![]() Overall, the B800i is an easy-to-use, easy-to-install and easy-to-manage SAN with exceptional flexibility and expansion potential. As larger drives become available Drobo should be able to handle those as well. Since Drobo supports all current SATA drives, a B800i can currently be expanded to 24TB using eight 3TB drives. You don't have another drive of the same capacity? No problem, you can add a larger drive or, if you have enough free disk space, even a smaller drive. Replacing a failed drive is simplicity itself – press the lever below the drive (a red LED indicates which drive has failed) to eject the drive then hold the lever down to insert a new drive. If not, Drobo will continue operating without protection until the failed drive is replaced. If you have enough disk space Drobo will rebuild itself using the existing drives and still provide the protection level you have chosen. LEDs tell you if capacity is low or if a drive has failed (and which one) and if a rebuild is in progress. When you first open Drobo Dashboard, the All Drobos page opens, displaying all Drobo devices connected to your computer and/or network. Other than initial volume configuration nearly all functions can be handled from the front of the Drobo itself. In this topic, the two main areas of Drobo Dashboard are defined for the Drobo 5N2: the All Drobos page and the Navigation menu. Thin provisioning allows you to create volumes larger than existing disk space and add capacity as needed. ![]() Drobo allows you to add and remove drives, change disk capacity and change the protection level pretty much at will without affecting operation. What the B800i provides that competitors don't is an amazing amount of flexibility. With a list price of $3,499 without drives the B800i isn't cheap, but pricing is in line with other iSCSI SANs of similar capacity. In some cases rebuild took less time, in others more. During the rebuild Drobo Dashboard displays the amount of time the rebuild is expected to take, but we did not find this to reflect the actual rebuild time. Under normal loads the impact should be fairly negligible. In testing, the performance impact during rebuild was approximately in the 40% range under heavy I/O load. However, I spoke to their support, and saw posts that said that Drobo Dashboard works over the network, when DROBO is connected via DroboShare. The rebuild time is usually several hours, but the system still functions properly during the rebuild process, albeit with reduced performance. I looked and looked and could only find a dated post somewhere which said that the Drobo Dashboard only works via USB2. When drives fail or are removed LEDs on the Drobo, as well as the display on Drobo Dashboard, indicate that a failure has occurred and that a rebuild is in progress. It survived the removal of a drive in single-drive protection mode and survived the removal of two drives in dual-drive protection mode. In our limited testing the B800i worked as advertised. Recently, SSG-NOW tested the Drobo B800i, an iSCSI SAN for small and mid-sized businesses.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |