My DroboElite is about 60% full right now; and it is SLOWER than molasses. A 27GB copy OFF the drobo will take 7 hours. Copying off 500GB will take about 120HOURS (that’s 5 days).
Seriously? WTF? My USB drive could copy stuff off faster. There’s something seriously wrong with Drobos… How can I improve the speed? Horrible.
Details: Brand new macmini server (Snow Leopard Server) with the drobo elite connected via. ethernet to a switch. The ONLY thing the macmini is doing is copying off data from the drobo. But, it’s so freakin’ slow, it’s a joke. I could literally hook up my USB drive and transfer 1TB over USB2.0 in the time this is taking to copy off only a few GB’s.
Frankly, I convinced that my FiOS internet could download 27GB faster than I’m copying it off locally… There is something seriously wrong with these devices…
hi drdavid,
if you stop the copy and listen to the machine… does it sound like the drives are being thrashed / constantly used?
(it could just be that its performing an action - or another applicaiton is using it and that could be the reason for the slowdown - or maybe an antivirus is actively scanning parts of the file before releasing the bits etc?
on my v1 and v2 its via usb 2 (both are hooked up directly to my pc), and ive seen 12-15MB writes, and 30MB’s reads recently from it. (sometimes after zapping tons of small files etc i hear the drive trhashing for a few mins here and there, and do notice some slowdown, but after that its fine)[hr]
i’ll do a quick test here for you:
from V1 drobo to v2 drobo, on a folder i have using dvdisaster backups, which is around 30GB…[hr]
fluctuating around 48-52mins remaining (and this is after heavy use, and with virus scanner enabled, and system idle time around 30hours.[hr]
or, possibly your destination drive (eg not a drobo but say your machines internal drive) might be doing something, or busy commputer, or possibly even fragmented itself)? - just some thoughts[hr]
btw heres something to cheer you up a bit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Molasses_comic.jpg
Figured it out. DroboDashboard is a piece of work…
Mac OSX Server boots into a 64-bit kernel by default. Normal Macs boot into a 32-bit kernel by default.
So, when the kernel is in 64-bit mode, the drobo dashboard screws up, crashes, hangs, has HUGE issues… In 32-bit mode, it works just fine. But, my server is designed to run in 64-bit mode, and drobo states that drobodashboard should also work in 64-bit mode. But, it doesn’t.
Paul, the USB on the Elite is for management only. I’m dealing with drobo to get them to release a fixed iSCSI driver; but, until then, the reality is that the Elite does NOT work with OSX Server in any meaningful (proper) way. It’ll work if you force 32bit mode, but a server that’s designed to run at 64bit really should stay at 64bit IMHO.
Drobo’s known about this for years, why wasn’t it fixed?
So, are you inside your return window for your Drobo? Send it back. Get a ReadyNAS.
Or, in the interim, run in 32-bit mode. What are you using 64-bit for? Aren’t you running on a Mac Mini? The speed difference is negligible on the Mini platform.