NASLite Network Attached Storage

Just asking if a drobo can be used as main storage when hooked up to NL.

That way you get the good network speed with NL and the hardware RAID of the drobo, plus the flexibility of firewire/USB.

Any ideas? Potential problems?

I don't want to do an "experiment" at the price of a drobo.

potential problem will be the "on the fly" expansion
you can just pop another drive in the drobo and it wil expand the volume automaticly using raid JBOD

something like that is possible under naslite but not on the fly
here you must expand the array on the hardware raid card
and then, using gparted, expand the volume to the new drive size, before naslite recognises it

so how these 2 must ultimatly work together is beyond me

The Drobo uses what is called "BeyondRAID" technology not JBOD. (see: http://www.drobo.com/Products/BeyondRAID.html)
Why I want a Drobo is so I don't have to use a RAID card.

As far as I understand the drobo just looks like a very large USB storage device. Since NASLite supports external USB/IEEE storage, I just wanted to know if I could boot (and/or use) a Drobo as primary storage.

Has any one tried this? Does anyone here have a Drobo?

I just don't want to purchase one just to do an experiment.

A little late since I missed the original post.

Performance of any storage device on a USB connection is going to be limited. USB is rated at 480Mbps, Ethernet is 1000Mbps, that's the first bottle neck.

Second issue is the fact that USB is a simplex connection. There is only on channel for data to move on between devices and so reads or writes wait for the green light to move.

Third issue, USB has a fair amount of overhead which will impact performance.

Fourth issue, RAID is RAID is RAID. No matter how they try and wrap it, RAID comes in a number of flavors and the performance and data safety vary with each one. The thing they fail to tell you is that the different levels of RAID differ in the way data is stored and read and that they do not integrate well together unless you start to talk about the hardware used in the back end of a SAN array. In this case the hardware is high powered and dedicated to the task with the disks being virtualized and data being spread around to various disks and arrays to minimize the chance of data loss should any one disk or system fail.

You want it all, you can have it all if you are willing to pay the price. The unit you refer to is not going to give it to you though. FACT, RAID60 is likely the best performance and data safety you are likely to find at a reasonable price tag and that tag is likely to run in the thousand Dollar range. Don't know what I am talking about? 2TB of RAID60 will require at least six 1TB drives. At $200.00 for the good ones you are already at $1,200.00, add a good hardware RAID card capable of RAID60 and the cost just hit around $1,600.00. Throw in a battery back for the on card cache and you are up another $100.00 or more depending on the card. We are still not backing up our data yet and so the cost goes up if we talk about near line storage to back up the on line storage. The laws of entropy must be heeded!

Save your self the trouble and go for a proven solution that is not hype. If you are clear about your needs and realistic about your expectations there are people here that can help you make a good set of choices. I don't know squat about it and so would be little help.

Mike