 20% off the UK prices listed on the website at the moment. The margins must be huge!

Looks like it could be a Mac Pro for me

If anyone wants the details please PM me.

Cheers

Cris.

Hey, that naming scheme is almost as brilliant as composite/component. So easy!

The Airport routers support this. I'm not certain about your other two, though I have seen external logging options in the router. I'll have to see what it can do. QoS seems to be something a lot of people indicate is missing.

QoS I suppose isn't a deal-breaker because I have a couple of options. One would be possibly use my existing WRT54G set up between the APE and Modem doing only QoS duty. Optionally I could buy another dedicated device for this purpose, such as Hawking Tech's Broadband Booster

The APE isn't cheap, but compared to other devices that offer its benefits, it's not too bad (such as Linksys' 600-somethingN product that supports multi-frequency)

P.S. Don't tell my wife about the MBP purchase...

I was just listening to the Engadget podcast today, and they pointed out how absurd it is that that's Apple's actual term for the matte screen. I suppose they thought that the average consumer doesn't know what "matte" means, but "anti-glare" seems to imply that their standard screens are what, "pro-glare"?

I don't really care what they call it as long as I can get it. About the only thing that does bother me about it is having to pay extra for it.

"Matte" is not a description traditionally used for screens. At least I don't remember anyone using it until the glossy screens appeared. I'd think that everyone who's in the market for the 17" MBP would know what it means.

"Anti-Glare" however is at least a couple of decades old when used to describe screens. Used mostly as a description of the finish or special coating applied to a screen to cut reflections/glare.

Matte is less techy than Anti-Glare in fact, being used in general artistic and decorating/home improvement circles.

The standard screens, being glossy, are definitely pro-glare. They're like mirrors in some instances.

Do the guys in the Engadget podcast come off sounding as dumb-ass as they do when they post to the site? Just wondering/saying.

To bring this back on topic

Today, I have installed a new fan in my Drobo. I went with the suggested fan from the link Rob gave a few posts back. A great improvement over the stock fan. Amazing how much of a difference it makes really. I think the new one actually moves more air too as I can feel it with my hand, where I couldn't with the stock fan.

Cheers

Cris.

I've had my Drobo for almost a year now. For a year, it's been running happily with four 750GB drives. Data keeps growing, so they eventually became full. Full to the point where the Drobo starts throttling transfer speeds so you know it's time to throw in some more/bigger drives. Well, I put the Drobo to the test and it failed!

I replaced one 750GB drive with a 1.5TB Samsung. Immediately the array started rebuilding (relayout in Drobo-speak). After 3 days it actually completed the relayout successfully. So, it was time to insert another 1.5TB drive in place of an old 750GB. Similar to the first time, relayout began without an issue. Seamless and predictable. This time relayout took 2 days, but after completion the Drobo went berserk. Rebooting, relayout for 30 seconds, rebooting, relayout, reboot, etc.

Luckily, my crucial data is also uploaded to Mozy so I wasn't sweating it too much. I contacted Drobo support and opened a trouble ticket. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response within a couple hours on a weekend. However, by that time I had already removed the 2nd 1.5TB Samsung and shoved a 1.5TB Seagate in its place under the assumption that the Samsung was faulty.

I wasn't shocked when the Seagate relayout finished and the Drobo started its little dance all over again.... this time corrupting the filesystem.

Removing the 2nd 1.5TB drive made the the Drobo workable again in both instances. Of course, with only 3 drives there's no redundancy.

I was able to recover the filesystem (HFS+) only by disabling journaling and running repair from Disk Utilities. Running repair with journaling on constantly failed. Sheesh.

After speaking with Drobo Support on the phone and through their trouble ticket system, they sent me out a replacement Drobo. It arrived today. It's failing in an even more outrageous way where it decides to reboot randomly during relayout.

Now my filesystem is completely hosed, but I was able to get almost everything off the array while waiting for the new Drobo to arrive. I don't know how this story will end, but I'm very skeptical of Drobo devices at this moment. Since two Drobo boxes are failing in a similar fashion with the same disk pack, obviously my disks are screwed up in some way. But, they've only ever been inside my Drobo where they've been serving me well.

Anticipating this day, I've started looking at Drobo alternatives. The most attractive solution looks like running a ZFS raidz array in Ubuntu. But this doesn't allow the array to grow by replacing single disks in the array. This is the main advantage Drobo has, but as you can see it didn't deliver in my case. Is there anything else to consider?

Please keep us updated. I don't know about anyone else, but I'll be following this thread like a hawk.

I haven't been able to find anything at all that is even remotely comparable to the Drobo products. The only other multi-disk systems that are even close to the DroboPro (which is what I've been looking at) are rack-mounted arrays from Promise. They don't have the user-friendliness nor auto-expansion features though.

I plan to keep it updated, but I feel like I've reached the end of the line with this array. I'm almost certain I have to rebuild.

I agree that Drobo is in a class of its own. The supposed features are untouchable. The only thing that comes close is unRAID, but that's not nearly as elegant.

We have a Drobo Pro at work by the way. I'm really rethinking that decision now, but it's given us no issues.

Below is my final post on the subject at drobospace.com. I would just link it under normal conditions, but you can't read their forum unless you have a Drobo serial number.


There's not much more to say, really. The Drobo fell flat on its face when the marketing hype was put to the test. I know many people have been using these things as designed with no problems, but anyone reading this must keep my experience in the back of their minds. Never take the device that's holding your data for granted. If your data doesn't exist in more than one physical location, it may as well not exist at all.

Not that it's any less serious, but this all sounds like one or more software issues. Did you happen to notice if the new Drobo was running an updated software rev compared to your original?

Within IT circles, something this important/serious needs to be bulletproof. There's really little room for error, especially when it comes to integrity of the base filesystem. If it can't build out a new disk it should pop a warning and fail safe, allowing people without as much foresight as you to go and immediately make a backup.

Now imagine software issues in life-supporting apparatus. It's a dangerous world in the Adobe/Apple/Microsoft generation where "good enough" is usually what's good enough.

The Drobo has been around long enough that one would think any problems such as the one you've noticed would have been found n-times over and corrected by now. If it's something new, it would sure be nice to find out what the issue was. Do you know if the Drobo logs any of its rebuild process to internal flash or somewhere else where DataRobotics can look for clues to try and address this? I'm not a fan of the "send out a replacement and keep your fingers crossed it works this time" policy.

The Drobo device does keep detailed logs internally. You can request a copy of the current log through Drobo Dashboard. The file is then dumped to your desktop in an encrypted text file. A simple PHP script exists to decrypt the log file for Drobo v1 and v2 units, but the Drobo Pro uses some other encryption that nobody managed/decided to crack yet.

I've sent Data Robotics numerous log files. At one point, they wanted me to remove the drive in bay 3/4 which was a WD 750 that had been working fine for months. When I asked if the logs revealed anything wrong with the drive, the response I got was "Not exactly."

When I look at the logs, I do see various read/write errors on bay 3/4, but the cause of this could be anything. The hard drive passes the Drobo's internal diagnostics and it passed brief WD diagnostics when I had it outside of the Drobo.

I think software is to blame for this corruption and it probably started happening long before I introduced new drives to the system. My guess is that the Drobo has been working in a degraded state for quite some time. The initial cause could really be anything. Some freak power outage, not shutting the Mac down properly, etc.

For what it's worth, my old Drobo and the replacement they sent are both running the latest firmware.

Encrypted log files? I can possibly understand the customers-only forum if it's part of their official support infrastructure. But encrypted log files? I suppose they may be extremely paranoid about another company copying their technology, but they seem to be taking a somewhat overly opaque stance with customers about the customer's own problems.

The forums used to be hosted by the same folks that do the Slingbox forum. Then Drobo took the forums in-house and closed it up. They've been accused of having a heavy hand with moderating, but I haven't really seen any evidence of that.

Wow, even the massive HP SANs I worked with didn't dump encrypted logs. They were a pain to sort through without a parser, but a customer could open them up if they wanted to.

So far, still no problems with the ReadyNAS. It's been expanded once by putting in a 4th drive, and completed the initial expansion in under an hour. I'll probably be doing a large drive swapout here soon, in prep for ripping all my DVDs to it.

I wasn't aware the ReadyNAS was able to expand volumes like the Drobo. What model do you have?

I'm very wary of storage devices made by consumer-grade networking companies after my D-Link DNS-323 imploded.

I've gone from 2 drives to 3 recently (1TB to 2TB). I just put the drive in one evening and by the following morning it had emailed me to tell me it had finished resizing. I've got the ReadyNAS NV+.

I have the NV+ as well, and as far as I know, "X-RAID" is a feature in all of the ReadyNAS products.

It is a traditional RAID setup still, so rules about identical drive sizes apply. Though X-RAID2 in the newer units will open up the new space once enough disks in the array have been upgraded.

Digging deeper into how to recover from disaster on a ReadyNAS, I did find it would be possible to plug all the drives into a normal Linux machine and get the data back. So even if the device does implode and a replacement can't be found, I should be able to get my data back. I was initially concerned about this, as the NV+ has a hardware raid chip in it to keep speed up, and those can sometimes be very proprietary and closed off.

These devices don't appear as a local drive which is an issue with Mozy Home... unless they support iSCSI. The NV+ doesn't, though some other models do.

ReadyNAS devices are also pretty expensive compared to Drobo. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if I didn't already own a Drobo.

As for iSCSI, there is an addon to add it to older ReadyNAS units. I personally haven't tried it, so I can't speak about how well it works.

http://readynasfreeware.org/ has the addon, along with some other useful ones.

Too bad I can't afford (or justify if I could) a ReadyNAS 3200. 12 drive capacity would be super nice. Though not as nice if all the drives had to be the exact same size.

WIth same-size drive requirements, that means you'd have to replace, for example, you current 1.5TB disks if you ever wanted to add any 2 TB disks in the future.

The ReadyNAS Pro Business supports iSCSI out of the box but it streets for as much as the DroboPro MSRP ($1500) unpopulated. It also supports only 6 drives.

I need the storage capacity and redundancy, but I don't need the product to be NAS, that's why the DroboPro appeals to me. But going back to that bullet-proof comment from earlier... Always feeling uncomfortable or downright uncertain about the integrity of some of your data, let alone the entire array, would be too much.

I'm also liking the snapshot feature of the Pro Business model, but I don't think I'd have the external capacity to snapshot the entire array. I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to automate backups of specific shares or directories on one of the lesser products (NV+, Pro Pioneer).

I'll have to keep an eye on this space over the next couple of months, while for now I just try to scrounge as much free drive space as I can with the disks I have lying about.

It looks like the 3200 supports the newer XRAID-2, so you wouldn't need to swap out all the drives for larger ones, just a few to gain new space.

As for snapshots, thats generally the term applied to creating a new share that represents a normal share, but frozen in time. New changes to the share don't show up in the snapshot. Typically this is used for allowing backups to occur to stable data, or as a basic revision control setup. Space for allowing snapshots to be turned on would be carved out of the RAID disk space, and wouldn't be reliant on an external storage box.

Ah, gotcha. I understood that it supported making external snapshots. Didn't know it could do it internally.

I'm going to do a little light reading on XRaid-2. When I finally pull the trigger on a storage appliance I don't want to have any regrets - even if they' come only 6 months later without warning.

Unless I'm seriously mistaken, I believe that most Synology and Qnap NAS products can also extend their free space by adding more drives, and, in case all drive bays are full, by swapping the disks one by one by a larger disk and letting the NAS rebuild each time. I pretty sure I've read about this feature more than a year ago on both the forums of those brands.

My buddy's older QNAP box certainly does not work that way.

Stick a 1.5TB drive into it in place of a 750GB, and the new capacity of the RAID remains unchanged.

And on that box, they used a basterdized hack of ext3 internally, with extents from ext4, so the result was incompatible with resize2fs. That's the command needed to take over the new extra space.

We ended up ripping the drives out, plugging them into a real Linux box, formatting them there to full capacity, copying the data back onto them, and then put them back in the QNAP.

-ml

I decided to upgrade the Drobo again this weekend to all 1.5TB drives. This took me from 2.7TB to 4.07TB. I chose to do it now because I already have my data backed up at this point.

This time around, the Drobo expanded the volume after replacing each 750 without any drama.

The QNAP website mentions this (in their current feature set):

Online RAID Capacity Expansion
The storage capacity of a RAID configuration can be expanded by replacing the hard drives with larger ones. All the data will be kept and seamlessly moved to the newly installed hard drives. There is no need to turn off the server during the process.


Isn't that exactly what Rob is looking for?

Edit: this is the spec sheet for the Qnap TS-509 Pro : here or here for a Synology example (DS-409+).

Oh, and here's a how-to.

I'm not so sure that it's doing the same thing the Drobo does.

Yes, it looks like Qnap might be a little friendlier than your standard RAID, by letting you do an in-place expansion, but from everything I've read of the examples you're posted, the assumption is still that you are going to replace all the drives in your current RAID. It also assumes the usual RAID drawbacks: that all your current drives are identical and that all the future drives will be identical as well.

The idea of Drobo (at least in theory) is that, to begin with, you can just throw whatever hard drives you have in there. And when you want to expand, you can take out any single hard drive and replace it with another of any size and of any manufacturer (except Seagate ). So I could start with a 250GB, a 300GB, a 500GB, and a 1TB drive in my Drobo, and when it started to fill up, I would replace the smallest drive (the 250GB) with whatever I wanted and be done.

There aren't any other products on the market, as far as I'm aware, that do what the Drobo does as far as volume management and expansion.

There is no requirement in any RAID system that I'm aware of that all of the drives be identical. You will only get as much space as if they were all the same size as the smallest one, though.

What the Drobo does isn't exactly groundbreaking. It's been doable for years, if not decades, given a logical (extent-based) volume manager and a filesystem that supports online resizing. All they've really done is wrap some scripts around it.

Of course, you're right. I was simplifying even though it was unnecessary I just wanted to make it clear that while it appears that those Qnap devices appear to make expansion (and migration, which is pretty cool) easier than usual for a RAID device, it's still limited by the traditional characteristics of a RAID. They aren't doing what Rob was trying to do with his Drobo.

I've been lusting after the Drobo for a long while, Rob. I'm definitely concerned by your experience.

However, I suppose that the Drobo doesn't replace good backups. It's always good to have two copies of every file that's important to you.

A RAID is supposed to be a fault tolerant "live" working repository for your files, not a backup. A backup, regardless of medium (even if it's to a RAID volume) should never be used "live" - only a backup (or restore) operation should touch those volumes. When not performing a backup or restore, the medium should preferably be moved off site. At least put somewhere safe, away from your live volumes.

If I move to something like the ReadyNAS Pro, I'm not likely to have enough external volumes for a 1:1 backup, but all my critical assets will be covered, including music. Things like TV recordings I'll have to leave to chance.

So can you explain what drobo does that's different? I can put x random drives in my readynas and get the capacity of the smallest drive * x-1.

The only difference I've ever seen is that it's DAS instead of NAS. Fine if that's what you want, but not earth shattering.

The Drobo work by creating RAID sets across the drives in a mix of RAID 5 or RAID 1, depending on the size and number of disks. For example (stealing from wikipedia), a Drobo filled with a 500, 400, 200 and 100 gb disks would create a 100gb raid 5 across all 4 disks, then a 3 disk raid 5 across the 500, 400 and 200. At this point, the 200 and 100 disks are full, so it switches to making RAID 1 raids on the 500 and 400. With this particular setup, 100GB on the 500GB disk would simply be lost.

To calculate the usable space on a Drobo array, you would add up all the disk capacity (1200gb in this example), then subtract the largest size drive (500gb), leaving the usable capacity (700gb).

It's basically the same trick the ReadyNAS can do with XRAID2. In either case, it's always best to have 2 of the largest capacity drives in the RAID to ensure no wasted space.

*edit* Oh, one thing that bothers me with the way the Drobo works is that it asks you during setup to set the maximum size of the RAID, and allows this number to be higher then what is possible with the disks in the array. This can lead to some odd issues where a computer sees an 8TB drive, but can only write to 3.5TB or so of it. It's a way to work around file system expanding limits I suppose, but it still seems strange.

Try Drobo's interactive capacity calculator: http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobolator.php

This way you can see the exact effect of adding and removing drives of any size up to 2TB (ea) and with single or double drive failure protection.

In simpler language, when you RAID together dissimilarly-sized drives, you let the overage of the larger drives go unused. The Drobo merely then RAIDs together that unused space (potentially recursing several times) and adds it to the space provided by the first RAID set.

Cleanly said.

With the substitution of larger drives for smaller, does the Drobo ever grow the first raid that was created?

Good question. I have no idea. Probably.

I suppose it could reconfigure the second raid vol to be like the first, then somehow consolidate them into one.

Holy crap, Data Robotics has just released a DroboPro Elite. It's basically the 8-bay Pro but with two ethernet ports for iSCSI and without Firewire or USB drive access. Without drives, US$3500.

WTF!

Also a new Drobo S 5-bay model, without drives @ US$799. Yeah, that's 2x the price of the 4 bay model. It leverages the 8-bay's ability to have two drives fail safe.

Their NAS adapter doesn't work with the new models and they warn that accessing such volumes over a network would be very slow. Guess they've never seen a NAS from other companies with decent processors pushing over 100Mbytes/sec - which their direct-attached devices can't even manage.

I'm already waiting for payment instructions from a vendor for a ReadyNAS Pro which I hope to order within the next day or two. Still wish it had more than 6 bays, but there's not much I can do about that.

My ReadyNAS Pro is currently initializing the 4 1.5TB Seagate disks I dumped into it.

Here are some thoughts on the product...

Build quality: Sub-par for something costing this much. It's basically a small form factor PC case with drive rails. The drive brackets/caddies are flimsy and prone to insertion or removal problems. The slide action/fit of each rail/caddy is different, with a couple on the bottom being quite difficult to slide in and out. They include exactly the amount of screws you will need for 6 drives. Seeing as these are not the same length or head you'd find on typical drive screws, they should have included extras.

The instructions and quick-start guide are the worst I remember seeing for any product from any American company. Terrible.

The Mac OS software looks like crap. They didn't even take the time to make a proper icon. Not of huge importance, but it makes a very bad first impression when laying down over a grand for an empty box. It's shameful.

The web UI is very mid-90's design, though it seems to work. Many items are worded poorly or made overly complicated. Settings possibilities look decent enough though.

The big drawbacks of this product over a Drobo Pro are that it holds two less disks (6 versus 8) and that it can only protect for up to 2 disk failures while the Drobo protects up to 2 SIMULTANEOUS disk failures. Let me explain the difference... In the ReadyNAS, you can have up to two disks fail at any time if so configured. But you must replace those disks in order to gain back any protection at all. In other words, those disks fail but no rebuild is performed until you put in new disks. With the Drobo, the system will start rebuilding each time a disk fails. That means once the rebuild is complete you can have another two disks fail, provided you have enough free space of course. The unit not only dynamically expands, but it can dynamically contract if you have little enough data to do so.

Of course on the flip side, chances are your Drobo Pro will crap out and bork your entire array during the rebuild. But the idea and theory are nice. And of course the ReadyNAS isn't pig-slow like the Drobo and can support multiple simultaneous users effortlessly.

If you monitor your array you shouldn't just let it sit there after a disk failure, so in the real world, the dynamic down-sizing isn't likely to be an issue. But having two more drives bays would be nice. So would not having to use caddys.

How are you protected against two simultaneous drive failures. RAID 6 can't/doesn't do that (was thinking RAID 5 + hot spare). If it has to rebuild when one disk fails, what happens when the second fails while rebuilding?

Is that using RAID 6 then?

I'm assuming you're saying that it starts to decrease the file system size as well.

The ReadyNAS should offer RAID 6 as an option, and that does allow for two simultaneous drive failures. Any two drives could fail at any time and data would still remain. The difference though is the ReadyNAS won't downgrade the RAID level to 5 or 10, shrinking the array. It will keep data in a RAID 6 stripe, and will expect at least one drive to be replaced to get back to a level of redundancy. A Drobo Pro left alone with 2 drives dead would eventually return to redundancy, as long as there is free space.

The Drobo units really like to mix and match RAID levels, and migrate between them. This works ok in higher end enterprise SANs to still keep performance, but in a small box like the Drobo, it's mostly helpful to facilitate the ability to mix various sized drives, at the cost of performance.

Holy shit. I've just spent a few hours fixing permissions issues on the ReadyNAS. If anyone else is using or is planning to use an x86 ReadyNAS product, you might want to stay with firmware 4.2.5 if at all possible. Don't upgrade until something newer than 4.2.8 is available and you read in the forums that all permissions issues have been resolved.

4.2.7 which I've never run had some serious problems as per discussions in their forum. 4.2.8 suffers some permissions issues still. In an otherwise default setup, shares when accessed at least from a Mac via AFP or CIFS will have varying permissions depending on what "user" you connect with. And it's the reverse of what you might expect.

Guest access will have the most abilities and show less restrictive permissions than the default admin user or any user you might happen to create. Further, files copied to the NAS from Windows and then access on the Mac will show up without write permissions for anyone if using anything other than guest. Using guest will show that the owner can write, but that still won't help and you won't be able to modify the files.

To fix the issue I finally had to set the advanced permissions options for both AFP and CIFS so that the ReadyNAS changes permissions on all new files and folders to Read/Write for everyone. PLus I had to use the Advance tab on each share to also reset the permissions of all files/folders already on the drives to be read/write for everyone.

With these settings in place I can now copy to the shares and access the files/folders from either platform using either CIFS or AFP. CIFS seems to be faster even from the Mac however, so I'm not sure I'll keep AFP enabled for much longer - unless I can come up with another reason in the meantime.

So far the only issue I've encountered that still causes a permissions problem was when using the ReadyNAS to "backup" files from an external USB disk attached to itself. I cancelled the operation and the last folder and its enclosed two files didn't receive the updated advanced permissions. I guess the ReadyNAS changes them after copy operations are complete but didn't do this operation when closing down its copy process. This left me with a folder and two files that I was not able to delete or modify in any way, including changing permissions, regardless of what protocol I used to connect, Windows or Mac. I had to again use the advanced share tab to reset permissions on all files to fix these.

PITA.