Drobo + Firewire 800 = Super slow

L

lobski

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2008
Messages
460
I've been doing some benchmarking with the Drobo, using Firewire 800. In many runs, the read speeds average only to around 15MBps. This is horrible.

My Drobo is only about 25% full, and has four 1TB drives. They are Seagates.

Who else here has a Drobo V2? could you do some benchies?

HD1.PNG


HD2.PNG
 
Syntax Error said:
I've gotta say, despite the low throughput, those access times are pretty fast. :eek:
Click to expand...

Actually, ignore the access time on the first screenshot, I hit stop before it could finish. All I wanted was the read speed.


http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=24609792&m=750009293931&r=555009434931

Hello Everyone,

This is Mark from Data Robotics, makers of Drobo.

Thanks to ACE for his work and posting his benchmark results. Unfortunately I think you are experiencing the problems with FireWire 800 in Microsoft environments that many others have had. Let me explain.

On XP, Microsoft, for reasons not explained publicly, sets the default FireWire rate to 100 Mbps. They have a knowledge base article that explains how to edit the Registry to increase it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222. Unfortunately the highest you can go on XP is FireWire 400.

On Vista, Microsoft's driver only runs at FireWire 400 speeds. This is indicated in ACE's results -- look at the "HD Tune" benchmarks where connection via FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 show almost identical performance. HDTach results are similar.

How do you get more performance out of Vista using FireWire 800? You need a third party driver to reach FireWire 800. We recommend using the Unibrain PCI FireWire 800 card together with the Unibrain driver. With these we have seen "drag and drop" of a folder of files getting ~27MB/sec writing to Drobo and ~42MB/sec reading.

For comparison, on a Power Mac using the same test files we've seen ~35MB/sec write and 52MB/sec read performance.

You may be interested in reading a review by a professional photographer on using Drobo's FireWire connection: http://twipphoto.com/archives/593


Unfortunately, this did nothing for me.
 
I'm experiencing the same issues. I have raised a support call with Drobo and we'll see where that gets me.

My system is a shuttle barebones system, with a Sempron 3400+ chip and Windows 2003 Server. My Drobo v2 has two Seagate SATA2 1TB drives with 32MB cache. Here are my performance numbers running HD Tune:

  • Via USB
    • I get average transfer rate of 20.1 MB/s, burst of 20.7 MB/s
  • With default windows drivers:
    • built in motherboard (Via/Shuttle) 1394a, avg transfer 6.0 MB/s, burst 5.3 MB/s
    • Syba 1394b card, avg transfer 6.9 MB/s, burst 6.2 MB/s
  • With Unibrain drivers (available here: http://www.unibrain.com/download/download.asp):
    • built in motherboard (Via/Shuttle) 1394a, avg transfer 15.1 MB/s, burst 13.2 MB/s
    • Syba 1394b card, avg transfer 16.3 MB/s, burst 17.0 MB/s
The Unibrain drivers don't make my system very happy, as I have experienced some bluescreens at boot time. So, for now, I'm using USB and absolutely hating it. I'll fill you in if I hear back from support.
 
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