[Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
[Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
- Subject: [Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
- From: David Emery <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:24:53 -0400
I think competitive is a stretch. while the device is useful, the huge
advantage of the drobo is the ability to use mismatched drives and
upgrade to large drives later. Plus the drobo has a full Os that
allows it to be a stand alone server (if you get the network option).
Still, it's good to see old technologies like FW800 get a little boost.
I've been looking into this lately. I see two problems with the current
(2nd) generation of Drobo:
1. cost
2. performance
With respect to #2, here's a quote from OWC on their new competing product:
Qx2 is up to 80MB/s over FireWire 800, up to 230MB/s via eSATA.... Drobo is,
at best, under 30MB/s via Firewire 800 and costs more than the Qx2 too. :)
I'm not sure if Qx2
(http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQX2KIT0GB/)
supports the ability of the Drobo to handle different-sized drives. The
cost for a Drobo and a Qx2 unpopulated are about the same, but that's
quite a difference in delivered performance! And more importantly, the
Qx2 provides eSATA, which I think is the direction Apple should be
going. I believe current Drobo does not offer eSATA and that's a
substantial anti-feature in my mind.
Right now I have some old RAID Mirrored FW800/2xIDE drive enclosures.
These have a noisy fan and mediocre performance, but they're free to me
:-) I also have an OWC 2xSATA drive enclosure that's set for RAID
Mirrored which hosts the files for my internal network (this hangs off a
Mini running Leopard server.) I'll probably run with the IDE FW800 RAID
Mirrored enclosures until they break or I run out of disk space on their
IDE drives.
The big disappointment to me about the Mini Server was no eSATA. The
next gen Mini Server really needs to replace 2 of the USB ports with 2
eSATA ports, and Apple could/should have offered a Mini Server option
with no optical drive but an eSATA connection. (Granted that would
require at least some Mini case surgery...)
(Actually the biggest disappointment to me about the Mini Server is that
it came out -2 weeks- after I bought a Mini, more RAM, and Snow Leopard
Server!!! My cost for a 2 ghz FW800 refurb Mini from the Apple Store,
plus 4gb RAM installed at Micro Center, plus SL Server from eBay, was
$950. For another $50 I could have gotten 2x500gb / 5400rpm drives
instead of the 1x120gb / 5400 drive and another .5ghz clock speed, at
the loss of the internal optical drive. Oh well!)
Speaking of Snow Leopard Server: It took me about 10 minutes to go from
boot-after-install to up-and-running. In my case, I already had an OS X
(Leopard) server providing DNS and Open Directory LDAP. With those in
place (including the DNS entry for the new SL Server Mini's IP address),
I was able to configure my 3 different websites (not counting 50gb file
copy time :-), set up Wiki and Blogging on one of them to play with, and
install IPNetRouter and a USB 2.0 Ethernet adapter to configure the SL
Server as a 2-ethernet firewall router. I'm not doing email. Although
IPNetRouter is not a 64 bit (KEXT) application, it's working -just
fine-. Right now that Mini is responding on port 80, and the older
G4/933 Tiger Server it'll replace is handling other port traffic
(including SSL/SFTP). I want to let the SL Server Mini run for a couple
more days to ensure everything is stable before finally retiring the G4/933.
dave
--
David Emery, DSCI, supporting PdM FCS (BCT) SW Integration
703 298 3473 (office/cell), 703 272 7496 (fax)
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