Anything comparable to a Drobo?

If you just want a bunch of drives as direct attached storage (or, you can mirror manually, if you want), then something like the Mediaonic Probox is a good solution (you can attach up to 8 drives to your 1U server over USB 3.0). If you want RAID, then, something like the ProRAID. Drobo is just too costly for what it does (more like a Apple product) IMO.

What kind of slots does the server have?PCI-e? If so what version and how many lanes? Is the server in a rack? Do you have more rack space?

enzmin89:
Check out Synology. The DS 212 series is well thought of for NAS duty.
Good luck!
Mike

It will work over USB 2.0 too, but you won't get the high transfer speeds. There is an eSATA port, but, then, the eSATA port needs to be port multiplier compliant. I won't go down that route.

I hope you have a PCIe slot free, and in that case, you can just use a PCIe - USB 3.0 card.

Another alternative is a NAS like the Synology unit mentioned above, but it is network attached, not direct attached. Different application, and cost is very high once you go above 4 bays.

What Drobo model are you exactly looking at? Is it one of the new NAS ones or DAS? If it is the former, there are options like the Synology DS413j or the Netgear Duo v2 / NV+ v2 which are cheaper on a per-bay basis. For DAS, any USB 2.0 or eSATA limitation use get will be the same for both Drobo and Mediasonic. As for your question: over USB 2.0, you can expect to get around 25 MBps read speeds for a single stream. Should be just about sufficient for two units accessing simultaneously because efficiency drops down as you try to grab data from different parts of the same disk or different bays. Maybe around 8 - 10 MBps for each stream. So, maybe streaming two 3D Blu-ray ISOs might be cutting it close.. As for eight drives, yes, all 8 will be visible over USB 2.0

Mediasonic is no Drobo nor Synology. You'd be better of with a Synology or even a DAS Drobo, though I would go with a Synology. They have a variety of NAS units at various price points and support is great.

Philip

Now that it is clear that you aren't looking at DAS:

For your requirements, go with Netgear NV+ v2 or the newly introduced Synology DS413j. Recommend the latter, but it is a bit costly at USD 410 without drives. However, Synology firmware is pretty good and stable.

I find all those NAS devices to be slow, Black Armour, Drobo, etc. I find it much more cost effective to build my own NAS using low end AMD mobo that has Raid 5 and then I have 6 Seagate 2TB 5900 drives. The AMD Raid software has an alerting function that can email you when a drive has a problem. You can also schedule drive scrubs and syncs to keep the RAID set healthy. With a 1gb NIC on the mobo I can peg the NIC, something I could never do with any off the shelf NAS. And the cost was competitive to a NAS unit.

This is the route I went with.

If you wanna check over on the HTPC forum and don't mind getting your hands dirty with some mods and PSU/fan swaps, you could try something like this deal. Now, they are currently out of stock (a number of us AVS folks have depleted them of their supply ), but they get new shipments in fairly frequently, I was able to make myself a 50 TB 24-bay server with WHS and flexraid for $600 total (including WHS and flexraid costs). Obviously, drives aren't included in that price, but the beauty of flexraid is that you can frankenstein it together with as many drives as you have (all different capacities), and you can expand your server as you add to your HDD collection.

I have 4 Drobo's that I've been using for yrs, and, now that I've have transferred all of their contents over to my server (with MUCH better use of drive space using flexraid), I don't have much use for them anymore...

I ordered an Synology DS212J with two 3tb seagate drives. Have had drobos's in the past and no problems.