is it possible to connect the Drobo S eSata to the iMac? I know there isn’t an eSata drive but I thought I read somewhere you could use the LAN port…? No?
No - I have never seen an eSATA to ethernet converter.
Closest I have seen is an Express Card that has eSATA ports - but you need a laptop with an Express Card slot for this. Even then performance may be disappointing.
I haven’t seen any speed comparisons, but I don’t expect that you would get much real-world speed difference between an e-SATA connected Drobo S and one connected by FW800. I would expect that the Drobo “magic” adds enough overhead to mask most of the connectivity speed differences, if the older models are anything to go by…
@seherrell, I don’t think you can put an eSATA adapter card in an iMac. You can use DroboPro’s iSCSI, but that costs about 2x more. From what I’ve read in the news, FW800 on Drobo S is about 25% faster than FW800 on the gen2 Drobo. On all the Mac blogs I’ve seen, DRI made it clear that they used a faster processor in the Drobo S which accounts for the FW performance boost.
Hello all,
We just added an FAQ for approved eSATA cards that can be found here:
http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/332
Regarding performance, you are absolutely correct that the Drobo S has a faster processing engine and performance on both FireWire and eSATA will be improved over the 4 drive Drobo. Here is a range of performance numbers we have seen with internal testing using standard benchmarks such as Kona, Black Magic, and IOmeter:
Drobo
USB 2.0: 20 to 30MB/s
FW800: 32 to 49MB/s
Drobo S
USB 2.0: 25 to 30MB/s
FW800: 35 to 62MB/s
eSATA: 70 to 90MB/s
Regards,
Jim Sherhart
Sr. Director of Marketing
Data Robotics, Inc.