Immediately, my read speed multiplied by ten! Wow, right? Clearly it was a problem with the backup volume that had caused a major slowdown of the whole unit.
TURN OFF DROBO DASHBOARD SOFTWARE
I’m not sure why, but I just had this feeling, so I moved my Time Machine backup files over to another drive using the free SuperDuper! software and then deleted the backup volume from my Drobo.
My first suspicion was the backup volume. The read speed should actually be much faster than the write speed, so I knew something was wrong. That is insanely slow, and I repeated this test many times over several days and got the same result. One day I happened to speed test the Device and noticed that whilst my write speed was showing to be normal, my read speed had dropped to just 40MB/s. Secondly the backup volume was, in one instance, the source of a MAJOR slow down for my Drobo 5D3. In theory that is useful, and it saves you buying another drive for the purpose, but in my experience this can cause problems.įirstly, there is limited bandwidth to the Drobo and if Time Machine is running while you are trying to access other files from the Drobo, it will slow things down. It’s possible to use Time Machine with all modern Drobo models and when you enable that function it creates a second volume on the device to sandbox your Time Machine backup files. So if you have a Drobo that seems to be slower than you would expect, here’s some things you should be aware of and can do to try and speed things up. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. However, over the years there are a few things I have discovered about them that aren’t always well known, and can help you speed up a seemingly overly slow Drobo. So when I say Drobos are slower than other devices, I’m generally talking relative to the (usually much more expensive) RAID competition. By comparison, my LaCie USB-C Rugged drives that I use for on-the-road backup will only reach 120MB/s.
For example, my Drobo 5D3 that I’m currently using for primary storage will clock in at just shy of 400MB/s read speed over Thunderbolt 3. Now before you discount Drobo products altogether, they are still capable of huge speeds compared to a single standard spinning disk hard drive.
With regular RAID boxes, all drives need to be identical, but the simplicity of the Drobo system does seem to impact overall speed. In the long run this can save you a ton of money compared to other RAID systems because it allows you to expand slowly as you need to, and to buy drives when the price ($/GB) is just right. Any mix of brands, speeds and sizes will do. Their Beyond RAID technology allows you to fill the Drobo with whatever drives you have lying around. That said, Drobos have never been the fastest products on the market. Since the company was purchased by StorCentric some years ago, their products have been a considerable improvement over early models, and you’d be hard pushed to find a more user-friendly and affordable solution for safely storing large amounts of data. Hving been a Drobo user for over a decade I’ve used and tested the majority of their products in that time.
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