Drobo with network support?

Forum History Drobo
1

Hello,

i’ve recently got handed an old drobo box with 4 * 2 TB of hdd installed.

i noticed theres a tray right underneath the box which has rj45 socket .
i’m planing to use the box as a timemachine backup destination for my mac users hence a high read/write ratio will be present and needless to say the usb connection isn’t enough

so can anyone guide me on how to use the tray underneath that comes with the rj45 network socket? how can i set it up ?
i checked with the dashboard tools i have… theres nothing related to setting this up…
any advice?

2

i would guess looking at http://www.drobo.com/support/documentation.php is a good place to start.

3

[quote=“rolandah, post:1, topic:844”]i noticed theres a tray right underneath the box which has rj45 socket .
i’m planing to use the box as a timemachine backup destination for my mac users hence a high read/write ratio will be present and needless to say the usb connection isn’t enough[/quote]

Copying stuff to and from the Drobo via the Drobo Share’s network connection seems slower than the USB connection. Well, obviously it isn’t going to be faster, because it connects to the Drobo by USB.

If you need something faster than USB, ditch the Share are use Firewire. If that’s still not good enough, try something other than a Drobo.

4

@rolandah - Are you sure that USB won’t meet your needs? OK, the initial backup via TimeMachine will be slow, but the bulk of the traffic from then on is much smaller and even with multiple users a Drobo hooked to a Mac somewhere in your network and made available as a shared volume should be just fine I would think. I wouldn’t think about using the DroboShare for the application you suggest, it’s too slow and has had issues with large transfers and multiple simultaneous users. A Mac Mini is a much better solution for a Mac-based network.

I don’t think Time Machine is really I/O limited after the initial backup, my backup takes quite a while even on a directly connected USB drive, much longer than the data size divided by the USB transfer rate would work out to.

Does the Drobo you have been given have just USB, or does it have Firewire too? If it has Firewire then it’s a second gen unit and is faster over USB than the first gen (USB only).