[mythtv-users] DroboShare and HD Question

[Travis Tabbal]

Personally, I don't understand the fascination with Drobo. It's a
proprietary system, so you're stuck with what they want you to have. The
benchmarks don't seem all that great to me. For just Myth, storage groups
with a couple drives are likely a better option. If you need redundancy, my
software RAID (OpenSolaris ZFS) is significantly faster than the Drobos I've
seen. I'm running a raidz2 (RAID6 equivalent) and it screams. And it costs
less and is more expandable than a Drobo. From the info I saw, it looks like
you top out at about 30MB/sec. I just did a quick dd test, the same one I
saw someone do on a drobo to get that 30MB/sec number. I got 598MB/sec. I
figured that was cached as it was only a 1G file, so here's 10G. The machine
has 8GB of RAM, and not all of it is available to the main OS as I have
virtual machines running. One of which is my Myth backend. IIRC, I have 4G
available to the main host OS.

travis at nas:/raid/downloads$ dd if=/dev/zero of=big_file bs=1048576
count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 29.4181 s, 356 MB/s

At the least, I would get one with eSATA if you do get one. USB2 is just so
slow. FW800 would probably be OK, but still slower than gigabit ethernet. Of
course, if that matters depends on how good the controller and drives are.
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