When playing music through iTunes and the music being located on the DroboPro, the music sometimes pauses for a few seconds. The DroboPro is plugged-in using iSCSI and also disabled the ‘Disk drive spindown’. I also have a Drobo connected via Firewire800.
I didn’t have this issue when my music library was on a LaCie drive in the past. This is something new since moving my music library to the DroboPro.
Would anybody have any idea on what else I can do to prevent the music from pausing?
I’ve had the same issues on OSX with iTunes (and other apps) when connected via iSCSI. It’s those data throughput peaks and dips that everyone is talking about in the many forums. That’s what causes iTunes songs to “hang” briefly before they continue playing. I use Firewire 800 now and don’t have the issue anymore.
I can certainly sympathize, as I have that problem occasionally with my iPod. But so far I haven’t seen that problem when running on my 8-core Mac Pro, also equipped with 16 GB of RAM.
In fact, the other day I was playing some music stored on the DroboPro, and at the same time ran several Xbench runs against the DroboPro, fully expecting the music to hiccup or the Xbench performance to be impacted, but nothing happened – neither task seemed to be impaired!
Now, I have 8 drives in my DroboPro, so it is quite possible that I was reading from one drive, and simultaneously writing to another drive, but even that would be rather impressive.
I suppose this could be caused by a disk read error that was silently corrected by the RAID mechanism. Unfortunately, Drobo doesn’t report such events (to my knowledge), except in the encrypted Diagnostic file.
if it happens again, I would suggest opening a Tech Support case and sending in the Diagnostic file. And we should continue to press DRI for more and better status summaries, so that a failing disk drive can be replaced before it is too late.
I’m not sitting in front of my imac at home to give out the exact location of this setting, but there is a buffer setting in iTunes preferences menu that allows you to alter the initial buffer size before playing. I’ve always kept mine at maximum (i believe the correct setting is ‘large’).
I’m having the same problem - big (500gb) music library, apple lossless, and constant pausing. Yet I read about how people are streaming hi-def movies with no problems.
Does anyone have an opinion on whether this might be affected by the hard drives that I am using? I have the 1.5 seagates that were originally unfit for the Drobo, but which have been updated and approved, and I wonder whether performance would improve with Western Digitals?
I use FW800 and have those same peaks and dips. With my Drobo, iTunes would definitely hang and skip for 10-20 seconds while watching video. DRI swapped it for a new unit, but I also got a Pro after that and moved my iTunes library to that. I still get the problem occasionally but not as much.
