The Drobo-S datasheet does not mention any performance figures.
On the other hand, I read some post claiming the Drobo-S processor was twice as fast as the Drobo-V2 one.
And Jim Sherhart from DRI commented in this thread that “Drobo S will sustain 70-90MB/s of throughput using eSATA”.
Message to DRI : that would be nice to get a FAQ entry with more details about those figures, like :
does the 70-90MB/s figure apply for FW800 too ?
does the 70-90MB/s figure apply too when Dual Disk Redundancy is switched on ?
does this apply only in Read, or Write too ?
does that assume 7200RPM drives, or is it achievable with 5600RPM “Green” ones ?
is relayout faster on Drobo-S, and by much ?
Considering the heavy +100% price increase, those answers would certainly help many Drobo owners decide to upgrade or not…
The drive speed - regular drobo is not affect by spindle speed, but drobopro benefits from 7200 rpm drives, so assuming that the drobo-S has a similar processor tot he drobo pro (not unreasonable) i would think faster drives could help it.
Think you’ve forgrotten the most important question:
is that the theoretical or actual speed? (cfr. the Drobo V2’s theoretical speed of “50MBps read / 35MBps write” speed which actually only is about half of it (on a good day that is))
Geeji - All good questions, so let me address them one at a time:
does the 70-90MB/s figure apply for FW800 too?
The 70-90MB/s is a conservative figure for eSATA. Using FW800, the Drobo S will see 35-62MB/s.
does the 70-90MB/s figure apply too when Dual Disk Redundancy is switched on ?
As a rule of thumb, expect a 10% drop in performance when dual drive redundancy is enabled.
does this apply only in Read, or Write too ?
eSATA is more efficient than FireWire, so read and write performance is much closer on eSATA.
does that assume 7200RPM drives, or is it achievable with 5600RPM “Green” ones ?
Those numbers are achievable with green drives. For throughput, number of spindles is more important than spindle speed.
is relayout faster on Drobo-S, and by much ?
I do not have any data on relayout, but it will be faster due to the faster processor.
As for us adding specific performance data to an FAQ, that is unlikely as performance is very subjective and numbers produced by manufacturers will always come under additional scrutiny. We will leave this to independent reviewers as we have done with the DroboPro.
