Drobo B810i Review

[Guest]

Drobo lowered the price of the B810 products, and the SAN model moved to just $999. Let's take a closer look.

Drobo B810i Review : Read more

 

[Vorador2]

They seem to be branding the box as a iSCSI solution, which is not. Unless you don't mind the 7 mb/s speeds. Woefully underpowered for such a task.

Any real use will see this box thrown out of the window, or demoted to a basic NAS box.

 

[derekullo]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

 

[daglesj]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.

Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.

 

[JamesSneed]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.

Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.

Those same companies overspending usually don't have competent IT folks and the most important thing for disk systems like a NAS is backups and recovery outside of the obvious performance and storage capacity. For a small company a proper off site backup that gets tested at least once a year to validate recovery is where I would put my extra money.

 

[Snipergod87]

Type for the File Systems support on Page 2 "Windows NTFT"

 

[takeshi7]

Is that Seagate Nytro 141 review coming along?

 

[extremepcs1]

$900 for an empty box, plus $198 more for a rackmount kit? Wow...

 

[derekullo]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.

Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.

Those same companies overspending usually don't have competent IT folks and the most important thing for disk systems like a NAS is backups and recovery outside of the obvious performance and storage capacity. For a small company a proper off site backup that gets tested at least once a year to validate recovery is where I would put my extra money.

A fractal design define r5 has enough space for 8 hard drives.
Coupled with even a Core i3-6300T (supports ECC and lower power) and 32 gigabytes of ram it would run circl.... decahedrons around:

CPU
Marvell Quad-Core SoC (1.2 GHz Peak)

DRAM
2GB DDR3

"The system uses the same Marvell quad-core CPU and 2GB DRAM combination to power through complex workloads"
I almost though thought they were being sarcastic

For cheaper than the $884 they want for this drobo.

And it would allow you to run deduplication if you ever had the need.

You can say well not everyone needs that kind of power for their NAS.

And that may be true.

But if you are shopping for an 8 drive NAS/SAN then you are probably looking for something decently powerful.

I would imagine most small business would be fine with a 2, 3 or 4 bay NAS.

A 4 bay NAS for $230 is hard to beat even with a custom system and for a customer that is satisfied with that kind of speed and capacity it works well

But when you jump up to an 8 bay NAS and they want $884 without drives then I would start looking at a custom built NAS.

 

[CRamseyer]

I think the Nytro 141 goes live this coming Saturday*.

All dates and times are subject to change, lol.

 

[daglesj]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.

Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.

Those same companies overspending usually don't have competent IT folks and the most important thing for disk systems like a NAS is backups and recovery outside of the obvious performance and storage capacity. For a small company a proper off site backup that gets tested at least once a year to validate recovery is where I would put my extra money.

A fractal design define r5 has enough space for 8 hard drives.
Coupled with even a Core i3-6300T (supports ECC and lower power) and 32 gigabytes of ram it would run circl.... decahedrons around:

CPU
Marvell Quad-Core SoC (1.2 GHz Peak)

DRAM
2GB DDR3

"The system uses the same Marvell quad-core CPU and 2GB DRAM combination to power through complex workloads"
I almost though thought they were being sarcastic

For cheaper than the $884 they want for this drobo.

And it would allow you to run deduplication if you ever had the need.

You can say well not everyone needs that kind of power for their NAS.

And that may be true.

But if you are shopping for an 8 drive NAS/SAN then you are probably looking for something decently powerful.

I would imagine most small business would be fine with a 2, 3 or 4 bay NAS.

A 4 bay NAS for $230 is hard to beat even with a custom system and for a customer that is satisfied with that kind of speed and capacity it works well

But when you jump up to an 8 bay NAS and they want $884 without drives then I would start looking at a custom built NAS.

Most are fine with a 2 bay/dual ethernet in RAID1. Amazingly most small firms don't have more than around 100GB of data. These aren't media creation firms.

The problem with your solution is that for a firm to ask someone to put that all together is going to cost a lot extra in time and labour. But if they are happy to pay...go for it!

To be honest if they need that kind of 8bay+ data storage/system then I'd look at a proper supported data server

FreeNAS is fine for a hobbyist at home, great fun but not for business.

 

[derekullo]

Nothing beats the feeling of building your own san/nas the way you want it with FreeNas or Nas4Free

ZFS for life!!!

Thats fine for hobbyists or home users but sometimes you need something a little less homebrew. Especially in a work/small business environment. If a customer asks me to setup a file sharing and backup system then a off the shelf NAS from QNAP/Synology etc. is very very hard to beat. Setup and installed in 15 minutes and away I go. Time is money.

Also you choose a NAS because a lot of companies don't have full time IT depts or want to pay for over priced support contracts. The number of firms I've found with $10000 servers and $1000 a month support contracts when all they need is a $500 NAS is very high.

Those same companies overspending usually don't have competent IT folks and the most important thing for disk systems like a NAS is backups and recovery outside of the obvious performance and storage capacity. For a small company a proper off site backup that gets tested at least once a year to validate recovery is where I would put my extra money.

A fractal design define r5 has enough space for 8 hard drives.
Coupled with even a Core i3-6300T (supports ECC and lower power) and 32 gigabytes of ram it would run circl.... decahedrons around:

CPU
Marvell Quad-Core SoC (1.2 GHz Peak)

DRAM
2GB DDR3

"The system uses the same Marvell quad-core CPU and 2GB DRAM combination to power through complex workloads"
I almost though thought they were being sarcastic

For cheaper than the $884 they want for this drobo.

And it would allow you to run deduplication if you ever had the need.

You can say well not everyone needs that kind of power for their NAS.

And that may be true.

But if you are shopping for an 8 drive NAS/SAN then you are probably looking for something decently powerful.

I would imagine most small business would be fine with a 2, 3 or 4 bay NAS.

A 4 bay NAS for $230 is hard to beat even with a custom system and for a customer that is satisfied with that kind of speed and capacity it works well

But when you jump up to an 8 bay NAS and they want $884 without drives then I would start looking at a custom built NAS.

Most are fine with a 2 bay/dual ethernet in RAID1. Amazingly most small firms don't have more than around 100GB of data. These aren't media creation firms.

The problem with your solution is that for a firm to ask someone to put that all together is going to cost a lot extra in time and labour. But if they are happy to pay...go for it!

To be honest if they need that kind of 8bay+ data storage/system then I'd look at a proper supported data server

FreeNAS is fine for a hobbyist at home, great fun but not for business.

Agreed.

The very existence of an 8 bay drobo may lull consumers looking for a large amount of data storage into assuming it will be decently powerful SAN/NAS able to sustain transfers between more than 5 users at a time.

At work we use a Tegile hybrid array to store 70+ Terabytes of data.
Our Tegile server also uses ZFS like Nas4free and Freenas.

 

[johnmsch]

Just pray you don't need support. All the stuff you read about Drobo support is true. You're lucky to even get a reply to a support request, much less getting the issue resolved. I gave up on those clowns and went the NAS route.