For those of you that shoot LARGE raw files

DetlevCM wrote in post #11108085
HP Home server, 3 2TB drives inside, done

I've got an HP Homeserver which I use only as backups. It's far too slow to work off of.

tekkie wrote in post #11195066
the drobo is a huge piece of crap for performance, I have one and I hate the darn thing, the most I can ever get out of it is 35MBs which is a joke

I removed all of my photos and put it on my old buffalo raid

drobo has 4 x 1TB western digital 7200 rpm green 64MB cache, 3GS Sata, and using firewire 800 I get 35MBs

buffalo has 4x 250GB IDE 8MB cache I believe 5400 rpm hard drives in raid 5 ESATA and I can get 125Mbs

one of those 1TB drives by itself can achieve 93MBs in my tests so it should easily smoke the buffalo if the drobo was not such a turd

the drobo is cool as far as expandability but I have had it tell me 3 times already that a drive died when there was no problem, and their tech support is nothing to proud about either

although they claim you can access all your data when the drive dies... yeah you can hours later after its done rebuilding, and the performance then is like using a floppy drive

I am using mine for time machine backups now, I couldnt figure out why using photoshop and lightroom was so darn slow until I realized it was the drobo slowing down the whole thing

I have the 2nd gen one, apparently the S is supposed to be better but its still slow compared to a simple mirror which is ludicrous

Thanks for the information. I really need a unified expandable storage solution and I thought the Drobo S was it until I started hearing so many bad reviews. For $700 for an empty box, you'd think it would be much faster.

bohdank wrote in post #11196338
I have the Drobo S up and running and it's hooked up via Esata. On large files I am getting 95mbs. I'm using it for my images now and the performance is fine. I did have an issue, when first setting it up, that was resolved by their tech support which I thought was friendly and helpful.

Is that 95MB/s sustained?

TaDa wrote in post #11105174
...I have a quick question.

I shot with a 5D and 1D3 for a good long time, and could easily rattle off 800+ shots in a day. Now I've moved to a 5D2 that has huge raw files, and I find myself shooting many less frames. Has nothing to do with spray and pray, I just now find myself "thinking" about a shot a little more before I hit the shutter release. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm running out of USB slots to attach external storage to and that the cards fill up much faster.

Just curious if this has happened to anyone else?

And yes, I know all about sRaw, just kind of in the mode of "if I have it, use it" with the large RAW files. The cropping ability of the 5D2 files is insane.

I've just recently started thinking of trying to more careful with shots because of both having to sort through the photos and the amount of different places my photos are stored (which is why I would hope to find something like the Drobo S, but faster).

I find myself lately, shooting many photos of my toddler son and because the combination of my skill and focusing ability on the 5D is not quite there, I find I often need to spray and pray.

I would recommend geting a Drobo - I have the Drobo S which I bought in July and am quite happy with.

I think I may shoot more since moving fromma 5D to the 5DII because of the ability to crop deeper into the scene. Now, I take pics that I would have before thought wouldn't be worth it.

bohdank wrote in post #11196338
I have the Drobo S up and running and it's hooked up via Esata. On large files I am getting 95mbs. I'm using it for my images now and the performance is fine. I did have an issue, when first setting it up, that was resolved by their tech support which I thought was friendly and helpful.

95MBs is ok for something cheap, but for something that cost that much thats still pretty slow considering one drive itself can do that

if you had the same drives in another enclosure I bet it would be nearly double that, I dont know what they do to these things but the kill the performance of them

but 95 I could live with I think, 35 I cant especially when my boot drive is running nearly 200MBs

It's 95mps on large files. This is comparable to internal Esata drives on my machine, with "bursts" maybe hitting 110mps Internal RAID1). Once you start moving lots of small files to it, it will slow down. The throughput is very dependant on the file mix (large or small files). That number is also writing to the Drobo. I haven't done any any testing reading from the Drobo which is actually more important, for me.

By slowing down, transferring 5DII RAW files, for example, the sustained throughput over 400 gigs was about 52mbs which sounds slow but, in use, editing RAW files etc, opening a folder in Bridge (loading the thumbnails), it's transparent, imo. It did run slower than even that when I moved my Lightroom catalog to it (lots of tiny JPG's and thousands of folders).

As far as pricing, it's virtually the same price as a comparable HP Server which you would have to connect via Ethernet or on a network, which would be slower and does not give you the flexibility of a Drobo S, imo. I really don't care if a unit tests x mbs slower or faster. I do care how it impacts my workflow.

I do also have an Esata dock which I use to load for offsite storage. I don't recall the throughput but it does seem to be noticeably fatser/slower.

bohdank wrote in post #11198085
It's 95mps on large files. This is comparable to internal Esata drives on my machine, with "bursts" maybe hitting 110mps Internal RAID1). Once you start moving lots of small files to it, it will slow down. The throughput is very dependant on the file mix (large or small files). That number is also writing to the Drobo. I haven't done any any testing reading from the Drobo which is actually more important, for me.

By slowing down, transferring 5DII RAW files, for example, the sustained throughput over 400 gigs was about 52mbs which sounds slow but, in use, editing RAW files etc, opening a folder in Bridge (loading the thumbnails), it's transparent, imo. It did run slower than even that when I moved my Lightroom catalog to it (lots of tiny JPG's and thousands of folders).

As far as pricing, it's virtually the same price as a comparable HP Server which you would have to connect via Ethernet or on a network, which would be slower and does not give you the flexibility of a Drobo S, imo. I really don't care if a unit tests x mbs slower or faster. I do care how it impacts my workflow.

I do also have an Esata dock which I use to load for offsite storage. I don't recall the throughput but it does seem to be noticeably fatser/slower.

Just to comment on 1GBit/s Ethernet the throughput would be around 120MB/s - so provided you use a 1GBit/s Switch with an HP Home Server (or any home server) the connection would not be the limiting factor when it comes to access speed.

I have an issue on where I can postion my equipment. Currently I am connected wirelessly to my router. I would have to maintain that, so I doubt I would be getting that throughput. I made my decision based on having to work wirelessly. The Drobo is small enough to place next to my PC and hassle free (till this point). I would not expect the same level of set and forget with a server.

A Drobo is not the best solution for everyone but, I think, it was for me. My library is growing by about 500gig/year.

bohdank wrote in post #11198289
I have an issue on where I can postion my equipment. Currently I am connected wirelessly to my router. I would have to maintain that, so I doubt I would be getting that throughput. I made my decision based on having to work wirelessly. The Drobo is small enough to place next to my PC and hassle free (till this point). I would not expect the same level of set and forget with a server.

Microsoft Home Server is pretty much set up and forget

But if you only use Wi-Fi that might be an issue, theoretical limit for N is 300MBit/s.

_______________

This does lend me to ask a question though:
Do you guys work on external files?? I like the working set to be on my laptop - and once I have finished with them I dump them on the home server.

bohdank wrote in post #11198085
It's 95mps on large files. This is comparable to internal Esata drives on my machine, with "bursts" maybe hitting 110mps Internal RAID1). Once you start moving lots of small files to it, it will slow down. The throughput is very dependant on the file mix (large or small files). That number is also writing to the Drobo. I haven't done any any testing reading from the Drobo which is actually more important, for me.

By slowing down, transferring 5DII RAW files, for example, the sustained throughput over 400 gigs was about 52mbs which sounds slow but, in use, editing RAW files etc, opening a folder in Bridge (loading the thumbnails), it's transparent, imo. It did run slower than even that when I moved my Lightroom catalog to it (lots of tiny JPG's and thousands of folders).

As far as pricing, it's virtually the same price as a comparable HP Server which you would have to connect via Ethernet or on a network, which would be slower and does not give you the flexibility of a Drobo S, imo. I really don't care if a unit tests x mbs slower or faster. I do care how it impacts my workflow

I do also have an Esata dock which I use to load for offsite storage. I don't recall the throughput but it does seem to be noticeably fatser/slower.

internal esata is sata the e stands for external

I would not buy a HP server I would buy a different disk array because it will be faster for sure

actually if I copy files from my other PC via gigabit its getting around 100MBs and thats a single disk to disk copy

if I had it back I would have purchased this, this is the replacement model of my old buffalo its 950 bucks for 8TB which is way cheaper than the drobo and it does 235MBs which blows the drobo away http://www.newegg.com …id-_-22-165-266-_-Product

tekkie wrote in post #11199110
internal esata is sata the e stands for external

The way I understand it eSata has a power supply built in, which sata hasn't
Unless I am mistaken - although it would only power a 2,5" drive.

esata doesnt but the new esatap does but like you mentioned only something small

tekkie wrote in post #11199151
esata doesnt but the new esatap does but like you mentioned only something small

OK Thanks, good to know

I'm still in USB 2.0 land for transfers - it's just that most laptops nowadays have eSata for external drives... and I always though there was a power connection in there... ah well...

tekkie wrote in post #11199110
internal esata is sata the e stands for external

I would not buy a HP server I would buy a different disk array because it will be faster for sure

actually if I copy files from my other PC via gigabit its getting around 100MBs and thats a single disk to disk copy

if I had it back I would have purchased this, this is the replacement model of my old buffalo its 950 bucks for 8TB which is way cheaper than the drobo and it does 235MBs which blows the drobo away http://www.newegg.com …id-_-22-165-266-_-Product

I never believe company advertising on throughput It's about $100 cheaper than the Drobo S with 4 2TB drives. In my case cheaper overall since I already had 4 drives of various capacities lying around which I wasn't using.

I delete before the download when the thumbnails come up in LR3, then I go through again and delete everything I do not think is worth my time to process, that still leaves about a third of the images. I do more breakdown and deleting along the way but when done with everything I go back and delete everything that I do not think is important to keep and then I optimize my lightroom and am ready for the next batch. In the end I look at each photo with the question, is this photograph good enough that somewhere in my existence it would be good enough to publish, if not, I delete it.

DetlevCM wrote in post #11197044
Less than 1$ per disc... OK.. where you you find these?

I suppose if you can get them at that price - and then have a BlueRay Burner anyway, then there might be a point.

60TBs do sound wonderful - but how do you fill those up quickly? over summer I had maybe only 500-600GB in total maximum...

My digital photography is just a small part of it, most of it is consumed for business purposes.

I've been getting these at Newegg, they have specials on them every now and then making the net cost under $1 each.

http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6817607025