dschur

If you guys don't mind a little massive thread necrotism, I thought I'd share my way-back hindsight. I used Unraid from like 2006-2010 then moved on to a drobo. A recent discussion brought me back to this forum and thread. Drobo was a big mistake - I had little control over things and no visibility - I used it well for about 5 years until it was apparent to me that the company was dying and my hardware was too. It was brain-dead simple, but also incredibly restrictive - I'd recommend that anyone avoid it. The support sucks, no one from the company engages and it never evolves. I hope Tom and unraid are doing well these days , and from what I hear in the community they certainly are. For anyone using unraid, and sticking with it you've made an excellent choice, I probably should have too in retrospect. The old saying about the grass being greener... is quite true. I wonder if my old 1.X key (I used through 3.X) will still boot/work/upgrade these days - it's in one of the boxes... somewhere ;-)

Agreed, you and any new users coming into unRAID need to get uesed to it. The "company" is a guy in his garage. He takes long breaks and the pace of development is slow. Not hearing anything for 6 months or so is pretty par for the course (in my experience of 5 years). Too bad as an innovator could have radically changed the landscape.

I didn't see anyone answer this, but the answer is yes. It will automatically reallocate space over the remaining drives if you have enough free space. No, drobo FS is totally proprietary. You can't take a drive and read it somewhere else. It is like a raid controller, you either trust it or not and if something happens than you just pray that you could recover. If it fails on you, then your data is gone forever! This is not a two controller mirrored cache array, it is a totally simple, closed, proprietary system. Sorry I read it the other way. ie, If you pull out a drive can you read data from the Drobo. Sorry, if the understanding was pull out and read data off of the drive you pulled out, you're correct. My apologies. That is correct, when read the way starcat interpreted the question, this is one of the biggest drawbacks of drobo compared to unraid. If you loose multiple drives, or take a single drive out you cannot take a drive out and put it in another system utilizing drivers (ReiserFS in unraid's case) to mount and recover the data. You can take all of the drives out of a drobo and mount them in another drobo (called the "disk pack") to recover/rebuild the array.

I agree, apostate should be one as well (or The Judas if that is the preferred label). Might as well put me in there too.

Thought this was stated before - Drobo FS has both AFP, and native Time Machine support. While I can't vouch for it personally as I haven't set it up yet, user reports are that it works well. And how exactly does both the AFP and native Time Machine support ensure data is written and prevent the grabbing of a latption middle of a backup? I don't know, I didn't engineer the solution, but it does. Sorry to say it but it just works (used it for years that way with a Time Capsule). Nonsense. Time Machine works exactly the same as a *properly* setup unRAID or any other consumer NAS out there. OK, if you say so. You seem to know it quite well and are the expert on the topic so we'll leave it at that. I'm glad SMB is working *properly* setup for you on unraid. Have fun with that.

Thought this was stated before - Drobo FS has both AFP, and native Time Machine support. While I can't vouch for it personally as I haven't set it up yet, user reports are that it works well. And how exactly does both the AFP and native Time Machine support ensure data is written and prevent the grabbing of a latption middle of a backup? I don't know, I didn't engineer the solution, but it does. Sorry to say it but it just works (used it for years that way with a Time Capsule).

Dschur, if you still want to do this, please send me a PM. I can come pick it up. Thanks, but since my original post I've decided that because the Drobo is apparently so unreliable as outlined in this thread, I'll keep the unRaid dormant and use it as a backup once or twice a year for catastrophic failure. It's not on the market.

Thought this was stated before - Drobo FS has both AFP, and native Time Machine support. While I can't vouch for it personally as I haven't set it up yet, user reports are that it works well.

Yes I saw it work flawlessly as well until I grabbed a laptop up in the middle of a backup) . Yep, I also know that time machine backups are implemented as a sparsebundle on a filesystem. The issues I saw are more about writing data in transit and ensuring it is written.

That'd be no Time Machine (or rather related AFP protocol support). while there are hacks to force Time Machine to work with SMB and NFS there is no guaranteed receipt and they have been nothing but headaches in my experience (with unRAID) of configuring Time Machine over SMB.

Thanks, I am having fun with it. Just picked up another Macbook Air to add to the Time Capsule on it too.

I had hard power downs at boot a couple of years ago on my CM stacker config when I went over about 8 drives. That's why I had to add a second power supply. The 96W wall-wort of the drobo is a lot less than the 650W (in 2 power supplies) in my Stacker. Not really a fair comparison as my unraid has 13 drives, 6 120MM fans, 3 80 MM fans and a big ole motherboard and processor. The drobo has 5 drives one 120MM fan. Still, at the end of the day it will be a big net change for me. I'm tempted to get a kill-a-watt to measure the difference.

Good to know on the performance after 4.5.3. Don't know how 8A is enough but it is. For reference, this is lower power than my HP nc6320 laptop which has an 18V 8A power supply. Even my 2010 mini has a 110W power supply. Each hard disk will draw between 2 and 3 Amps when spinning up. Your motherboard probably draws an Amp or two on its own. 8 Amps will probably be fine for 2 or 3 low power disks... once you get past that, expect to need a different power supply. As drobo sells them pre-loaded with 5 disk, and doesn't sell a different power supply, I won't expect to need a different one.

Good to know on the performance after 4.5.3. Don't know how 8A is enough but it is. For reference, this is lower power than my HP nc6320 laptop which has an 18V 8A power supply. Even my 2010 mini has a 110W power supply.

Software is 4.5.1. Has been since the 4.5.3 data loss reports, and I backed down. I usually stayed current on the software front. I'm seeing about 30MB/s write on the drobo, copying from a Mac on the LAN to iy. Hard for me to really benchmark it though as I'm moving my data over all this week (and probably into next). Performance wise it's probably not a fair comparison as I'm sure there was probably multiple things screwed up in the unraid that I never tracked down. Setup of the drobo was 1 beer (5 minutes, I was really thirsty). The hardware is really, really small (size of a shoebox) and really quiet (the new WD green drives probably help a good bit there too). Wish I had a kill-a-watt as I'd guess this uses 1/10th the power. The power supply (external brick) is max rated at 96W (12V, 8A output)