Drobo FS in-depth, Part 2: day-to-day use
 

I'd done some spring cleaning and ended up with about 1.3TB of collected media to move over. Most of it was video (movies and TV), with a few gigabytes of archived software and some photos and music. The copy, unfortunately, confirmed one of the universal negatives I'd heard in other older Drobo product reviews—the thing is crazy-easy to use, but it's just incredibly slow.

I saw consistent sustained file transfer speeds of 26-28 MB/sec from the WHS via gigabit ethernet, about half of what I get between my iMac and my WHS for sustained transfers (my work laptop, with a cheap Samsung SSD, can copy data from the WHS at ~85MB/sec, which works out to about the max random sustained read speed of the SATA disks in the WHS when accounting for overhead and a nominal system load).

So, yeah, it's slow. It took a full day—a bit under 24 hours—to move over about one and one-thirds terabytes from the Windows Home Server. There were periods of time where the Drobo would drop down to an ingest rate of 1-2 MB/sec for minutes at a time, further lengthening the overall transfer. I don't really know what the story is on those extremely slow periods, either.

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