Think I'm leaving Unraid

[dschur]

A good deal of the cost of those prebuilt systems is in the drive cages, and high end Lian Li case. For a budget minded builder, case, mobo, CPU, RAM and power supply for up to six drives is only about $300. Since you already have a license, you'd be out less than half the cost of the Drobo. Add another $150 and you can expand to fourteen drives. If you want a Drobo, I think it's fine, but the argument from cost equivalence doesn't hold water in my opinion.

 

kenoka, you may be missing some of the subtleties in my posts. I'm not aware of a simple, pre-built 6 drive unraid solution that costs $300 shipped, ready to plug drives into, no tools needed. I trust you that I could research, order the parts, get them shipped, and build it all up myself, spending many hours scraping my knuckles and troubleshooting issues, but that's not my thing anymore. The time and convenience factor outweigh it for me at this time.

 

I absolutely agree that for someone willing to put in their own sweat equity, and learn a few things along the way, unraid is top dog, but from a convenience and plug and play perspective I think drobo has it topped at this time. I know unraid is a little faster in an optimal configuration, but I suspect the drobo will be on par with if not faster than the old hodge-podge unraid I had.

[prostuff1]

I know unraid is a little faster in an optimal configuration, but I suspect the drobo will be on par with if not faster than the old hodge-podge unraid I had.

 

Of course it might.  But you are comparing a much newer piece of tech in the Drobo to a machine that has been running nearly flawlessly for 5 years.  Barring any weird stuff happening replacing the piece and parts from you old server should not take more than about 4 hours.  You can get bad hardware (including a Drobo) at any time.

 

 

I understand where you are coming from.  Some people just want plug-n-play, and that seems to be the main sticking point for why you switched from unRAID.

[neilt0]

Of course it might.  But you are comparing a much newer piece of tech in the Drobo to a machine that has been running nearly flawlessly for 5 years.

 

Exactly. My second unRAID server is running on a system that's nearly 8 years old. The CPU, RAM and motherboard are all that old and still going strong.

If any parts die, I can always replace any part without any reconfiguration or reinstallation -- even the motherboard. That's one of the best unRAID features.

[kenoka]

kenoka, you may be missing some of the subtleties in my posts. I'm not aware of a simple, pre-built 6 drive unraid solution that costs $300 shipped, ready to plug drives into, no tools needed. I trust you that I could research, order the parts, get them shipped, and build it all up myself, spending many hours scraping my knuckles and troubleshooting issues, but that's not my thing anymore. The time and convenience factor outweigh it for me at this time.

 

I absolutely agree that for someone willing to put in their own sweat equity, and learn a few things along the way, unraid is top dog, but from a convenience and plug and play perspective I think drobo has it topped at this time. I know unraid is a little faster in an optimal configuration, but I suspect the drobo will be on par with if not faster than the old hodge-podge unraid I had.

unRAID definitely fails if you're looking for a no-brainer plug-and-play solution. I was simply addressing the point about cost. If plug-and-play is worth that additional money for you, then go for it. It is of course your money to do with as you please.

 

I think if you were to look at it, you might find that building a system circa 2004 and now is quite a bit different:

SATA has made cable management much easier.

Cable management has become important in case design. The CM 590 vs. the Stacker offers a whole area behind the motherboard tray to hid cables. It also has holes to allow for zip ties.

Power supplies have bundled their cables more intelligently. You can also get a modular PSU.

 

I'm not trying to dissuade you from getting your Drobo. I'm mostly addressing this to someone who might be on the fence about going with unRAID. My perspective may be biased. I have been building PCs for nearly twenty years. Having gone through the years of headaches with IRQ settings, jumpers and DIP switches, I consider system building now to be a piece of cake. But if you don't enjoy the process, then Drobo or something similar will have its obvious attractions.

 

As for the $600 solution, I think Tom had a "recession buster" built around budget parts for $700, but it sold out and he hasn't offered any more.

[poofyhairguy]

I have never seen AFP done well by anyone but Apple.

 

Netatalk has gotten better recently. But I understand what you are saying. Have you considered using NFS? OSX being a Unix has decent NFS support.

[aiden]

Macs just work, once you go Mac you won't go back

 

Sorry, had to laugh at this Kool-aid comment.  I had a Mac, and couldn't wait to go back.  I guess it all depends on how much control you want over your system.

[dschur]

Macs just work, once you go Mac you won't go back

 

Sorry, had to laugh at this Kool-aid comment.  I had a Mac, and couldn't wait to go back.  I guess it all depends on how much control you want over your system.

 

I wonder if maybe your Mac was pre-OSX (i.e. <= OS 9) or you didn't spend enough time with it to see that under the covers it is pretty much all Unix, giving you plenty of control, while not inflicting emacs on you to get the simpler things done.

[WeeboTech]

Macs just work, once you go Mac you won't go back

 

Sorry, had to laugh at this Kool-aid comment.  I had a Mac, and couldn't wait to go back.  I guess it all depends on how much control you want over your system.

 

My co-worker had the same issue. He hated his Mac. He used to bitch about it all the time.

[bkasten]

I have never seen AFP done well by anyone but Apple.

 

Netatalk has gotten better recently. But I understand what you are saying. Have you considered using NFS? OSX being a Unix has decent NFS support.

 

I have heard that netatalk has gotten better, and I hope it is true. I have not tried it in a while.

 

If we could get a good working AFP on unRAID, I would be very, very happy. 

 

I have been using SMB, and frankly, I have been getting pretty good speeds, in the upper 30's. I am not at all unhappy. But since you mentioned it, I will give NFS a trial, see if I get better speed. After all, faster is better.

 

All that being said, my need for speed is in fact very small. In my evaluation of unRAID, reading all the post on the board, I came to realize that having wickedly fast file transfers is cool, but not necessary, at least for me. I have a small office in my home, so a small portion of my server is for the needs of the office. The major function of the unRAID server for media. As a media server this thing is AWESOME. I have a WD TV Live device to serve up files to my HD TV, and the truth is, the device is 10/100. If the activity lights on my switch are to be believed, there is hardly any data being moved at any one time while watching videos.

 

So much for the need for speed.

[dschur]

Also, be sure to visit the drobospace forums - are you still required to have a serial number to view the forums?  Any company that will not open their forums for pre-sales support should not be a strong consideration.

 

Between SERIOUS performance issues and near loss of all of my data (among several horror stores on the Drobo forums), I won't go near another one again.

 

 

I have to say, now that I can access them (and I agree there is no reason not to make them public), I do not see these "horror stories" or "SERIOUS performance issues" on the drobo forums at all.

 

So far the new drobo seems to be outperforming my unraid by at least double (on totally back of the napkin big copies), but as I said I had some really old hardware on unraid.

[kenoka]

I'm glad you're enjoying your new hardware.

 

Just out of curiosity, what version of unRAID were you running? My understanding is that performance has improved substantially within the last few releases. What kind of read/write speeds are you seeing with the Drobo?

[dschur]

I'm glad you're enjoying your new hardware.

 

Just out of curiosity, what version of unRAID were you running? My understanding is that performance has improved substantially within the last few releases. What kind of read/write speeds are you seeing with the Drobo?

 

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)

[theone]

I'm glad you're enjoying your new hardware.

 

Just out of curiosity, what version of unRAID were you running? My understanding is that performance has improved substantially within the last few releases. What kind of read/write speeds are you seeing with the Drobo?

 

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)

 

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

How is 8A enough to power 5 drives?

 

[dschur]

 

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

How is 8A enough to power 5 drives?

 

 

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.

[Joe L.]

 

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

How is 8A enough to power 5 drives?

 

 

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.

[dschur]

 

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

How is 8A enough to power 5 drives?

 

 

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.

[Joe L.]

 

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

How is 8A enough to power 5 drives?

 

 

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.

Interesting...  I expect they stagger the spin-up of the drives then...  otherwise basic physics would get in the way of it working.  Either that or they are drawing more than the labeled current rating for the interval when the disks are spinning up, and the power supply is able to handle the short term peak.

[SSD]

Interesting...   I expect they stagger the spin-up of the drives then...  otherwise basic physics would get in the way of it working.   Either that or they are drawing more than the labeled current rating for the interval when the disks are spinning up, and the power supply is able to handle the short term peak.

 

I would think it very unlikely that Drobo would intentionally run their PSU out-of-spec for the drive spinup phase.  Staggered spinup seems likely.

 

But to pick up on the second point, I wonder how capable a typical PSU is at running out-of-spec for a short burst (5-10 seconds?) while drives are spun up?  We have not seen many (any?) users reporting hard power downs on boot after adding new drives.  Isn't that what would happen if a PSU were overtaxed?

[reggie14]

Performance improvements where reported after v4.5.3 if I am not mistaken.

 

I think the performance increases came with v4.5-beta8.  I started my unRAID experience with 4.5.1, and I didn't see any performance increases releases after that.  I've always had write speeds somewhere around 30-40MB/sec.  But I'm using all modern hardware.

[dschur]

 

But to pick up on the second point, I wonder how capable a typical PSU is at running out-of-spec for a short burst (5-10 seconds?) while drives are spun up?  We have not seen many (any?) users reporting hard power downs on boot after adding new drives.  Isn't that what would happen if a PSU were overtaxed?

 

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.

[Joe L.]

But to pick up on the second point, I wonder how capable a typical PSU is at running out-of-spec for a short burst (5-10 seconds?) while drives are spun up?  We have not seen many (any?) users reporting hard power downs on boot after adding new drives.  Isn't that what would happen if a PSU were overtaxed?

They are probably not being read or written at that point when first spinning upon initial application of power.

 

 

[BRiT]

So you have some power usage figures and performance to compare your Drobo unit to a modern unRAID system.

 

My 4 2TB drives unRAID idles at around 35 watts with drives spun down and hit around 55-60 watts during a parity check with all drives active. I run an Intel i3 530 CPU with 4 Gig DDR3 memory on an MSI H55 motherboard, and quite a few 120mm cooling fans. Drive writes are above 30 MB/s.

 

 

Before I tried out unRAID, I was looking into Drobo but the horror stories were too much for me to risk my data. When I was there, I saw threads that had been locked and then deleted off their support forums. Then Drobo locked down the forums to only those who registered their product. Drobo is definitely not a company I want to do business with if they do everything they can to silence those with real issues and prevent potential customers from making an educated decision.

[Rajahal]

Does Drobo allow you to take a single drive out and recover data from it?  This is one of the big selling points for unRAID for me.  As far as I've seen, unRAID offers the best chances of data recovery in a 'worst case scenario' type of situation.

 

When I first started looking into NASs, the drobo was just released.  Therefore, it was expensive, and you had to pay a lot extra ($150, I think) for the network add-on.  By default, the drobo was USB only.  I really didn't like the idea of TBs of data bottlenecked over USB.  Obviously that has changed with newer versions of the drobo that have been release since.  The limited number of drive bays was a concern for me as well, since I had 6 drives at the time (all 500 GB) that I wanted to use.  As drive sizes have increased, again I understand that this is less of a concern now.

 

The only advantages of the drobo that are apparent to me are aesthetics, and I suppose AFP (though I'm not a Mac guy anymore, so I don't really care about that).  It seems to me that unRAID has the drobo beat in every other aspect.

 

Anyway, I'm not trying to deride your decision.  If the drobo works for you and you are happy with it, fantastic.  I just really hope that we don't see you back here in few months complaining that the drobo lost your data.  I like your idea of using your old unRAID hardware to backup the drobo every month or so.  No reason to let it go to waste, even if it is a bit slow.

 

For reference, I generally get writes to my server of around 50 - 70 mb/s using a cache drive.  Without a cache drive, writes are around 25 - 35 mb/s.

 

And by the way, we as a community have tried to make it as easy as possible for someone to build a modern unRAID server themselves:

 

Wiki - Recommended Builds

 

and

 

Raj's Prototype Designs

 

The above efforts aren't perfect since hardware evolves so fast and we don't always have the time or resources to test out replacement models, but at least it is a start.

 

I've never been in the drobo forums, but I wonder if they have the same type of 'users helping users' type of forum activity that unRAID does.  I think it speaks volumes about unRAID that the majority of the support comes from community volunteers...I don't know of any other proprietary product that can make the same claim.

[starcat]

Have fun with the Drobo:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2031.msg79573#msg79573

[dschur]

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