While the core Drobo product might be cool, the DroboShare isn't exactly causing much excitement. Reviews are mixed, and reviews which include performance aren't good - one cited time to write a 780MByte file as "Wired gigabit Ethernet - 2:10 (6MBps)". That's not good for a device with four spindles. Actually, it would be very good for a device with a single spindle. Yes, I'm missing the point of consumer hardware. But it does mean that a 2TB Drobo would take a couple of days to write to. I would hope that the iSCSI enabled DroboPro would do wire-speed for a single workload - big performance gap.
Plugging it into a Linux box defeats the point of an appliance and turns it into a hell-like mess of high power consumption, additional management, performance bottlenecks and generally makes it more appealing to just stuff more disks in the machine. Besides, Linux .. smelly.
I doubt ZFS is going anywhere with Apple, really - they've pulled all references to ZFS from their marketing material and have been very, very quiet on the subject. ZFS isn't really cut out for consumer hardware, from a desing point - it expects I/O subsystems to honour cache barriers, for example, and that's just not a given in a land of USB storage. ZFS is nifty stuff, but it wasn't designed to be a consumer filesystem and probably never will be.
Apple's marketshare has managed to climb to around 10% - a big step up. That still leaves 90% of desktop users not able to enjoy Time Machine and such features. I'm not using with with my Mac - but I avoid keeping anything valuable on an unmirrored machine and have an rsync cronned to cover the stuff that is there. Not exactly user-friendly, though.
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zvi
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 03:01 (UTC)Plugging it into a Linux box defeats the point of an appliance and turns it into a hell-like mess of high power consumption, additional management, performance bottlenecks and generally makes it more appealing to just stuff more disks in the machine. Besides, Linux .. smelly.
I doubt ZFS is going anywhere with Apple, really - they've pulled all references to ZFS from their marketing material and have been very, very quiet on the subject. ZFS isn't really cut out for consumer hardware, from a desing point - it expects I/O subsystems to honour cache barriers, for example, and that's just not a given in a land of USB storage. ZFS is nifty stuff, but it wasn't designed to be a consumer filesystem and probably never will be.
Apple's marketshare has managed to climb to around 10% - a big step up. That still leaves 90% of desktop users not able to enjoy Time Machine and such features. I'm not using with with my Mac - but I avoid keeping anything valuable on an unmirrored machine and have an rsync cronned to cover the stuff that is there. Not exactly user-friendly, though.