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I'm planning to use a Drobo system for storing my music library. Does anyone have experience and/or recommendations on the "black" versus "green" WD drives? While the blacks spin at 7200, the green touts its energy saving abilities and uses the Intelli system for management, spinning at lower speeds. Any ideas appreciated. Will very likely ad a DroboShare to run off a network, so I can also backup my wife's photo collection.

Thanks

 

MBP13-128gb ssd using VoiceOver to hear the screen, iTunes, Ayre QB-9, McIntosh mx119 & mc207, Thiel CS2.4

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I have the drobo and three 1T WD green drives. Drobo is in the back room except I am using the usb via a laptop. I find it better for downloading data into it. I also plan to add the share later on. The green drives are very good no issues and yes pretty quiet.

 

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I use a Drobo for backup, for which it is great, and use 4x WD green drives (2 2TB and 2 1TB). Great, quiet, cool drives. However.... data transfer rates with the Drobo are very slow. Haven't measured, but copying 500GB to the Drobo, vs a typical hard drive is at least 2x longer. So depends upon your bandwidth and convenience requirements I suppose. Also just upgraded the 3rd 1TB drive to a 2TB drive, and took 3-4 days to rebuild. So just a head's up on the speed factor

 

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Thanks to all for your feedback.

Silverlight, how are you connecting the Drobo? Do you think the speed factor is the drives or your connnection?

Has anyone been using Drobo through Droboshare as their music storage in ITunes and, if so, how is performance for playback through this setup.

 

MBP13-128gb ssd using VoiceOver to hear the screen, iTunes, Ayre QB-9, McIntosh mx119 & mc207, Thiel CS2.4

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From what I understand it's the overhead of the Linux-based RAID-like configuration the enclosure/Drobo system uses, rather than the drives. I use USB2.0 and have used Firewire as well (both of which I'm guessing are faster than an ethernet / droboshare config). The speed is a well-known characteristic of the Drobo setup (if you look at various forums, amazon comments, etc.), and the one tradeoff to what is an all-around great performer that is VERY easy to use, flexible in it's application and lets one sleep well at night when it comes to data integrity. You've done the right thing, which is ask about media streaming from the Drobo as a NAS. I haven't used it in that way so can't comment, for example, on whether ethernet or read speed would be the greater bottleneck when multi-tasking or streaming hirez, or video, etc. It has the various DroboApps that allow it to serve as an iTunes server or DLNA server which is convenient.

 

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As I continue to consider my storage medium, I came across the Western Digital My Book World Edition II 2TB Ethernet Dual-drive Network Storage WDH2NC20000N

 

It supports high speed network transfers and both Windows and Mac platforms which is one of my goals. I'm not a computer guy, so anyone who can comment on the plusses and minuses of this system versus a Drobo would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

 

 

MBP13-128gb ssd using VoiceOver to hear the screen, iTunes, Ayre QB-9, McIntosh mx119 & mc207, Thiel CS2.4

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I'm a drobo user, so I will stick mostly to that for comments. The drobo will take any drive size combination (cool feature). The dorbo requires an extra expence to make it network or you will have to use usb or firewire (bummer). You can format the drives (then it does it automatically) to fat32 that can be read by both apple and pc (nice). The drobo takes 4 drives, so you can buy two good ones and still use two older drives you may have around (cool). WB and drobo have good support. I returned a bad wd drive and they sent me a new one before I sent the old one back (pretty cool). I returned a bad drobo and they sent me a new one no issues. Don't read two much into the returns the issues were related and entirely our fault.

 

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Thanks for your reply. One of the advantages of either the Drobo or the WD mentioned above is their ability to support both platforms. I've read in other threads that FAT32 is a slower, older legacy system and that NTFS (windows) and HFS (Mac) are both prefferable. With the Drobo it appears that I'd need to add DroboShare to support multiple formats. Any suggestions on which drive and which format to use in this situation?

 

MBP13-128gb ssd using VoiceOver to hear the screen, iTunes, Ayre QB-9, McIntosh mx119 & mc207, Thiel CS2.4

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I am using the fat32. It seemed like a good idea to be able to read the drive from an apple or a pc. I gave up any apple solutions and thus I am thinking about converting the drives to ntsf. I realize that the fat32 is slower, but I can't really tell except maybe when moving the entire collection to another drive to remote backup.

 

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Hi Guys - Another thing to think about is using a more traditional NAS drive. Many use a version what's called the EXT3 file system. It's commonly used in Linux and that's what most NAS units are running today. Accessing an EXT3 file system on a NAS drive can be done from almost any operating system. You don't have to worry about NTFS, FAT32, OS X Extended, etc...

 

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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Chris, thanks so much for weighing in here. With your expertise on storage, I was hoping for your views. If I go with a Drobo and Droboshare, Ext3 is clearly an option and will let me use the drive as my music storage device streamed via ethernet to a MacBook Pro; and I can also use it to back up my wife's photos (kept in a Windows envitonment, which is a major sore spot in our household (because she doesn't do it). The only downside I've read about Ext3 is the naming conventions which are somewhat more limiting. Willl these limitations cause any conflicts with ITunes conventions? If not, is there any downside to going this route with the Drobo setup?

Thanks again.

 

MBP13-128gb ssd using VoiceOver to hear the screen, iTunes, Ayre QB-9, McIntosh mx119 & mc207, Thiel CS2.4

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You won't have any naming convention issues with iTunes and Ext3. Everything will just work. I found the information below on the Data Robotics website. With DroboShare you could even format NTFS or HFS+ (AKA Mac OS Extended) and still have access via any operating system. I suppose one possible advantage of formating HFS+ would be the ability to connect the device locally if needed and still be able to read and write to the drive.

 

I sue Ext3 and have absolutely no issues with my Thecus 5200B Pro NAS unit.

 

 

"Q. I would like to use my Drobo on DroboShare with both my Windows and Mac. Do I have to format it in FAT32?

 

A. No, there is no need to feel forced into using FAT32. As long as you don't want to connect Drobo directly to your Mac, there's no need to format it in FAT32 for use with DroboShare. You can format it HFS+, NTFS, or EXT3 (Linux) through Drobo Dashboard, and DroboShare deals with the tasks associated with making files understandable with multiple platforms.

 

Since you are accessing Drobo through the DroboShare, which is talking to you with Windows file sharing (SMB) protocols, you are not seeing the actual format on the disk with your computer. Only DroboShare sees the actual format."

 

 

 

 

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

 

I strongly recomend that you NOT use FAT32 file formatting if you ever plan to access your library from a Mac.

 

Don't believe the marketing literature hype about Apple's interoperability. More than one person here has had significant issues due to their use of Fat32, especially if you want to hang a WD drive off an Apple Extreme base station (aka router), which is a very common way to access music files wirelessly in the Mac environment.

 

Clay

 

 

 

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every time I would restart the computer it would take forever for the drobo dash board to complete what ever bs it was doing and let me access the drives. The other weekend I moved the files and formated the drobo to ntsf and all is good again. Restarts are no longer a big deal!

 

Regards

Jesus R

www.sonore.us

 

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