Drobo 5N speed issues

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soxfandoug

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 10, 2005
Messages
92
Hey guys,

I just purchased a Drobo 5N. I put in 5 Seagate 3TB drives, and added a 128gb SSD in the mSATA slot to enable the Hot Caching feature.

It is painfully slow. My PC and the Drobo are both wired into a Gigabit router. Copying a 780mb file from my PC to the Drobo takes 68 seconds. 11.5mbps is pretty slow, right?

I am unable to stream from the Drobo. When I try to stream a small MP4, it just hangs up.

Any ideas? Maybe router settings to look into? The router and Drobo are both brand new.

Thanks in advance!
 
Drobos are historically notoriously slow, but I do not have experience with the 5N model. Around here it is always encouraged not to purchase these devices as many other competitors such as Synology, QNAP, or even building your own is not only cheaper but grants better performance and flexibility.

Sorry I could not be of more help. :(
 
Sorry to hear, but I too have heard nothing but speed issues about Drobo's, I have four NAS's and none of them is a Drobo for the very issue you are experiencing, and others I have read about. I would suggest going to Drobo forums and seeing what other users are doing to resolve their speed issues, perhaps there is a firmware updater for your Drobo.
 
Not the responses I was hoping for, but I appreciate them nonetheless.

The reviews I read of this latest Drobo were all pretty positive, saying they were quite a bit faster than previous versions. I wasn't expecting a speed demon, but thought I'd at least be able to stream DVD rips.

I could probably return the Drobo, as I purchased it at Amazon. Is there another similarly user friendly solution that would be better? $1000 would be my absolute limit, not counting drives. I want at least 5 bays, though more would be awesome. I want protection in the case of 1 drive failure.

Thanks!
 
Synology DS1512+ does up to RAID-6 or their 2 drive redundancy SHR-2, can be expanded with up to 2 additional 5 drive expansion units for 15 potential drives, has 2 gigabit NICs and supports MPIO if you use iSCSI, newest firmware has SMB 2 support which is a considerable upgrade over SMB 1, runs Linux on an 2GHz dual core intel atom, 1GB RAM upgradable to 3, and only costs ~220 more than that drobo. It does not have a built in battery or that "accelerator" slot but don't think that would help you much anyway...

If you want to blow the full $1000 the DS1812+ is all of that but with 8 base drive bays instead of 5.
 
I would suggest looking at anything from Synology or Qnap that fits your budget. I have an older six bay Qnap that has never given me a problem in more then two years I've had it nor has the Synology four bay unit I recently bought, they are both excellent companies with well made products. I stream MKV files from both daily over my network, no issues at all.
 
I did spend some time looking at Synology. I ultimately went with the Drobo because of price and ease of use. I may have to revisit Synology after all.

Beyond looking to replace the Drobo, are these speeds what I should have expected? In all of the reviews it seems they are achieving much faster speeds than I am. I haven't seen anybody else getting speeds in the neighborhood of 10mbps. Most reviews mention speeds 10x faster than mine. So is there something wrong with my specific Drobo, my network setup, or something else?

Thanks again!
 
Honestly I couldn't find any real reviews of the 5N to compare to, other than 2 tests apparently run on a Mac using a speed test I'm not familiar with. Those 10x higher speeds might be for smaller files. Couldn't really find out what kind of hardware those boxes have in them so hard to say what performance should be.
 
I have used two synologys and have nothing but good things to say about them. With the 2 disk model in RAID 1 I can DL at 70-80MB/s
 
soxfandoug said:
Hey guys,

I just purchased a Drobo 5N. I put in 5 Seagate 3TB drives, and added a 128gb SSD in the mSATA slot to enable the Hot Caching feature.

It is painfully slow. My PC and the Drobo are both wired into a Gigabit router. Copying a 780mb file from my PC to the Drobo takes 68 seconds. 11.5mbps is pretty slow, right?

I am unable to stream from the Drobo. When I try to stream a small MP4, it just hangs up.

Any ideas? Maybe router settings to look into? The router and Drobo are both brand new.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Hi Doug,

Sorry to hear you're having issues with your Drobo. We have a Customer Support department that can help you troubleshoot this issue. Please give them a call at (866) 426-4280.

Thanks,
Drobo Team
 
soxfandoug, it has to be your specific Drobo that is having the issue. I just bought my 5N last week and was getting 15mbps over wifi (old router, old computer) and 65-75mbps wired while transferring a total of about 8TB over a few days in several chunks.
 
soxfandoug said:
Hey guys,

I just purchased a Drobo 5N. I put in 5 Seagate 3TB drives, and added a 128gb SSD in the mSATA slot to enable the Hot Caching feature.

It is painfully slow. My PC and the Drobo are both wired into a Gigabit router. Copying a 780mb file from my PC to the Drobo takes 68 seconds. 11.5mbps is pretty slow, right?

I am unable to stream from the Drobo. When I try to stream a small MP4, it just hangs up.

Any ideas? Maybe router settings to look into? The router and Drobo are both brand new.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

My 1st thought based on the 11.5mbps speed that you mentioned is that somewhere along the line between your Pc and the Drobo is a 100mbps connection, which has a theoretical max throughput of 12MB/s. It could be the Drobo not negotiating at gig speeds, or a switch issue, or even at the PC side. Might log into the Drobo and see if it you see anything about the network connection, or maybe hard set it to Gigabit.

Short of troubleshooting the Drobo, I'd have no fear going with a QNAP or a Synology, with my personal perference being QNAP. Both are typically reliable and reasonably fast.
 
Thanks everybody for the Drobo advice and comments. I returned that original Drobo unit, and had Amazon send me another one. I was getting the exact same speeds. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with Drobo support, and they weren't able to figure it out. So I returned that Drobo and purchased the Synology DS1812+.

I just finished setting up the Synology, with 8 Seagate 3tb drives. I'm getting exactly the same speeds as I was with the Drobo! So something clearly isn't right.

During my Drobo troubleshooting, I tried the following:

- Connected the Drobo to my gigabit router, 12MBPS.

- Connected to a gigabit switch (with my PC connected to the same switch) connected to the router, 12MBPS.

- Connected directly to my PC, 12MBPS.

- I tried several different Cat5e and Cat6 cables, 12MBPS on all of them.

- Tested with my PC and my laptop (both with gigabit NICs), 12MBPS on each.

I am starting to get really frustrated. Does anybody have any idea what could be going on here?

Thanks a bunch!
 
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How are you measuring the speed? Are you using link aggregation? What kind of switch do you have? Are you using jumbo frames? What size files and how many are you transferring to measure the speed?
 
ashman, thanks for the questions. I'll answer them the best I can.

To measure the speed, I'm simply clicking more details on the screen that pops up when I start the file transfer.

I'm not using link aggregation right now, just the single ethernet cable.

The switch is just a D-Link gigabit switch that I have lying around. To rule out the switch, I had connected one of the Drobos directly to my PC, and there was no improvement.

I can't seem to find where to enable Jumbo Frames on my NIC. I went to the screen where that option should be, and it wasn't listed. I guess my Broadcom Netlink NIC doesn't have that option? I'll check my laptop and report back.

The file I have been using for testing is a 1gb video file.

Thanks!
 
Drobo strikes again. I have a bunch of B800i units loaded with very fast drives, and they are slow as shit. Nothing you can do will speed them up, it is unfortunate.
 
Have you tried different ports in the switch? Try plugging in the second ethernet cable to the NAS and the switch. Do you have any large files you can test copying with anything that is 4GB or larger? When you have been testing file copying have you been using a few large files or several small files?
 
I have been using a single 1gb file. I just confirmed that Jumbo frames are enabled on my laptop, and I am still getting roughly 12MBPS to the Synology, which is the exact same speed I got with the Drobo.

I have tried different ports on the switch, and I also bypassed the switch entirely. No difference.

I will try the link aggregation, and I'll see if I have any 4gb+ single files.

Thanks!
 
Sounds like your laptop can't truly connect at 1Gbps. 12MBps is literally 100 base T max.
 
You should direct connect your laptop and then check the link speed from the Synology, you might be able to do it from the GUI but I can't check on mine as mine are clustered and the normal network control panel configuration page is disabled and the cluster network page doesn't show link speed. If the normal network page doesn't show it you can just telnet or SSH to the box and do "ethtool eth0" or "ethtool eth1" depending on what port you connect to (I think eth0 is the top one). That will show you the negotiated link speed.

Unless you have a managed switch in which case you could just check the laptop link speed connected there.
 
To all the Drobo bashers in this thread, he had a network problem. Getting a Synology didn't help him.
 
dekard said:
To all the Drobo bashers in this thread, he had a network problem. Getting a Synology didn't help him.
Click to expand...

We don't know that. We just know the first bottleneck was the network. :)

Drobo has a reputation for bad performance for a reason.
 
dekard said:
To all the Drobo bashers in this thread, he had a network problem. Getting a Synology didn't help him.
Click to expand...

Necro a thread just to say this? The DroboFS doesn't even have a working gateway, at least with a synology you can hit it from another subnet. I won't ever touch one again, too many better options.
 
NetJunkie said:
We don't know that. We just know the first bottleneck was the network. :)

Drobo has a reputation for bad performance for a reason.
Click to expand...
Lol, I've owned a few Drobos in my time and they were slow. I know where you're coming from. But seriously, give him a chance... Just looks bad when you bash a product and tell him to buy something else and that new, improved product performs exactly the same.

Oh, and after running 2-3 different, 1st generation, Drobos, I got a ReadyNAS and it's been kicking butt for about 3 years now. Love it. And my next NAS will probably be a Synology.
 
ND40oz said:
Necro a thread just to say this? The DroboFS doesn't even have a working gateway, at least with a synology you can hit it from another subnet. I won't ever touch one again, too many better options.
Click to expand...
Better is a subjective kinda of thing. There's people I'd recommend a Drobo to in a heartbeat. Just not someone who's technically proficient enough to care that the gateway isn't implemented right.
 
dekard said:
Better is a subjective kinda of thing. There's people I'd recommend a Drobo to in a heartbeat. Just not someone who's technically proficient enough to care that the gateway isn't implemented right.
Click to expand...

Go look at the competing products these days. They are all super simple.
 
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