So I’ve been following Drobo for a few years now and finally was able to get one. I picked the FS and am pretty happy with it so far. I got my speeds write speed to about 25ish and read to about 30ish. Then I moved and got Fios, not knowing that the Fios router is not Gigabit. Now I’m in the process of researching how to make my computer and my drobo connect to my old gigabit router and then to the Fios one. I’ll post my progress with more details of my setup as I get time to work on it… though, in the back of my mind I wonder if I should return the FS and get an S and not have to worry about all this networking stuff…
If you’re not sharing the FS contents between more than one machine, then I would consider going S and direct-attach instead of FS.
If you do stay with the FS, you can do what I did in a few installs:
Set up your old gigabit router’s LAN IP to a Static IP not served by your FIOS router but in the same subnet (this will ensure you can still get to your old gigabit router’s configuration)
Turn off your old gigabit router’s DHCP server
Connect LAN port of FIOS router to LAN port of old gigabit router
Connect your gigabit clients to the LAN ports of your old gigabit router
Done. Do NOT connect anything to the WAN port of your old gigabit router!
Essentially you’re using the gigabit switch portion of your old gigabit router, and ignoring the router portion - in other words you’re cascading a gigabit switch under your FIOS router’s switch.
It’s cheaper than going out and getting a gigabit switch, plus if your old gigabit router serves other functions like wireless, you can still use that, as long as the wireless isn’t in isolated AP (direct to Internet) mode too.
Yeah, those were roughly the speeds I got which seemed ok for the work that I do (3D Animation). and I plan to use Drobo as the main working drive instead of a backup.
I don’t do much sharing from computer to computer but liked the idea of the possibility of doing it. and I thought it would be cool to be able to access the drobo remotely… but yeah, I guess the speed of an S might be more important.
Thanks for your instructions! I tried something similar with my first attempt at fixing it but I must have had one of the settings wrong where I was able to get internet but the drobo wasn’t connecting. When I get some more time I’ll try again… I’m on a tight deadline at the moment
The keys are the LAN to LAN conenction and disabling the router’s DHCP - that’ll just make the switch parts cascade. This works for most routers with integrated switches.
I work for a video equip manufacturer that has video editing products, so our customer have similar throughput requirements to your 3D animation, so I would still look to the S over the FS in your case, unless you’re doing some network-based stuff, in which case the sharing of the FS might help.
Either way, smart choice - finish what you’re doing first.
I use a paid package called Passmark PerformanceTest, though for the network speed testing you’ll need two seats (one for the sender, one for the receiver), so I wouldn’t really recommend buying it unless you have plans to use the other features as well.
I found a pretty basic free lan test program and I just did a few lan speed test with a 1gb file size setting.
I got:
243.122 Mbps writing / 635.333 Mbps reading
Is that 30.4 MB/s write / 79.4 MB/s read?
79.4 read seems off, did I do the math right? (the exe doesn’t convert to MB/s)
I’m not sure what you mean. I used one of those programs and set the size to transfer to 1gb. I think it transfers that amount of data when it tests it.
I have jumbo frames turned off. I tried turning it on but my write went down to 17MB/s . I read that every device on the network needs to support jumbo frames. Do you know if that would include a fios router in bridge mode like I have? Maybe that’s the reason for the speed dicrease?
My question was whether the measurement was to-disk, or just to-memory. Pure network bandwidth tests don’t really store the data, so it’s to-memory and the speed isn’t affected by physical storage.
Your FIOS connection shouldn’t come into play for internal network traffic.
The “gotcha” with Jumbo Frames is that if any of the devices in the chain don’t support it (or the chosen size of Jumbo Frame), then those jumbo packets get split into multiple fragmented packets and that can make things even slower than sending smaller non-fragmented packets.
Imagine you’re trying to fill a 2-gallon container using a 3/4-gallon bucket. You take 3 trips, but on the last trip, you’re only using 1/2-gallon worth of the 3/4-gallon bucket, and there’s “slack space” in that trip.
Whereas if you had a 1-gallon bucket, you’d take only two trips and maximize efficiency of your carrying bucket. This is tremendously oversimplified, of course.
So, you’re saying that only the DIR-655, computer and drobo fs would need to support a level of Jumbo frames? I guess my next step is to find out if my computer supports it. I’ve read yes and no’s for the DIR-655 jumbo frame support.
Does anyone know if the ps3 supports jumbo frames?
Every hop along the path would need to support the chosen frame size, otherwise the packet gets fragmented.
Usually this means the two endpoints and the switch, but if the packet needs to go through multiple switches/routers/whatever, then it includes them as well.
So, a new development happened a few days ago. I noticed that the fios on demand service wasn’t working. I figured that it was because I made the fios router a bridge and I was okay with losing this feature. Then the guide area where it shoes all the channels and what is on at what times was empty. It wasn’t showing any data, making it impossible to figure out what shows are on when through the cable service.
That was a big hit… I was like damn… verizon wins, I can’t live without a channel guide. I then went back to the default system using the verizon router at a 10/100 network speed. Drobo again was slow…
Then I thought maybe I could get a switch and put everything on it and then connect it to the verizon router… I figured that verizon would have something else that would mess up this plan.
I got a netgear gigabyte switch and connected everything and weirdly… everything seems to work. I’m knocking on wood and waiting for an axe to drop but so far my speeds are back and I have all the fios services again. So, if anyone gets fios I think this is the best solution to this problem.
GigE switch “downstream” from the router is fine. As long as you connect all your clients to the GigE switch, you’ll get GigE between internal network clients.
Just think of the FIOS router as a cable/DSL modem and there’s nothing weird about it.
