Re: [Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
Re: [Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] Re: Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB (and new Mini Server and Snow Leopard Server install experience)
- From: Allan Marcus <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:52:18 -0600
Apple needs to ads a slot! Even an expresscard slot would allow for a
port multiplier sata connection.
man, it's like the 80's all over again. Macs need a slots. I have to
get a thrid party anti-glare screen for my monitor. The ports on my
Mac are too slow. :-)
eSata sucks as a port. no power and it's looser than bowel movement
after KFC (ok, that was gross, but I liked it :-)
At home I have a 5 bay trayless port multiplier subsystem I love
('cept for the loose cable). I don't think Apple will ever go that
route. With USB 3 and FW8900000 coming out soon, eSata will not be
necessary.
As for the performance of the Drobo, you don't get a drobo for
performance, you get it for easy of use and the ability to use
mismatched drives. If all you want is 4Tb (raw) of RAID storage, the
promise is better.
---
Thanks,
Allan Marcus
505-667-5666
On Oct 21, 2009, at 11:24 AM, David Emery wrote:
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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