Drobo FS vs Lime Technology unRAID vs FreeNAS

drobofreenasnas

I already decided to by a Drobo FS until I just found these two tests:

The two cons agains drobo for me:

loudness
price

What disadvantages has the unraid stuff against the drobo fs? Has it also got that ease of use like swapping drives on the go, simply extend capacity by plugging in new drives, notify me of drive errors, disk failure protection, dynamic space of "partitions", better/worse effective capacity, etc. Which is more secure? Am I able to simply replace a bad drive with a new one on unraid? What happens if my pc fails? Lets say the cpu overheats.

Since I have a complete pc which is going to be replaced, I only have to pay the software to use unraid.

I am going to use my nas for:

music library (how well does it integrate with iTunes? )
picture library
movie library
development (i need to be able to be to use time machine)

I am going to use this nas with a MacBook pro.

My current disks:

2x 500Gb
1x 1.5Tb
1x 2Tb

On a drobo fs I would have 2.26 Tb of space. What would it be on unraid?

Is FreeNAS also an alternative?

Best Answer

For your home network, any of those is "fast enough". I promise you won't notice the difference... really.

Comparative performance only becomes a concern if you're trying to use it for virtual machine storage (e.g. iSCSI) or if you're creating a share for a larger workgroup... say at least 25 users or more, where you have enough that several people will frequently hit it for large transfers at the same time.

Related Solutions

Drobo vs. Internal Drives – Transfer Speed Comparison

If you're connecting over gigabit ethenet and you don't have super-fast HDDs, LAN will not be the bottleneck. USB, however, could be a serious bottleneck. Rough estimation of speeds:

Item                 Bytes/s      Bits/s
----                 -------    --------
USB 2.0:              60MB/s     480Mb/s
7200RPM HDD:          70MB/s     560Mb/s    (average hard-drive)
10000RPM HDD:        100MB/s     800Mb/s
Gigabit Ethernet:    125MB/s    1000Mb/s
2x 7200RPM RAID0:    300MB/s    2400Mb/s
FireWire 800:        400MB/s    3200Mb/s

1 Byte = 8 Bits

Install OpenSSH on Drobo 5N

Connect to your Drobo

You can quickly connect to your Drobo:

Look up the IP address of your Drobo device using Drobo Dashboard You can find the Network Information under the Status section of the dashboard for your device.

open PuTTY

enter the connection details root@<ip-address>

when prompted use the password "root" to authenticate

You should now be logged-in and the PuTTY window should look like this:

Change the default password

It's good practice to change publicly known default passwords as soon as possible. Sure, it's unlikely that anyone will connect to your network, stumble across your Drobo, connect, and do Evil Things™ but why take the risk.

It's also a good way to give an example of using the SSH session.

Simply type passwd, press Enter and follow the prompts. You won't see any output when you're typing your new password; you don't know how many spycams have been installed while you were at work during the day.

Saving an SSH session

If you have configured your home router to assign a fixed IP address to your Drobo you might want to save the session in PuTTY so that you don't need to type the username and destination every time you want to reconnect.

Open the menu by clicking on the icon in the top left of the PuTTY window, and choose New Session.

enter the connection details as before ( root@<ip-address>)

In the text input field for Saved Sessions enter a name to call the session ('MyDrobo')

click 'Save'

Please refer to this guide for more information - http://blog.chisel.pm/2014/03/how-to-ssh-onto-drobo-5n-from-microsoft.html

Related Question

Will FreeNAS/ZFS let me manage the storage this way