Optimising Speed of Connection

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

I have a Drobo 5N connected to a Apple Airport Extreme (Gigabyte Ethernet) networked to my MacBook Pro.

I find a bit annoying having to connect to the bloody thing. Waiting for connection.

Also the speed I don’t think is that great ! I have Airport Extreme’s Wifi switched off so it is as direct as possible through the ethernet cable.

It has just take 20 mins to copy over 4GB. That seems a little slow to me.

2

hi andrew,
if you get a chance, could you try another test with the 5n plugged just straight into the mac, (just to see), and also another test with the airport (but using different network cables, (just in case there are any cabling issues slowing things down too?)[hr]
also, am not sure how indexing works on network drives, though might be worth checking if spotlight or something else was possibly accessing the drobo at the time too?

3

Yeah, something is wrong. I have slow-as-heck WD Green 4TB drives in my 5n and average about 95MB/sec copy speed wired through a router. And, of course, copying anything over wifi is always going to be painfully slow, even with an AC wireless router.

4

thanks for the info arnold,
yeah if you see in my sig, i got about 96MB/sec tops using my drobo-s via direct usb, which should be about a minute or less to copy 4GB, so if it takes you about 20mins, then it could be maybe something of the following:

  • all the routers in the mix, are somehow slowing it down
  • & the wifi part probably doesnt help
  • maybe something else was using your drobo at that time (does it still go slow when you test it like in your first post arnold?)
  • can you check how much used and free space your dashboard is showing (including TB and % values when you get a chance), along with what the drive lights are show you or doing?
  • sometimes after copying and modifying/deleting lots of files, the drobo does some background optimisation or space reclamation, and maybe that was causing some slowdown too?